"Objects of Emancipation": the Political Dreams of Modernism
1 “OBJECTS OF EMANCIPATION”: THE POLITICAL DREAMS OF MODERNISM A Dissertation Presented by Hanna Musiol to The Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the field of English Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts May, 2011 2 © 2011 Hanna Musiol 3 “OBJECTS OF EMANCIPATION”: THE POLITICAL DREAMS OF MODERNISM by Hanna Musiol ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Northeastern University, May, 2011 ABSTRACT 4 ABSTRACT In the first part of the twentieth century three interconnected modernist trends, primitivism, consumerism, and nationalism, imagined the inclusion of new persons in the national polity through their engagement with what I call “objects of emancipation.” In such modernist imaginings, “quasi (legal) persons,” to use Bruno Latour’s idea, could become New Women, New Negroes, or New (and “civilized”) Americans through their intimacy with empowering objects such as consumer products, keepsakes, cultural artifacts, commodified natural resources, and even waste. Such person-thing fabrications were central, in my view, to modernist politics and aesthetics, and I argue that literary genres often considered to be nonmodernist (including the bildungsroman and the documentary) were particularly important vessels for debates about things and persons. Specifically, my work explores how Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), Fannie Hurst’s Back Street (1931), John Joseph Mathews’ Talking to the Moon (1945), and James Agee and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) challenged the promise of personification-through-objects using generic conventions associated with both progress and material culture.
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