University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2015 Virtuoso Beasts: Modernist Fables and the Vitality of Style Cliff Mak University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the American Literature Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons, and the Modern Literature Commons Recommended Citation Mak, Cliff, "Virtuoso Beasts: Modernist Fables and the Vitality of Style" (2015). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1093. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1093 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1093 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Virtuoso Beasts: Modernist Fables and the Vitality of Style Abstract This dissertation examines the pivotal function of animals in modernist writing, particularly where modernist style confronts inherited moral codes. Classic accounts of modernism emphasize â??impersonalityâ?? as the prime method for artists seeking cultural and ethical authority in the period after 1880. This project digs into what I argue is ultimately the more palatable capacity of literary beasts to animate a similar poetics of authority. Where doctrines of impersonality often resorted to figures of the inorganic in order to simultaneously disavow and indulge the expression of authorial intention, modernists such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Rudyard Kipling, and Marianne Moore instead avowed their didactic ambitions by appealing not to traditional expressive and explicit methods nor, on the other hand, to the complete evacuation of personality, but to the vitality and instinct of animals. More than any platinum filament (T.S. Eliotâ??s famous catalyst), animals offered modernists a vocabulary for the bodily and behavioral mechanisms by which individuals become ethical and historical subjects. In my chapters, I examine specific formal effects that require animal energyâ??from the modeling of queer poetic virtuosities upon animal instinct (as in Hopkinsâ?? windhover, for example, or Mooreâ??s slapstick critters) and the casting of fictional characters along evolutionary-typological lines (as in Woolfâ??s The Waves) to the anticolonial implementation, even, of a â??bestialâ?? prose style resistant to modernismâ??s self-authorization (exemplified by the indifferent creatures we find in Finnegans Wake). Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Comparative Literature and Literary Theory First Advisor Jed Esty Keywords animal, evolution, fable, modernism, style, virtuosity Subject Categories American Literature | Literature in English, British Isles | Literature in English, North America | Modern Literature This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1093 VIRTUOSO BEASTS: MODERNIST FABLES & THE VITALITY OF STYLE Cliff Mak A DISSERTATION in Comparative Literature & Literary Theory Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2015 Supervisor of Dissertation Graduate Group Chairperson Jed Esty Kevin M. F. Platt Vartan Gregorian Professor of English Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in the Humanities Dissertation Committee Karen Beckman, Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Endowed Professor in Film Studies Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English and Comparative Literature Paul Saint-Amour, Associate Professor of English VIRTUOSO BEASTS: MODERNIST FABLES AND THE VITALITY OF STYLE COPYRIGHT 2015 Clifford Mak This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-ny-sa/2.0/ iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS At every point from the inception of this project to its completion, I have been supported by an invaluable cast of scholars, mentors, friends, and family. For everyone I am thankful, and to everyone I owe much. In the most expansive and yet concentrated way, I feel have been swimming alongside everyone named here for at least the past six years. I have been submerged in their thinking, buoyed up by their conversation, sometimes overwhelmed by their love, and always propelled forward by their encouragement. This dissertation in particular has been guided through so many waters by my advisers Jed Esty, Paul Saint-Amour, Karen Beckman, and Jean-Michel Rabaté. Without their wisdom, foresight, and constant willingness to entertain the most embryonic of my ideas, this project would have never come to fruition. At each stage, I was inspired to expand my work towards horizons only they could envision, fill my thought out into structures only they could build, and texture my writing with glances and nubs only they would ever think to look for. It was and is, we might as well say, in many ways a preposterous project, yet they nevertheless took it on, and held on. Jed, in particular, like a consummate host, suffered me to invite myself to his party, and in his vital shrewdness put this layabout immediately to work. There has been no rest, but also no weariness, since. Kevin Platt, Priya Joshi, Heather Love, Bob Perelman, Max Cavitch, Chi-ming Yang, Gerry Prince, JC Cloutier, and Eric Jarosinski all gave me the right instruction and guidance at the right time, lending me their ears and time and helping me to exfoliate the rhetorical and methodological surfaces of my project into legibility. Without Kevin Platt and Rita Copeland as graduate chairs, I would not even be in the Comparative Literature program; since I’ve been at Penn, they have provided for and supported my studies with care. And JoAnne Dubil, especially, has always been an unfailing source of help and friendship in the COML office. To JoAnne we owe everything. In the beginning, there were also Ellen Oliensis, John Bishop, Mitchell Breitweiser, and Janet Adelman at Berkeley. It was their pedagogy and their intellects that pushed me to graduate study and planted the seeds of this project all those years ago. Moreover, without my grandparents, parents, and sister (hey, Mui), I would have never begun reading and would not have ever found a way to name my ambitions. And my friends at Penn and elsewhere, named and unnamed—Devorah Fischler, Laura Finch, Avi Alpert, Kelly Rich, Alice McGrath, Ana Schwartz, Kalyan Nadiminti, Caroline Henze-Gongola, Philip Tsang, Jessica Hurley, Alison Howard, Will Schmenner, Marina Bilbija, Sunny Yang, Christen Mucher, Jason Zuzga, Justin Lee, Clint Warren, Josh Mackanic, James Yoo, Brent Webster, John Montague, Robin Tung, and Dennis Hou— where would I ever be without you? “Satisfaction is a lowly thing, how pure a thing is joy,” writes Moore. How would I have ever known joy without you? Jos, you’re all over this sucker. In you, this finds some righteousness. And this is not all it, but this will do. Philadelphia, PA April 30, 2015 iv ABSTRACT VIRTUOSO BEASTS: MODERNIST FABLES AND THE VITALITY OF STYLE Cliff Mak Jed Esty This dissertations examines the pivotal function of animals in modernist writing, particularly where modernist style confronts inherited moral codes. Classic accounts of modernism emphasize “impersonality” as the prime method for artists seeking cultural and ethical authority in the period after 1880. Literary beasts, however, had a more palatable capacity to animate a similar poetics of authority. Where doctrines of impersonality often resorted to figures of the inorganic in order to simultaneously disavow and indulge the expression of authorial intention, modernists such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Rudyard Kipling, and Marianne Moore instead avowed their didactic ambitions by appealing not to traditional expressive and explicit methods nor, on the other hand, to the complete evacuation of personality, but to the vitality and instinct of animals. More than any platinum filament, animals offered modernists a vocabulary for the bodily and behavioral mechanisms by which individuals become ethical and historical subjects. The chapters here examine specific formal effects that require animal energy—from the modeling of queer poetic virtuosities upon animal instinct (as in Hopkins’ windhover, for example, or Moore’s slapstick animals) and the casting of characters along evolutionary-typological lines (as in The Waves) to the anticolonial implementation, even, of a “bestial” style resistant to modernism’s self-authorization (exemplified by the indifferent creatures in Finnegans Wake). These examples bear out my main historical claim about modernist animals: after Darwin, it became necessary to address the individual as a complete, organic being whose developmental bandwidth was now not only more capacious—encompassing a range of instinctive and affective faculties beyond the classically rational cogito—but also, and for that very reason, as a more precarious, volatile subject, vulnerable like any animal to the unrelenting flux of biology. Drawing on the established tradition of the fable mode, then, as a “lowly” but highly effective form for conveying ethical dicta and, at the same time, anticipating the work of modern affect studies, what I call the modernist fable reframes the field’s relation to style, highlighting its centrality as a specialized mechanism by which to mediate and stabilize the volatilities of language, ethics, and bodies.