UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles The Art of the Modernist Body A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in English by Valerie Lauren Popp 2012 © Copyright by Valerie Lauren Popp 2012 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Art of the Modernist Body by Valerie Lauren Popp Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Los Angeles, 2012 Professor Michael A. North, Chair The Art of the Modernist Body explores the fraught relationship between corporeality and the genesis of new language in modernist literature. The dissertation argues that the history of disability in the early twentieth century facilitates a revised account of Anglo-American modernism; specifically, the modernists’ formal preoccupation with loss, deficiency, and absence, long regarded as a vital aspect of the movement, can be re-imagined productively through the heuristic of disability theory. The project likewise reveals that many of modernism’s signature novelties, including free verse, Imagism, and the embrace of ordinary speech, are influenced by artists’ attempts to represent physical deviance. Each text in question is generated out of repeated encounters with extraordinary figures or forms, and the artists openly challenge the conceptual, social, and political parameters that delimit the ideal human body. Their literature also reminds us that the modernist period is a remarkably inchoate time in terms of how the body is imagined. Two World Wars, the rise of the machine age, and advances in prosthetic and rehabilitative medicine are just a few of the phenomena that brought the human form to the forefront of British and American culture, with politicians, cultural critics, industrial scions, workers, artists, and soldiers all tussling over the social and economic value of ii imperfect bodies. Accordingly, many accounts from the period resist any entrenched, discrete notions of normality and abnormality, and acts of corporeal discipline, normalization, and rehabilitation are neither roundly condemned nor applauded. The confluence of multiple visions of corporeality not only alters the cultural landscape, but it also affects the very language through which the experience of physical difference is articulated. The novelists and poets herein record both processes, namely by producing what might be called a “contingency of corporeality:” they define the superlative modernist body as a hybrid entity, a form that registers the dueling forces of normalization and destabilization. iii The dissertation of Valerie Lauren Popp is approved. Helen E. Deutsch Shelley I. Salamensky Michael A. North, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2012 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction pp. 1-26 Chapter One: D.H. Lawrence and A Disabled Aesthetics pp. 27-51 Chapter Two: “Slashed and Torn but Doubly Rich:” H.D.’s Poetics of Deformation pp. 52-105 Chapter Three: The Perfectly Adequate Poetry of William Carlos Williams pp. 106-163 Coda: Beyond Modernism pp. 164-167 Works Cited pp. 168-176 v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A dissertation is never a solo endeavor, and I am profoundly fortunate to have received great love and support from colleagues, family, and friends all over the world throughout the last nine years. I owe a debt of gratitude to my doctoral committee, a group of brilliant and dynamic scholars whose intellectual rigor, commitment, and creativity inspired me daily. Thank you to Shelley Salamensky and Eleanor Kaufman for offering guidance and valuable perspective from areas of study beyond English. Thank you to Helen Deutsch for being a formidable, fashionable, witty, and all-around incredible mentor; I look forward to many more years of conversation and friendship. I am so grateful to have studied with my dissertation chair, Michael A. North. Robert Frost once wrote in his notebooks that “to know a moment when you see it- that is to be a teacher. ‘There, there you are, you’ve said it’ is the most influencing thing you can say to a person. Or I know exactly- you get it just as I have felt it. Fellow feeling and common experience.” I thank Professor North for enriching my life and work with his diligence, humor, integrity, and intelligence, but most of all, I thank him for being a teacher in the truest Frostian sense: for his generosity of spirit and “fellow feeling,” and for knowing precisely how and when to tell me “there, there you are, you’ve said it.” Thank you to the UCLA Department of English for providing ample material support for my scholarship, and for providing me with an energetic and challenging academic home during my career. Thank you to Michelle Harding and Michael Lambert for their patience, care, and administrative ingenuity. I was privileged to learn from many of the outstanding scholars and instructors on the faculty, and I especially wish to thank the following professors for their guidance: Michael J.B. Allen, Frederick Burwick, Stephen Dickey, Mark McGurl, Chris Mott, Felicity Nussbaum, Caroline Streeter, and Richard Yarborough. I am indebted beyond language to all of my family and friends. Thank you to my parents, my grandmother Phyllis Harden, my sister Amanda Popp, and to Stephen and Sally Phillips, John Flavin, Patricia Phillips, Megan and Thomas Phillips, Tyler Phillips and Heidi Rahn, and Elizabeth and Jonathan Wesser for your advice and love. To my dear friends, your warmth, hospitality, erudition, and love sustained me many times throughout this project, and I thank you with all my heart, con todo mi corazon: Dushyant Asthana, Dan Braun, Lilian and Alfonso Bustamante, Alexis Javier Carduno, Sil Cartolano, Timothy Danner, Dustin Friedman, Jose Juan Maris Garcia, Eric Gudas, Georgina Guzman, Laura Haupt, Renee Hudson, Brendan Kayes, Julian Knox, Petra Kuppers, Courtney Marshall, John Marshall, Lisa Mendelman, Emily Morishima, Erica Onugha, Alia Orbin, Conor O'Sullivan, Carmen Pereiro, Santiago Picasso, Gary Pickard, Theri Pickens, Julio Romano, Sam See, Jason Sell, Maureen Shay, Erin Suzuki, Dennis Tyler, Jessica Weare, Awet Weldemichael, and Gita Zarnegar. And lastly, this dissertation would not have been completed without the friendship and great love of John Wilson Phillips, whose presence offers eternal, fervent proof that "Even. If. The. Sky. Is. Falling. / My. Peace. Rose. Is. In. Bloom." vi VITA EDUCATION MA in English, University of California, Los Angeles, December 2006 Field areas: early twentieth-century American literature, twentieth-century British and Irish literature, African-American literature BA in English, Yale University, August 2002 PUBLICATIONS “Improper Identification Required: Passports, Papers, and Identity Formation in the Poetry of Jackie Kay.” Contemporary Literature. Forthcoming Summer 2012. “‘Eloquent Limbs:’ D.H. Lawrence and the Aesthetics of Disability.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 5.1 (2011): 35-52. “Where Confusion Is: Transnationalism in the Fiction of Jessie Redmon Fauset.” African-American Review 43.1 (Spring 2009): 131-44. WORK EXPERIENCE Doctoral Candidate/Teaching Associate (2004-11) University of California, Los Angeles Courses taught: English 10A, British Literature to 1660 English 10B, British Literature, 1660-1832 English 10C, British Literature, 1832 to the present *Recognized for teaching excellence English 85, The American Novel English 90, Shakespeare for Nonmajors English 95A, Introduction to Poetry *Recognized for teaching excellence English M104A, Early African-American Literature English M104B, African-American Literature from the Harlem Renaissance to the 1960s English 142A, Shakespeare: Poems and Plays Business Manager (2002-03) Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies Yale University Library Managed business activities for the Fortunoff Archive, an organization which collects and organizes videotaped oral testimonies from survivors of the Holocaust from around the world. Responsibilities included: coordinating global affiliate shipments and tapings, supervising student employees, overseeing Archive finances, maintaining donor contacts, editing Archive print publications and web content, organizing the Archive 20th Anniversary Conference (2002), and participating in survivor tapings at the Yale University production studio. Student Assistant (2001-02) vii Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies Yale University Library Provided support services for the staff of the Fortunoff Archive. Responsibilities included: transcribing and editing survivor testimonies, performing videotape quality checks, and participating in survivor tapings at Yale. FELLOWSHIPS AND AWARDS UCLA Graduate Division Dissertation Fellowship (2009-10) UCLA Department of English Dissertation Year Fellowship (2008-09) UCLA Graduate Summer Research Mentorship (2005) UCLA University Fellowship (2003-04) Distinction in the English Major, Yale University (2002) CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS AND PANELS “Creative Writing à la Mullen.” Moderator with Poet Harryette Mullen. Women Writing the West Annual Conference, Los Angeles, California (September 2009) “Black Vulcan: Disability, Race, and the Poetic Prose of Jean Toomer’s Cane.” Collegium for African-American Research Conference, Bremen, Germany (March 2009) “Slashed and Torn but Doubly Rich: H.D.’s Poetics of Deformation.” UCLA Americanist Research Colloquium, Los Angeles, California (November 2008) “Modernist Studies and Disability.” UCLA Disability Awareness Week, Los Angeles, California (October 2008) “Latin America in the Fiction of Jessie Redmon Fauset.” Collegium