University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations Summer 2010 Speaking for Americans: Modernist Voices and Political Representation, 1910-1940 Sarah Kerman University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the American Literature Commons Recommended Citation Kerman, Sarah, "Speaking for Americans: Modernist Voices and Political Representation, 1910-1940" (2010). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 237. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/237 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/237 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Speaking for Americans: Modernist Voices and Political Representation, 1910-1940 Abstract In the early twentieth century, a time of massive population shifts from external immigration and internal migration, the question of whose voices would be heard—both politically and aesthetically—became central to American politics and culture, and authors found new and innovative ways of representing those voices on the page. Yet these textual transcriptions of speech and song are typically considered either as nostalgic representations of a folk past, or as exhibits of populations whose language is marked as non-standard. This dissertation argues that vocal production is in fact a progressive and future- oriented force in American modernist texts, and finds a pedagogical potential in formal innovations that often encouraged readers to themselves perform the voices they read on the page. It examines polemically cross-generic texts by Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, Henry Roth, and Muriel Rukeyser in the contexts of modernist experimentation and of leftist attempts to effect social change through literature, and argues that these authors self-consciously strove to reshape the ways in which their readers performed American identity to themselves and others. Adapting the genres of the long novel, the folk anthology, the modernist long poem, and the documentary, they demonstrate both a deeply felt imperative to represent marginalized communities in aesthetically innovative and ethically responsible ways, and a self-conscious awareness of the limits of such representations. Their works thereby both delineate and manipulate American national identity. In contrast to scholarship that finds a divide between aesthetic innovation and politically-engaged didacticism, then, this dissertation suggests that authors negotiated the ability of speech and song to bridge the two. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Comparative Literature and Literary Theory First Advisor Charles Bernstein Second Advisor Nancy Bentley Third Advisor Jean-Michel Rabate Keywords modernism, voice, Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, Henry Roth, Muriel Rukeyser Subject Categories American Literature This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/237 SPEAKING FOR AMERICANS: MODERNIST VOICES AND POLITICAL REPRESENTATION, 1910-1940 Sarah Kerman A DISSERTATION in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2010 Supervisor of Dissertation ________________________ Charles Bernstein, Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature Graduate Group Chairperson ________________________ Kevin Platt, Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures Dissertation Committee Nancy Bentley, Professor of English Jean-Michel Rabaté, Vartan Gregorian Professor of the Humanities ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I offer my thanks first to the members of my dissertation committee, all of whom supplied crucial feedback and mentoring throughout the process. Charles Bernstein was always open to discussion, and encouraged me to explore new connections and to embrace didacticism in the best possible way. Jean-Michel Rabaté offered both generous professional support and comments that helped me clarify the stakes of my argument. And Nancy Bentley provided expertise and suggestions that greatly enriched the scope of the project. All three have shown an enthusiasm and willingness to engage that I have appreciated immensely. The Program in Comparative Literature has been a supportive home for the past six years. Thanks to Rita Copeland for her enthusiastic optimism, and especially to JoAnne Dubil, whose good cheer was matched only by her administrative prowess and willingness to lend a hand. Important financial support was provided both by the Program’s Benjamin Franklin Fellowship, and by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation’s Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies. A number of individuals supported my research and writing in more or less official capacities. At the Library of Congress, Alice Lotvin Birney was my capable guide to the Muriel Rukeyser Papers. Two anonymous readers at Arizona Quarterly and Laurel Garver at the Journal of Modern Literature provided comments that helped reshape chapters 2 and 3, respectively. Many thanks to Ondrea Ackerman, Aliki Caloyeras, Shonni Enelow, Michael Golston, Jesse Rosenthal, Eugene Vydrin, and members of the Modernism/Postmodernism Reading Group at Columbia University for their productive feedback, encouragement, and exciting (and excited) conversation. I will always ii appreciate the unfailing curiosity, wit, political intelligence, and unfeigned interest of Adrian Daub, Mearah Quinn-Brauner, Anastassia Zinke, and Jules, Susan, and Sophie Kerman. Finally, I feel lucky to have had Andy Lynn as the first reader of every chapter: his astute questions, syntheses, and suggestions have truly improved this work from the ground up. iii ABSTRACT SPEAKING FOR AMERICANS: MODERNIST VOICES AND POLITICAL REPRESENTATION, 1910-1940 Sarah Kerman Supervisor: Charles Bernstein In the early twentieth century, a time of massive population shifts from external immigration and internal migration, the question of whose voices would be heard—both politically and aesthetically—became central to American politics and culture, and authors found new and innovative ways of representing those voices on the page. Yet these textual transcriptions of speech and song are typically considered either as nostalgic representations of a folk past, or as exhibits of populations whose language is marked as non-standard. This dissertation argues that vocal production is in fact a progressive and future-oriented force in American modernist texts, and finds a pedagogical potential in formal innovations that often encouraged readers to themselves perform the voices they read on the page. It examines polemically cross-generic texts by Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, Henry Roth, and Muriel Rukeyser in the contexts of modernist experimentation and of leftist attempts to effect social change through literature, and argues that these authors self-consciously strove to reshape the ways in which their readers performed American identity to themselves and others. Adapting the genres of the long novel, the folk anthology, the modernist long poem, and the documentary, they demonstrate both a deeply felt imperative to represent marginalized communities in aesthetically innovative and ethically responsible ways, and a self-conscious awareness of the limits of such iv representations. Their works thereby both delineate and manipulate American national identity. In contrast to scholarship that finds a divide between aesthetic innovation and politically-engaged didacticism, then, this dissertation suggests that authors negotiated the ability of speech and song to bridge the two. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii ABSTRACT iv INTRODUCTION: Sound Practices 1 CHAPTER 1: “Our History Is Complete”: Gertrude Stein's Theory of American Repetition 15 CHAPTER 2: Authentic Imitation: Modernist Anthologies and the Pedagogy of Folk Culture 56 CHAPTER 3: Call It Sleep and the Limits of Typicality 98 CHAPTER 4: Muriel Rukeyser's Politics of Quotation 147 CONCLUSION: Joining Voices 193 BIBLIOGRAPHY 195 vi Introduction: Sound Practices I began this project with a conjunction: the “and” of Gertrude Stein's notorious sentence "I am writing for myself and strangers." Stein uses these words to justify writing her early novel The Making of Americans, but, coming as they do in the middle of long, discursive, repetitive paragraphs, it is easy to take only the first half of the sentence under consideration. In other words, to read Stein's experiments with the form of the novel as hermetic or private, a working-through of aesthetic and philosophical issues that then appear more fully conceived in Stein's later work. Stein’s obsession with repetitive speech patterns, in this model, is biographically instrumental but aesthetically and philosophically insignificant. Taking the "and" of Stein's "myself and strangers" literally, however, not only opens up new possibilities for reading The Making of Americans, but provides a paradigm for reading other modernist literature that straddles generic and formal boundaries. For Stein's declaration connects her with other modernists who consciously took it upon themselves to mediate between individuals and American readers, broadly conceived, through experiments with transcribing speech and song. They used formally innovative techniques to call attention to the construction of American national identity out of numerous individual instances of enunciation.