Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Modernism: State, Self, and Style in Four Authors by Kris Amar Weberg Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Michael Valdez Moses, Supervisor ___________________________ Nicholas Allen ___________________________ Srinivas Aravamudan ___________________________ Ian Baucom Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2011 ABSTRACT Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Modernism: State, Self, and Style in Four Authors by Kris Amar Weberg Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Michael Valdez Moses, Supervisor ___________________________ Nicholas Allen ___________________________ Srinivas Aravamudan ___________________________ Ian Baucom An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2011 Copyright by Kris Amar Weberg 2011 Abstract This study examines Irish modernist literature in order to complicate established critical modes which read modernist movements as reflective of distinctly vernacular or cosmopolitan aesthetic and political commitments. I argue that neither recent models of vernacular modernism nor older models of cosmopolitan modernism entirely account for the stylistic innovations and formal experiments of modernist literature. Instead, modernist writers negotiate a field of tension between the poles of cosmopolitan and vernacular, and demonstrate that their works represent forms of identity that accommodate elements of both national belonging and cosmopolitan individualism. Examining works by four authors – William Butler Yeats, Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett, and Raymond Queneau – this project argues that modernist literature represents a set of idiosyncratic, dynamic efforts to negotiate the tensions between the limits of the nation-state system and a variety of emerging transnational modes of cultural exchange in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The nature of modernist writers’ efforts to negotiate a period of passage between national and global systems of exchange is, I think, especially visible in the case of Irish modernism. Ireland’s transition from a part of the United Kingdom to an independent nation-state in the interwar period makes that nation’s literature an exemplary case for my argument, as does the critical importance of Irish writing in the modernist canon. iv By examining these and other critical and historical perspectives alongside a sampling of plays, novels, short stories, and memoirs, this study makes the case that modernist literary aesthetics spring from writers’ efforts to make sense of competing desires for national belonging and cosmopolitan autonomy. Focusing on works that cross categorical boundaries between Irish and cosmopolitan modernism, this study traces the ways in which modernist aesthetics construct dynamic, adaptive relationships between the global and the national, and suggest that we can imagine them as something other than static, exclusive alternatives. v Dedication To my parents – From whom I learned to follow my dreams vi Contents Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iv Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Modernism’s National, Transnational, and Cosmopolitan Frames .............................. 3 The Irish Case ............................................................................................................. 17 Literary Space and Modernism ................................................................................... 25 Vernacular Modernism and Cosmopolitan Modernism .............................................. 32 Irish Modernism and the Division of Elite and Mass Culture .................................... 37 Yeats, Bowen, Beckett, Queneau: Four “Irish” Writers in English and French ......... 46 “[A] Small Minority Which Is Content to Remain a Minority:” National Literature as Anglo-Irish Synthesis in Three Plays by William Butler Yeats ....................................... 53 Yeats’s Cosmopolitan Tradition of Irish National Literature ..................................... 58 The Late Colonial Yeats of On Baile’s Strand ........................................................... 66 The Changing Ireland and Yeats’s Evolving Poetics ................................................. 81 Spiritual Traditions and Yeatsian Republicanism in The Words upon the Window- Pane ............................................................................................................................ 87 Purgatory and Yeats’s Late-Period Politics ............................................................... 99 Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 114 “[T]he Aesthetic of Living”: Transnational Identity, Private Space, and National Belonging in the Works of Elizabeth Bowen ................................................................. 119 Bowen’s Remaking of the Big House ....................................................................... 123 Ascendancy Circulation and the Centrality of the Big House in The Last September ................................................................................................................................... 129 The Aesthetic Imagination of Bowen’s Court and the Historical Narrative of Bowen’s Court ......................................................................................................................... 156 “The Demon Lover” and Bowen’s Gothic Modernism ............................................ 170 Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 186 vii “Your Region Is Vast:” Cosmopolitan Imagination and Vernacular Form in Three Novels by Samuel Beckett .......................................................................................................... 189 The ABCs of Molloy ’s Vernacular Cosmopolitanism .............................................. 195 The Disintegration of Nationality in Malone Dies ................................................... 219 The Unnameable and the Ghosts of Origin .............................................................. 231 Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 238 “[T]he Great Gulf That Separates Literature and Life:” Raymond Queneau’s Irish Modernist Pulp Fiction ................................................................................................... 243 Authenticity, Nationality, and Genre ........................................................................ 245 The Roman Noir and the Genesis of Sally Mara ...................................................... 250 Fascism, Ideology, and Literary Sadism ................................................................... 255 Genre and Nationality in On est toujours trop bon avec les femmes ........................ 266 Artifice and Nationality in Queneau’s Novel ........................................................... 270 Queneau’s Use of Paratext and the Macaronic Life of National Languages ............ 285 Pan-Celticism and Queneau’s References to Breton Nationalism ............................ 290 Polyglot Cosmopolitanism and Vernacular Literature ............................................. 297 Queneau’s Satire of Universal History ..................................................................... 300 Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 309 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 313 Vernacular and Cosmopolitan in Relation to Literary Space ................................... 314 Irish Modernism and Global Modernism .................................................................. 324 Modernism as a Literature of Passage ...................................................................... 326 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 339 Biography ........................................................................................................................ 347 viii Introduction In this dissertation, I explore several works of Irish modernism, as well as one work that parodies Irish modernism, in order to argue that Irish modernist writing represents a group of idiosyncratic efforts by writers to find a middle path between the competing alternatives of nationalism and cosmopolitanism. Nationalism and cosmopolitanism make up two poles between which exists a field of productive tensions that Irish modernist literature attempts to represent and resolve. By considering modernist works written in or about Ireland, I suggest that its particular historical and cultural circumstances make the underlying forces that shape modernism especially visible in Irish modernist writing. Ireland in the early twentieth century shares features