Thesis advisor: Robert Lehman / “Modernity Against Itself” pinpoints a fundamental division within modernity: an antagonism between artistic modernism and political-economic modernization. I argue that this division is best thought of as a conflictual relationship between aesthetic and social forms. Twentieth-century authors, I contend, saw their art as both linked and opposed to the social forms of their time. “Modernity Against Itself” articulates the complexities of modernity’s interconnected yet conflicting forms in two parts. The first two chapters address the ontology of art by examining the entanglement of the artwork’s form with that of the commodity. These chapters offer readings of key texts in modernist aesthetics, political economy, and psychoanalysis to make a case for artistic autonomy by theorizing the work of art—as envisioned by Wilhelm Worringer and Wyndham Lewis in particular—as a form of fetishism that contests, rather than capitulates to, the logic of commodification. The third and fourth chapters link poetic forms to politics by scrutinizing provocative references to general strikes by Hope Mirrlees and Virginia Woolf to argue that the former’s poem Paris and the latter’s novel To the Lighthouse suspend conventional linguistic and literary meaning in order to represent the strikes’ disruption of the status quo. “Modernity Against Itself” contributes to contemporary scholarly debates by focusing on how modernism—often regarded as famously, even infamously, formal—investigated questions that literary criticism is currently struggling to answer. It endeavors to make a significant methodological intervention by uniting, but not conflating, the aesthetic insights of formalism and the social insights of historicism by positing the relation between literary and social forms as an oppositional relation of non-relation. For it is only by working through the antinomies of form, and not by presuming to resolve them, that the connection between aesthetics and politics can be adequately theorized. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2024. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

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This dissertation considers the way in which the figure of fashion expands and complicates the field of literary modernism. My project treats "fashion" as more than just clothing and other bodily adornment, broadening it to include certain spaces, locations, and objects organized by social hierarchies of performance and display. I focus on the way in which characters--often in the texts of authors on the margins of mainstream modernism--use fashionable dress and the manipulation of social spaces to defy constraining social positions. I argue that fashionable expression allows characters to revise personal history and represent a self in opposition to externally imposed perceptions of identity.The readings of fashionable "moments" I consider show how fashion, like the modernist aesthetic itself, allows authors to fragment and remake conceptions of self and persona, meaning and value, and past and present, all categories scholars now argue were at the heart of the aesthetics of modernism. In chapters on Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Nella Larsen, and William Faulkner, I explore the production of womanhood as anti-modern, the generation of personhood through new relations to things, the relations of the signs of race to the more general fashion system, and the relation between the domestic, modernity, and the American South. Examining texts through the lens of fashion reveals the ways in which modernist moments are produced by characters, subjects and authors often considered to be outside the boundaries of the modernist movement through an engagement with concepts of the fashionable, and the remaking of the self it allows. Building on the history of scholarship on modernist aesthetics, and on recent work on the role fashion played in the production and growth of the spirit of modernity, I show how, at the fringes of the American aesthetic, the frictions that brought literature in contact with the fashion system allow us to rethink the history of the early twentieth century.

This dissertation explores textual junctures such as this in the compositional processes of James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Ezra Pound that illuminate how these modernists negotiated the fraught position of being an author in the early twentieth century. This approach marks a departure from conventional textual criticism as I look at the intersections between textual criticism and literary theory, demonstrating the effects different theories can have on our understanding of textual criticism. Recent innovations in textual scholarship influenced by poststructuralist theorists allow me to uncover and describe the extent to which each of these four authors construct a self-conscious version of authorship in relation to their larger Modernist aims. This examination reveals how Joyce, Barnes, Loy, and Pound were subject to numerous outside influences, personal insecurities and preoccupations throughout the writing process, indicating their desires to both manipulate and participate in the modernist project of innovation and experimentation. The first chapter addresses the evolution of Joyce??s pre-writing, drafting and revising processes as a form of textual gossip. Joyce excised material from much of his early writing, controlling his work as a gossiper controls rumors. As he becameincreasingly more inclusive in his writing process, he also reflected a more positive regard for gossip as a similarly inclusive process. The second chapter examines the revision and editing of Ryder, Nightwood, and The Antiphon. Barnes increasingly sought legitimacy for her work by subjecting it to the conventionalizing editing of T.S. Eliot and Emily Holmes Coleman. In the third chapter, I interrogate Pound??s poetic practices and his status as an expatriate in order to reveal how Pound felt as an exile to his own writing. The fourth chapter analyzes Loy??s marginal status in the modernist canon, arguing that she created a persona through her public presentation of herself in her poems that is responsible for her constant and perpetual rediscovery.

This dissertation explores textual junctures such as this in the compositional processes of James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Ezra Pound that illuminate how these modernists negotiated the fraught position of being an author in the early twentieth century. This approach marks a departure from conventional textual criticism as I look at the intersections between textual criticism and literary theory, demonstrating the effects different theories can have on our understanding of textual criticism. Recent innovations in textual scholarship influenced by poststructuralist theorists allow me to uncover and describe the extent to which each of these four authors construct a self-conscious version of authorship in relation to their larger Modernist aims. This examination reveals how Joyce, Barnes, Loy, and Pound were subject to numerous outside influences, personal insecurities and preoccupations throughout the writing process, indicating their desires to both manipulate and participate in the modernist project of innovation and experimentation. The first chapter addresses the evolution of Joyce??s pre-writing, drafting and revising processes as a form of textual gossip. Joyce excised material from much of his early writing, controlling his work as a gossiper controls rumors. As he becameincreasingly more inclusive in his writing process, he also reflected a more positive regard for gossip as a similarly inclusive process. The second chapter examines the revision and editing of Ryder, Nightwood, and The Antiphon. Barnes increasingly sought legitimacy for her work by subjecting it to the conventionalizing editing of T.S. Eliot and Emily Holmes Coleman. In the third chapter, I interrogate Pound??s poetic practices and his status as an expatriate in order to reveal how Pound felt as an exile to his own writing. The fourth chapter analyzes Loy??s marginal status in the modernist canon, arguing that she created a persona through her public presentation of herself in her poems that is responsible for her constant and perpetual rediscovery.

This thesis tracks an alternative trajectory for thinking about the way in which modernist texts incorporate silence as an aesthetic and a theme, one that departs from those currently favoured by contemporary modernist criticism. Particularly, I wish to move away from the prevailing approach to Virginia Woolf's texts that borders on biographical criticism, an approach that theorizes silence as indicative of the author's trauma, pointing to that which is 'unsayable' as evidence of some psychically unassimilable event. Instead, I argue that by experimenting with an aesthetics of silence, repetition, and musicality, Woolf is participating in a wider cultural debate. With Between the Acts, I believe she seeks to incorporate sound to such a degree that the novel becomes a listenable art piece, requiring a reconceptualization of reading as not only a visual act, but an aural one as well.

This thesis tracks an alternative trajectory for thinking about the way in which modernist texts incorporate silence as an aesthetic and a theme, one that departs from those currently favoured by contemporary modernist criticism. Particularly, I wish to move away from the prevailing approach to Virginia Woolf's texts that borders on biographical criticism, an approach that theorizes silence as indicative of the author's trauma, pointing to that which is 'unsayable' as evidence of some psychically unassimilable event. Instead, I argue that by experimenting with an aesthetics of silence, repetition, and musicality, Woolf is participating in a wider cultural debate. With Between the Acts, I believe she seeks to incorporate sound to such a degree that the novel becomes a listenable art piece, requiring a reconceptualization of reading as not only a visual act, but an aural one as well.

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