DISCOURSE, IDEOLOGY, AND SUBJECTIVITY IN THE MODERNIST NOVEL by Adam Meehan

186 Pages·2014·0.89 MB·English

DISCOURSE, IDEOLOGY, AND SUBJECTIVITY
IN THE MODERNIST NOVEL

by

Adam Meehan

__________________________

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

For the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

In the Graduate College

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

2014
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THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
GRADUATE COLLEGE

As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation
prepared by Adam Meehan, titled Discourse, Ideology, and Subjectivity in the Modernist
Novel and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the
Degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date: (12/18/2013)
_______________________________________________________________________
Suresh Raval

Date: (12/18/2013)
_______________________________________________________________________
Jerrold Hogle

Date: (12/18/2013)
_______________________________________________________________________
Edgar Dryden

Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate’s
submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College.

I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and
recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement.

________________________________________________ Date: (12/18/2013)
Dissertation Director: Suresh Raval
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STATEMENT BY AUTHOR

This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for
an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University
Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library.

Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission,
provided that an accurate acknowledgement of the source is made. Requests for
permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in
part may be granted by the author.

SIGNED: Adam Meehan
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I owe thanks to many individuals who have contributed both directly and indirectly to
this project: Suresh Raval, Jerry Hogle, and Ed Dryden, for their wisdom and diligence,
which was invaluable throughout this process; Carlos Gallego for his advice and support;
the Department of English and the Writing Program at The University of Arizona for
supporting their graduate students; all the friends and colleagues I have met during my
time in Tucson—completing this project is bittersweet, as it means I will be leaving you
soon; my professors at San Diego State University—especially Joanna Brooks, Bill
Nericcio, and Jerry Farber; Louise Eckels Fericelli and Julie Ratchford for making me
want to be a teacher; my parents for always believing in me; the Clemons family for
trusting me; most of all my wife Nicole, for her love, patience, understanding, and
inspiration—there are no words to express my gratitude.
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DEDICATION

To my parents –

For your unwavering love and support; you have made all this possible.

To Guy, Martha, Katie, and Cindy –

For accepting me without hesitation or pretense.

To Nicole –

This achievement, like every other, is not mine, but ours.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………...............…..7

INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………...9

CHAPTER ONE: SPECTERS OF IDEOLOGY IN JOSEPH CONRAD’S
NOSTROMO……………………………………………………………….………….…37

CHAPTER TWO: REPETITION, RACE, AND DESIRE IN THE GREAT
GATSBY.............................................................................................................................68

CHAPTER THREE: “THE PEOPLE WHO COME TO CALIFORNIA TO DIE”: SWAN
SONGS OF MODERNISM IN WEST, HUXLEY, AND FITZGERALD………...……94

CHAPTER FOUR: MÉCONNAISSANCE, ERASURE, AND POST/MODERN
SUBJECTIVITY IN SAMUEL BECKETT’S MURPHY……………………………...143

CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………….......….…168

WORKS CITED…………………………………………………………….………….176
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ABSTRACT

This project challenges the conventional assumption that representations of
subjectivity in modernist fiction, while innovative in their own right, were ultimately
limited by overriding concerns with determinacy, order, and coherence. This view has
been widely adopted by postmodern critics, many of whom rely upon a “straw-man
modernism” (a term I borrow from Marjorie Perloff) in order to legitimize
postmodernism as a descriptive artistic category and substantiate the existence of a
post/modern divide. This project argues that in fact representations of subjectivity in
modernist fiction anticipate postmodern theory in ways that have not been sufficiently
explored and that highlight continuity rather than rupture. It analyzes six novels
published between 1904 and 1941 that articulate subjectivity as “in process,” a term used
by Julia Kristeva to describe identity as constituted by linguistic, ideological, and social
processes rather than ontological fixities.
I argue that the central modality in each of these novels is deconstructive, in the
sense that each uncovers the processes through which the subject is interpellated into
larger discourses oscillating between order and disjunction. Each novel, therefore,
represents subjectivity as radically indeterminate, decentered, and fragmented.
Ultimately, this project suggests that from its earliest moment modernist fiction was
concerned with the “crisis of representation” that would not be theorized until well after
modernism had been declared over. This reading not only calls into question the notion
that postmodernism represents an overcoming of modernism’s alleged limitations, but
reappraises modernist fiction in its own right as the seminal expression of twentieth-
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century subjectivity. Taken together, the novels that comprise this study reflect the
complexity and multiformity of modernist fiction’s concern with subjectivity as it
intersects with issues of ideology, race, spatiality, violence, and other factors. The version
of modernist fiction thus arrived at looks much different than the one described by
Hassan, McHale, and many other postmodern critics. The authors covered make no
attempts to envision new coherent versions of subjectivity or recover a challenged or lost
transcendental ego. They not only depict and confront the fragmented self, but maintain
an intentional open-endedness that explicitly rejects any sense of closure.
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INTRODUCTION

In his seminal book A Genealogy of Modernism (1986), Michael Levenson
describes the term “modernism” as “at once vague and unavoidable. Anything more
precise would exclude too much too soon; anything more general would be folly. As with
any blunt instrument, the best that can be done is to use it for the rough tasks and to
reserve the finer work for finer tools. As a rough way of locating our attention,
‘modernism’ will do” (vii). In fact, however, “modernism” has not done. The subtitle of
Levenson’s book, A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908-1922, suggests one of the
major reasons why, which is that the field of modernism was commonly perceived
throughout the twentieth century as a coterie of Anglo-European critics studying an elite
group of Anglo-European writers. In other words, it has long been viewed, as Peter
Nicholls has called it, as “a sort of monolithic ideological formation” (vii). For many, the
term “modernism” itself, particularly in literary studies, has been seen as a smokescreen
for the “high modernism” of Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and other giants of early twentieth-
century Anglo-European literature. Thus, while the study of modernism has flourished
throughout the latter half of the twentieth-century and into the twenty first, it has also
accrued a stigma that critics are still struggling to shed.
Aside from its own internal problematics, the field has for several decades had to
contend with the massive wave of postmodernism and its attendant theoretical force. This
is truer now than ever, as John T. Matthews has recently attested: “By this point in the
early twenty-first century, students of culture rarely encounter terms like 'modern,’
‘modernist,’ and ‘modernity’ without a familiar prefix: ‘postmodern,’ ‘postmodernist,’
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‘postmodernity’” (282). But this trend has been unfolding for at least the past two
decades and the “problem,” such as it is for the field of modernist studies, has been
addressed before. The problem, in other words, is not a new one. Consequently, post-
Levenson attempts at defining and delineating modernism have become more inclusive in
order to accommodate more texts, more ideas, and more disciplinary possibilities. In
Modernisms: A Literary Guide (1995), a landmark in modernist studies, Nicholls
addresses this underlying factor in his own approach:
When I began work on this book, postmodernism was in its heyday. The
plural form of my title – Modernisms – thus had something of a polemical
intent, since so much of the debate about the ‘post’ hinged upon what
Marjorie Perloff has called a ‘straw-man modernism’, one characterized
primarily by its commitment to reactionary ‘grand narratives’ of social and
psychic order. (vii)
This “straw-man modernism,” in other words, has had the dual effect of legitimizing
postmodernism as a descriptive aesthetic category, while simultaneously minimizing
modernism’s heterogeneity. This concept of straw-man modernism is one that I would
like to expand upon and continually return to throughout in order to help frame my own
particular reading of modernist fiction in relation to notions of a post/modern divide.
Fortunately, as a result of Nicholls’ and more recent efforts, the landscape of modernist
studies has considerably diversified and is more expansive in our present moment than it
was a quarter century, or even fifteen years ago.1 In fact, the term “modernist studies”

1 In a follow-up to their seminal book Bad Modernisms (2006), Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz
remark that “were one seeking a single word to sum up transformations in modernist literary scholarship
over the past decade or two, one could do worse than light on expansion” (737). In tracing this expansion,
they address the insular focus of twentieth-century modernist criticism: “Meanwhile, interrogations of the