Description
- Abstract:
- This dissertation examines a series of strange intimacies in twentieth-century literature by focusing on works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Richard Wright, Graham Greene, and Christopher Isherwood. While recent literary criticism has tended to focus on communal forms ranging from the nation-state to the black diaspora, each of these forms still retains a commitment to communal essentialism. Countering this tradition, I argue that the literature of late modernism strives to depict relations that don’t draw on the romance of community. Moreover, I suggest that such intimacies transpire through various non-linguistic media such as noise, signals, and silence. The first chapter provides a framework for reading noise by turning to the archives of communication theory and scientific opinion polling. I argue that Fitzgerald’s novel, Tender is the Night, frames noise as the locus of public desire but refuses to convert these desires into language. In Chapter Two, I consider Greene’s The Quiet American, a novel often read as allegorizing America’s intervention in Vietnam. The novel’s ties to nationalism are tested by a series of strange intimacies I characterize as phatic in nature. While Greene will grant that such intimacies are idyllic they prove politically facile and ultimately untenable. In the third chapter, Wright’s Black Power serves as a foil for literary criticism that demands the African-American travelogue recapitulate a vision of the black diaspora. Instead of affirming diasporic identity, Wright’s travelogue subverts the ethnographic imperative to inform by performing affective bewilderment instead. The final chapter contests readings of Isherwood’s A Single Man that interpret silence as indicative of sexual identity. I show how, despite its turn away from community, Isherwood’s novel fails to align with the antisocial turn in queer theory. Instead it offers a sustained vision of impersonal intimacy maintained through the non-linguistic media of humming and silence.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2014)
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Citation
Schnepf, Jennifer D.,
"Strange Intimacies: The Limits of Community in the Twentieth-Century Novel"
(2014).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0736P7Z
