Description
- Abstract:
- This dissertation aims to explain the emergence of a set of vital, if unrecognized, realist imperatives in American literature and critical thought at mid-twentieth century. Joining recent scholarship that expands the range of modernist studies, it challenges the conventional wisdom that modernism should be characterized by its commitment to the work of art detached from the world. This version of modernism found its inspiration in T.S. Eliot’s statement that “assumed as axiomatic that a creation, a work of art, is autonomous,” in Wallace Stevens’s objection to the idea of a “useful” poetics, and in Clement Greenberg’s celebration of self-referential painting. My study follows a different paradigm, drawing on the tendency among writers and poets to imagine their work as inescapably continuous with the world it depicts. In so doing, it finds within modernism’s major genres—novels, poetry, and documentary nonfiction—a vital and variegated commitment to what I refer to as non-representational realism. Impatient with the limits of an increasingly self-reflexive notion of art perfected under high modernism, the writers in my study sought to reject or bypass the artwork. In order to explain the contours of non-representational realism, I turn to Charles Sanders Peirce, whose discovery of the index offers the most compelling account of unmediated relations. Unlike symbols and icons, indexes refer and belong to their referents through physical proximity, shared substance or causality. While taken up in art history and film studies, the index has much to tell us about the literary modernist imagination. Each chapter of my project identifies a different engagement with the idioms of immediacy, immersion and immanence associated with the index: from Flannery O’Connor’s fiction to verse by George Oppen and William Carlos Williams, from James Agee’s foray into documentary nonfiction to Richard Wright’s experiments in memoir, a range of genres tested the implications of non-representational realism.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2016)
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Citation
Osment, Sarah M.,
"Indexical Modernism: Autonomy, Commitment, Aesthetics"
(2016).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z00000HS
