Secret States: Modernism, Espionage, and the Official Secrets Act.
Kaufman, Mark.
2013
-
Abstract: This dissertation interrogates the way modernism both informs and
informs against the national security state by examining the recruitment of writers into
the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), the resulting infringements of the UK
Official Secrets Act, and the appropriation of espionage tropes by the leftist "adversary
culture." I contend that the practice of recruiting ... read moreauthors as spies works to reify an
aesthetic ideology that privileges writerly sensibility; that is to say, the writer's
presumed expertise in "human nature" and ability to convert raw observation into readable
intelligence. Consequently, these recruitments compel us to rethink Friedrich Schiller's
notion of the "aesthetic state," a hypothetical political system based on humanistic
principles. Instead, this project theorizes a militant aesthetic state, a phantom regime in
which literary acts (reading and writing) are weaponized in the interests of national
defense--with unforeseen political, legal, and aesthetic ramifications. Drawing upon a
range of spyographies, fictional and nonfictional narratives by former agents and others
who elect to "play spy," I locate these texts' "violations" not in the revelation of
specific secrets, but in their modernist unveiling of the authoritarian kernel within
democracy itself. Arguing that the "literary agent" is more a liability than a boon, I read
W. Somerset Maugham's Ashenden (1928) as foregrounding the paradoxical recruitment of
cosmopolitanism into the service of nationalism; Compton Mackenzie's Greek Memories (1932)
and Water on the Brain (1933) as disclosing the manner in which government bureaucracy
projects an aura of sacred secrecy that ultimately founders on its own "formalism"; W. H.
Auden's The Orators (1932) as a "mock-spyography," an imaginative infiltration of
democratic totalitarianism that inevitably demands its own destruction; and Virginia
Woolf's Three Guineas (1938) as representative of a larger "spy function" informing both
her politics and aesthetics, a conception of feminism as a secret society, a clandestine
conspiracy against the patriarchal "procession." By following Woolf's own advice that "bad
writing" be regarded as an act of revenge on authority, I uncover the double agency of
modernism itself, which both witnesses the rise of the secret state and becomes a leak that
must be retroactively contained.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2013.
Submitted to the Dept. of English.
Advisor: Joseph Litvak.
Committee: John Lurz, Modhumita Roy, and Sean Latham.
Keywords: British and Irish literature, Modern literature, and Literature.read less - ID:
- xk81jz068
- Component ID:
- tufts:21933
- To Cite:
- TARC Citation Guide EndNote
