Productive Perplexity: The Aesthetics of Confusion in Modernist Novels
Gorbach, Sarah.
2019
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Confusion has not been traditionally considered a proper scholarly
response to texts. I argue that exploring confusion as something to be worked with
rather than worked through makes us reflect on the experience of reading rather
than its end product. Considering confusion as a valid response to "difficult"
modernist novels makes them more approachable to non-scholarly readers, bridging
the ... read moregap between critic and Virginia Woolf's "common reader." In modernist novels,
characters must make sense of unknowable affect just as readers are challenged to
make sense of the novel they are reading. The characters often experience this
crisis as bodily, as the body is accessible when the mind is overwhelmed,
paralleling the reader's response to being cognitively blocked by the novel. These
novels keep the body's otherness at the forefront of the reading experience and
teach us to hold open the space of difference by suspending our critical
practices. Yet the appeal to characters' bodies reminds readers of our own
corporeality, connecting us with these characters even as we are taught not to
reify them. In my first chapter, I argue that E.M. Forster's A Passage to India
and the earlier Where Angels Fear to Tread encourage a bodily reading practice
that attends to fluidity over fixity, though both texts emphasize the need to keep
this practice within limits. Chapter two explores atmospheric confusion in Marcel
Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, arguing that the narrator's ability to
accept the confusing atmospheres found in his childhood in Combray provides a
model for the reader to emulate, even as such acceptance will seem to be replaced
by a more analytical stance in The Captive. Finally, I discuss cognitive and
linguistic limitations in Djuna Barnes' Nightwood and Virginia Woolf's The Waves,
arguing that, by calling attention to these limitations, both novels encourage a
reading practice based on bodily experience over understanding. In grounding
reading in the body shared between character and reader—a grounding fluid as the
body itself—my project mediates between the stable and the mutable, reflecting the
contradictory currents of modernism while positing another way to read modernist
texts.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2019.
Submitted to the Dept. of English.
Advisor: John Lurz.
Committee: Joseph Litvak, Nathan Wolff, and Megan Quigley.
Keywords: Modern literature, and Aesthetics.read less - ID:
- xp68kv58j
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