Interrogating the Mind of Modernism: Gender, Race, and Modern Cognitive Citizenship

Abstract

This dissertation, titled “Interrogating the Mind of Modernism: Gender, Race, and Modern Cognitive Citizenship,” argues that women authors across racial and ethnic difference experiment with narrative form to undermine dominant cognitive models, not to demonstrate the universal shift towards epistemological doubt often attributed to transatlantic modernist formal innovation. Scholarship in transatlantic modernism contends that the fragmentation and alienation of modernist representation produces and reflects profound historical shifts in the understanding of reliability, truth, and subjectivity. That is, it proposes that the modernist mind found in the work of authors like Woolf and Joyce plays a crucial role in producing postmodern theories of performative, relational, or fluid identities. In this study, I argue that literary works by or about women who in some way navigate complicated racial, ethnic, or migrant identities demonstrate that this shift towards epistemological doubt has different stakes for marginalized people. In a political climate that hinges on an articulation of identity for the achievement of political or economic parity, epistemological uncertainty is a privileged condition and a barrier to sociopolitical equity. While the authors I study undoubtedly reveal the limitations of available systems – the arbitrary nature of borders and categories of identity and cognition – they also depict what it means to live life within relational systems of oppression. My analysis develops through an examination of the interplay between cultural conceptions of gendered modernity in Europe, Mexico, and the United States and the representation of fictional minds in Anglophone literary texts. I contend that each of the writers I examine in depth – Nella Larsen, María Cristina Mena, and Jean Rhys – develop alternative models of the mind, models that both echo and intervene in the liberal individualist conceptions of cognition and autonomy that ground European and American definitions of citizenship. I employ relational analyses to outline a shared investment in undermining the way that women’s minds were constructed as spaces of empowerment and freedom through the naturalization of an exclusionary cognitive model: linear, singular, and individual (not intersubjective, relational, protean, or social), rational (not emotional), and universalizable (not multiple or sociohistorically contingent). Mena, Larsen, and Rhys all use narrative form to critique the hierarchies of cognitive capacities that were mobilized as a means to police marginalized racial groups. Through the use of narrative tools like unreliable narration, stream of consciousness, and narrative revision, they depict the politics of cognitive representation, undermine dominant discursive regimes, and develop a more complex field of mental models. My dissertation indicates the array of strategies women authors used to negotiate circumscribing conceptualizations of whose minds matter, whose stories matter, and why. In representing the limitations of universal models, the texts I study circulate their own theorizations, shift available narratives of belief formation and subjectivity, and suggest a proliferation of diverse constellations of raced and gendered cognition in a cosmopolitan, modern world. The new history I develop in this project constructs a genealogy of shared literary strategies and outlines the political import not just of narrative experimentation but also of the notions of cognition, citizenship, gender, race, and modernity through which those narrative forms emerge.