Writing Communities: Aesthetics, Politics, and Late Modernist Literary Consolidation.

Abstract

This dissertation examines late modernist constitutions of literary community and their relationship to the processes of literary consolidation. Between the 1930s and the 1950s, social and political exigencies such as the Depression, the rise of Fascism in Europe, the Second World War, and the emergence of a new Cold War led writers and the general public alike to attend more closely to issues of community. In chapters treating the genre of modernist memoir, the later writings of William Carlos Williams, New Directions Books, and the Cold War cultural publication Perspectives USA, I argue that, through a variety of discursive and representational practices, writers, publishers, and patrons actively set out to contest and codify the aesthetic and political legacies (both past and contemporaneous) of modernist community. Often treated as contexts for the literary, these sites of communal constitution helped to determine the canons of and narratives about modernism that circulate to this day. Attending to such constitutions reveals how paradigms central to the concept of modernism—including the imbrication of the literary in commodity culture, the relation of the aesthetic to the quotidian, notions of the “New,” literary cosmopolitanism, and the political function imagined for literature—underwent significant revision throughout the mid-century. Moreover, these refashionings expose the various tensions inherent in modernism’s transition from a self-proclaimed countercultural movement to a mainstream phenomenon. My analysis also importantly recovers and resituates the pivotal role played by poet and publisher James Laughlin in the dissemination and reception of modernist writing. This project recuperates literary community as a category of critical inquiry and, methodologically, calls attention to our own scholarly entanglements in the production, perpetuation, and revision of communal paradigms. Though I focus primarily on American modernisms, the scope of this project is more properly characterized as international. The communal and consolidating negotiations that it examines suggest how modernist communities must be read in relation to the forces of expatriation, cultural exchange, and group affiliations that alternately reify and transcend national boundaries. This dissertation participates in conversations vital to modernist scholarship, American cultural studies, print culture, and the institutional history of literary studies.