Wondrous Detritus: Thingness and Alternative Spirituality in American Modernist Fiction.

Abstract

This dissertation explores the hitherto unattended aspect of the interpenetration of materiality and spirituality in American modernist novels. Revisiting the works of Dreiser, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Nathanael West, my project articulates the reason why modernist writers repeatedly showed qualms about the inefficacy of disembodied spirituality, and turned instead to the materiality of objects as embodying an alternative spirituality. Chapter by chapter, I focus on the way each novelist transforms a particular object into something spiritual by exposing its thingness, and how each writer suggests that unruly materiality can resonate with the alterity of the human subject.

In my first chapter, I focus on West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, paying particular attention to West’s idiosyncratic formulation of similes that resists mass media’s enormous capacity to turn once authentically spiritual words into mere clichés. In Chapter 2, I take up Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury to explore how Faulkner found a nexus between the highly religious atmosphere of the New South and the modernist aesthetics whose emphasis on the revolutionary and the transient were directly at odds with his cultural upbringing. My third chapter focuses on Dreiser’s interest in “facts” as supernatural entities. Against the longstanding image of the naturalist novelist, as an atheist and proponent of science, my analysis illuminates another side of Dreiser, as a devotee of a self-imposed researcher of anomalous phenomena, Charles Fort. My final chapter focuses on Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and its treatment of discarded objects to pursue the power and urgency with which the author sought to experience a sense of wonder in the age of disillusionment.

Collectively, these modernist writers saw spiritual manifestations within the thingness of objects. They turned toward an alternative spirituality residing in the very materiality of objects, a thingness that rejects facile signification. By so doing, they sought to make visible and available for the experience of modern life, a kind of alterity they understood to be inherent in both things and the human subject.