Composite Visions: Writing and Photography in American Modernism

Abstract

This dissertation builds on scholarship that apprehends the ways in which modernist writing instantiates the episteme of doubt and contingency that emerges, paradoxically, from the development of photographic technologies. It accounts for an unexplored aspect of the photography effect in modernist writing that is variously composite in form and narrative. Early twentieth century texts by Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, John Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald function analogously to photography—and are culturally imbricated with it—inasmuch as they privilege representational ambiguity through their sequenced, fragmentary poetics. I argue that formal interstices of these composite texts, like that of serialized photographic practice, are raised as signposts to the limits of the eye and of visual and discursive objectification itself. Most provocatively, I interpret their gaps and openings as textual sites in which the dominant socio-political order is negotiated and even circumvented. I map the sequenced tissue of modernist narration onto the repeated disappearances and appearances of female bodies that are, like the narratives they populate, constructed as aggregates or assemblages. In so doing, I enrol what I call the woman-in-series within a host of new theoretical figurations of female subjectivity emerging within feminist scholarship that seeks to exceed the hostile relationships between the camera and the female subject that have dominated discussions of photography and cinema. As such, this dissertation works to destabilize gendered and racialized oppositions of power and vulnerability as they relate to encounters between subjects and objects in the visual realm. The gap or interval in the composite visions of American modernism signifies both as a mark of trauma, the wounding of objectifying representation, and as a means for evading or defending against such trauma. The woman-in-series thereby stages the insurrectionary potential of the in/visible subject.