E.M. Forster and the Parataxis of Modernity

Abstract

This thesis explores the under-charted literary-historical territory located between the concepts of modernity and modernism. E.M. Forster’s writing is deeply embedded in the experience of modernity, preoccupied with modern social, political, and aesthetic phenomena. It is not, however, conventionally modernist. As a result, Forster usually is left adrift in the conceptual wasteland between modernity and modernism. Drawing on the impulse towards definitional explosion and thematic expansion in new modernism studies, I do not seek to re-position Forster’s work within the existing canons of modernism, but to explore the tensions between the modernity of his work and its apparent un-modernism. I explore three quintessentially modern phenomena – nostalgia, impersonality, and advertising – in order to demonstrate how they can be read more productively outside of the contexts in which they have been discussed and defined in a way that privileges the work of high modernist writers. The first chapter considers nostalgia at work in Howards End. Reading the novel alongside Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, I argue that Forster’s novel examines the complex dynamics of nostalgic desire in a way that goes beyond the regressive nostalgia associated with the work of his modernist peers. The second chapter examines the idea of impersonality in A Passage to India and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. I argue that Forster’s novel offers a nuanced exploration of impersonality as central to the aesthetics and morality of the novel form. While impersonality in modernist works frequently plays into reactionary politics and different versions of aesthetic autonomy, I claim that the impersonality of A Passage to India is the primary means by which the form of a novel facilitates political engagement with the world in opposition to the authoritarian and autonomous impersonality of modernism. The third chapter responds to the dominant way of reading advertising and modernism in terms of a mutually constitutive relationship that comes to a head in high modernism. In focusing on how advertising changes the way texts can be read, rather than how writers assimilate its rhetoric to their style, I trace out a history of commodified legibility from Matthew Arnold’s cultural criticism to Forster use of the epigraph in Howards End. The final chapter is dedicated to the examination of the question how a different approach to the concepts of modernity and modernism impacts the way literary history can be written. Drawing on Forster’s critical writing and recent scholarly work on periodization and time in literary history, I offer a model of studying literature historically that is thoroughly Forsterian and that could serve as a paradigm for future considerations of writers whose work is marginalized by the dominant tropes and terms of their period.