Modernism out of synch : the avant-garde asides of H.D., Gertrude Stein and Antonin Artaud / Ruth Georgia Walker.

Abstract

Negotiating various avant-garde and mass-cultural influences, H.D., Gertrude Stein and Antonin Artaud created texts that trouble the dividing lines often drawn in discussions of modernism between high and low, experimental and traditional, visual and aural, exclusive and popular massproduced sounds, printed words and talking images. They experimented with film, radio and the projection of their own literary celebrity into the public domain during a period between the world wars when the mass communication media were crossing and extending their own technological boundaries. It has already been extensively argued that the encounter with new visual technologies affected writers’ positions concerning their own media and, consequently, the act of modernist literary production itself. The introduction of sound to film, with its disquieting asynchronisation of aural and optic, was of a particular anxiety, as it provoked a re-conceptualisation of the field of perception offered by the new communications media. This thesis examines non-canonical projects of H.D., Stein and Artaud, choosing texts that invoke the ‘out of synch’ nexus of technological change, literary form and modernist aesthetic practice. While redirecting textual attention with distracted viewing, reading and listening practices, these authors used this nexus to inform not only their writing but also their experimentation with mass cultural forms and their own noisy selfprojection.