Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
6-2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Program
English
Advisor
Nico Israel
Committee Members
Joan Richardson
Mary McGlynn
Subject Categories
English Language and Literature
Abstract
The dissertation has three chapters on three lengthy prose works: Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans (1925), James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) and Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1930-1943). Each of these books pursues the epic ambition to invent a new expansive form of literature; each of the chapters begins from a detailed close reading of their literary innovations to work through their principal formal problematics: Stein attempts to create a radically new conception of character; Joyce a language whose every word has an equivocal meaning; Musil a narration of extreme irony. Around the time these authors were writing, early theorists of the novel like Mikhail Bakhtin and Georg Lukács supposed that it had become impossible to write an epic of the modern world, whose open-ended complexity could not be represented in its totality. By studying these impossible attempts to strive nevertheless for that totality, the readings explore wide-ranging questions about modernist literature’s ability to engage with its complex social world.
Recommended Citation
Fridell, Caleb Shao-Ning, "Vast Planetary Abstraction: On the Impossible Modernist Epic" (2024). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/5757
Graduate Center users:
To read this work, log in to your GC ILL account and place a thesis request.
Non-GC Users:
See the GC’s lending policies to learn more.