Living Enfleshment Otherwise:" Articulating Embodiment Across Transatlantic Modernisms"

Abstract

This dissertation traces the language authors employ to describe visceral experience in the literature of the past century and asks: how does the way we articulate embodiment reveal the ways we push against our received notions about the body, and how does our language in turn shape the reality of the human body and even shift our definitions of the human? Through an examination of a variety of interdisciplinary texts—novels, poetry, songs, film, live performance, archival documents—I discover a particular resonance between Afrofuturist and modernist models for embodiment that suggest an alternate genealogy of modernist authorship based on a shared aesthetic and ethical project of revisioning the human. The texts this project examines reveal the degree to which the concept of the human body is in no way essentially or naturally true, and has historically been a racializing, exclusionary construct; this dissertation does the essential work of teasing out just how bodies are constructed, identifying three structures that materialize modernist bodies anew. The first chapter describes the undulatory body, tracing the way that waves structure embodiment in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Sun Ra’s music and poetry. The second chapter, which links Mina Loy’s poetry, Janelle Monáe’s music videos, and Douglas Kearney’s verse and nonfiction, focuses on the possibilities and limitations of our increasing enmeshment with machines. The final chapter theorizes the horrified body through Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood and Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories, positing that horror has the potential to productively erode boundaries between bodies. Re-centering the body as a foundational critical concern for modernism and literary studies more broadly reveals the sinews that animate texts by Black and white authors alike, illuminates the long history of resistance to the hegemonic constructions of the body, and provides building blocks for negotiating a twenty-first century subjectivity that goes beyond the previously established boundaries of the human.