Ineluctable modality of the visible: Joyce, Beckett, and the modernist challenge to vision.
Item
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Title
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Ineluctable modality of the visible: Joyce, Beckett, and the modernist challenge to vision.
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Identifier
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AAI9830759
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identifier
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9830759
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Creator
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Rocco, John.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Louis Menand
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Date
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1998
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, English
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Abstract
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Modernism has always been associated with challenging conventional vision. Modernist art has been traditionally depicted as dealing in anti-representation, "personal" vision, the debunking of "normal" perspective, and attacks upon the eye of the spectator. The famous movements of modernism--Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, Futurism, Imagism, Vorticism, and Bloomsbury--are all associated with visual experiments and ocular themes. And this preoccupation with the visible was compounded and complicated by the technological advances in photography and film that challenged the nature of mimesis and the role of the artist. From the synthetic collages of the Cubists to the typographical gymnastics of e. e. cummings, modernism is perceived and written about as obsessed with the visual. This study furthers the analysis of this modernist obsession by proposing a reevaluation of what occurs in modernism's relationship to vision. James Joyce and Samuel Beckett are the key figures in this consideration because their work provokes a discussion of vision that breaks with traditional approaches to the subject. Through an examination of their aesthetics and politics, Joyce and Beckett become the starting points for questioning the hold "pure" seeing has had over meaning since Plato. The challenges to vision embodied in their work provide a map for reading their precursors in the battle against the hegemony of sight (Blake, Wilde, Nietzsche, Yeats). The modernist movement itself is then delineated in terms of visual exploration, visual problems, and visual politics; Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and Sergei Eisenstein are considered in relation to their probing of modernist seeing. This study ends with an analysis of how Joyce and Beckett's radical experiments with vision lead to a blurring of "clear" meaning that is taken up by thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Helene Cixous. This reevaluation leads to a reordering of the modernist canon as well as a new "look" into its impact upon poststructuralism and postmodernism.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
