24: The Story of a Day in Modernism Pubblico

Abstract

Abstract 24: The Story of a Day in Modernism By Erin D. Sells The story of one day is never only that. 24: The Story of a Day in Modernism is the first to define and explore the subgenre of the twenty-four hour novel--an entire novel set in the time-frame of a single day--through its modernist origins and four transnational, modernist examples. The origination of the twenty-four hour novel during this period exposes and coalesces the modernist obsession with time as a both structural and relative principle. Defining the subgenre as such, as well as its conventions and parameters, I contend that these novels are examples of how diverse and dramatic cultural developments in the early years of the twentieth century lead to the origination of the unique narrative temporality of the subgenre. The traditional and natural division of time as a day structures the increasingly fragmented narratives of modernism that seek to interrogate other epistemological categories, including time itself. The communal and individual experience of time in the unit of a day becomes the ordering and controlling structure of these twenty-four hour novels, as time itself does for modernism as a literary movement.

The attentiveness of modernist literature to issues of time and space and their representation is exhibited in the number of novels from this period that take for their setting the space and time of a single day or night: twelve to twenty-four hours. Ulysses (1922) and Mrs. Dalloway (1925) are probably the most famous examples, but Richard Wright's Lawd Today! (1937, 1963) and Nathan Asch's Pay Day (1930) are two of American modernism's contributions to the subgenre. Literally compressing lifetimes into the space of twenty-four hours, these novels illustrate an acute awareness of the narrative and stylistic possibilities of exploring the issues of time and space becoming increasingly prominent in the first half of the twentieth century. Combining distinctive urban settings with a multiplicity of stream of consciousness narratives and the liberating constraints of a twenty-four hour timeframe, these novels are literary demonstrations of the modernist preoccupation with exposing the microcosm that exists within what appears to be only a fragment.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents Introduction: 1 Chapter One: 15 Ulysses and Possibilities: The Paradigmatic Twenty-four Hour Novel Chapter Two: 46 Mrs. Dalloway and The Dangerous Day: The Lives of Time in the Twenty-four Hour Novel Chapter Three: 72 Nathan Asch's Pay Day: Sacco-Vanzetti and the Execution of Modernist Vision in the Night-long Novel Chapter Four: 108 Richard Wright's Lawd Today!: The Crisis of Cultural Nationalism in the Twenty-four Hour Novel Epilogue: 136 Works Cited: 138

About this Dissertation

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	English
Degree	PhD
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	Literature, English Literature, Modern
Parola chiave	temporality modernism day-long novel twenty-four hour novel novel subgenres time
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Higgins, Geraldine, Emory University
Committee Members	Sanders, Mark, Emory University Schuchard, W Ronald, Emory University

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