"A Profane Miracle": Modernity and the Accident in American Literature and Film, 1925-1934 Öffentlichkeit

Abstract

Although much of the recent scholarship surrounding literary modernism and modernity
has focused on speed, technology, and the novel pleasures these afford, few scholars have
placed the techno-industrial accident at the center of their investigations. In response,
"'A Profane Miracle'" makes a critical, interdisciplinary intervention in the field of
American modernism, foregrounding the automobile accident as the site of newly
convergent political, eschatological, and aesthetic paradigms that substantially revise and
deepen our understanding of early twentieth century art, culture, and experience.
Historicizing the project during the interwar period, when mass production and
consumption of the automobile was at its height, I argue that the accident functions as a
complex signifier through which the experience of modernity under mass industrial
capitalism finds particularly cogent and powerful expression. Works by Theodore
Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, King Vidor, and Zora Neale Hurston deploy the
accident-both as a recurrent motif and structuring aesthetic-in an effort to expose the
suffering and dysfunction inherent to capitalist modernization. As my analysis of the car
crash victims in An American Tragedy, The Great Gatsby, The Crowd, and Jonah's
Gourd Vine reveals, this suffering is unevenly distributed across race, class, and gender
lines. Taken together, these bound-to-rise, bound-to-fall narratives invite us to re-
cognize the automobile "accident" as an intimation of larger systemic crimes which
countervailing discourses of chance and personal catastrophe deliberately obscure. In so
doing, my project challenges the discourse of ambivalence that characterizes much of the
recent scholarship on the relationship between literary modernism and modernity,
foregrounding the anguish necessary to incite social change.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter One
Violent Intersections: Accident, Copies, and Acceleration in Dreiser's An
American Tragedy 24

Chapter Two
Myrtle as Martyr: Perversions of the Sacred and the Profane in F. Scott
Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby 58

Chapter Three
Reflecting on the Medium: Cuts and Collisions in King Vidor's The Crowd
108

Chapter Four
An Aesthetic of the Accident: Pastiche and Narrative Disfigurement in Zora
Neale Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine 150

Conclusion 185

Works Cited 196

Non-printed Sources Cited 205

Document Outline

• Distribution Agreement.pdf
• Approval Sheet
• Abstract Cover Page
• Abstract
• Cover Page
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• Introduction 4
• Dreiser 5
• Gatsby 5
• Vidor 6
• Hurston 4
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Non-printed Sources

About this Dissertation

Rights statement

• Permission granted by the author to include this thesis or dissertation in this repository. All rights reserved by the author. Please contact the author for information regarding the reproduction and use of this thesis or dissertation.

School	Laney Graduate School
Department	English
Degree	PhD
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	Cinema Literature, American
Stichwort	modernism automobile accident
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Ladd, Barbara, Emory University
Committee Members	Johnston, John H, Emory University Oeler, Karla, Emory University Womack, Craig, Emory University Bernstein, Matthew, Emory University

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