"A Profane Miracle": Modernity and the Accident in American Literature and Film, 1925-1934 Pubblico
McCulloch, Christine Marie (2012)
Published
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
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