"Dispersed are we": Late Modernism, Cinema, and the Crisis of Collective Form, 1930-1946 161 views

This dissertation tracks how novelistic writing of the 1930s responds to the dual pressures of cinematic hegemony and escalating historical emergency. While the notion of late modernism’s “outward turn” has often described literature’s engagement with the social crises of the decade, I argue that key novels of the period – John Dos Passos’s trilogy U.S.A., Henry Green’s Party Going, and Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts – demonstrate that this outward turn was both inspired by and made possible through the perceptual regime of synchronized sound-cinema. That is, critical accounts of late modernism have underestimated the decisive cultural and formal impact of film on the literary imagination. For each of these authors, cinema had not only introduced a new collective mode of spectatorship; it fundamentally changed the way they perceived and narrated the world around them. As acute external pressures of economic suffering and rising fascism forced them to look out at their communities, these authors turned in their fiction to the evolving methods and vocabularies of cinematic representation. Yet this was not merely a case of film “influencing” literary form or offering resources for narrative innovation. Following the technical and sensory revolution of sound cinema, I argue that literature and film operated within a shared cultural milieu, one defined by the pressures of what I call cinematic saturation. The novels Dos Passos, Green, and Woolf wrote during this period are exemplary in this respect. While their works are of course grounded in the distinct affordances of the literary medium, they unmistakably respond to the evolving perceptual frameworks introduced by film. Within this shared media environment, writers not only absorbed and refracted cinematic visuality, including montage, shot/reverse-shot editing, and deep-focus cinematography, but also interrogated the limits and breakdown of these very techniques, particularly their capacity to narrate social experience under strain. To account for this, my project builds on and reassesses theories of cinematic perception and modernist form, including those concerned with distraction, media saturation, interiority, and Hollywood visual grammar. By returning to a closer-grained analysis of the specific filmic techniques inscribed in these works (an approach that has largely fallen out of favor in recent scholarship, particularly in relation to classical Hollywood cinema), we can better understand not only the shared cultural milieu of literature and film, but also the specificity of these authors’ critiques of mediated modernity. This project thus brings into cinematic focus a turning point in the history of literary modernism: a shift from the mysteries of selfhood to the disenchanted spectacle of social life in the shadow of the Great Depression and World War II.

PHD (Doctor of Philosophy)

English

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2025-07-31