The Poetics of Fragmentation: Modernism and Theology in Twentieth-Century British and Irish Literature

This dissertation examines the fragment, placing in conversation twentieth-century literary and theological vocabularies for thinking through this vital concept. In so doing, it nuances two provisionally useful but limited models in literary scholarship. In the first, interest in fragmentation, especially among modernist authors, stems from a basically mimetic impulse. Faced with a reality in which God is dead and the world seems broken, art follows suit: prose imitates chaotic subjectivity, language disintegrates into syntactic paroxysm, narrative eschews linearity, all in pursuit of mimetic fragmentarity. The main literary alternative to this mimetic fragmentation is a conservative, nostalgic collector’s impulse: “these fragments I have shored against my ruins,” as T. S. Eliot writes. Lamenting the loss of a unified, religiously ordered imagination, modernity in this model is marred by rupture, disunity, chaos. All the poet can do is clutch at fragments and hope that is enough—in other words, to turn the fragment into the autonomous whole. This dissertation agrees that the twentieth century—war-torn and shorn of social, cultural, and epistemic certainties—was indeed the era of the fragment. However, it argue for a key group of authors the rest of this narrative falls flat. For them, art may be fragmentary but is never merely a fragment, mimetic, autonomous or otherwise. Rather it is a fragment gesturing beyond itself. Translated into a theological context, the fragment becomes a regulating principle for mediating ultimate realities, fragment (or part) paradoxically containing divine whole—or as Hans Urs von Balthasar notes, the Whole dwelling in the fragment. With this framework in mind, my dissertation traces this in-and-beyond, Whole-in-fragment orientation across a variety of authors, with individual chapters focusing on different ways the fragment has been understood in a literary context: as technique (Joyce), as theme (Eliot), and finally as a genre unto itself (Tolkien).