Distressed Histories: Late Modernism and Everyday Life, 1929-1945

Most readers and critics of twentieth-century literature tag the years between 1930 and 1945 as the long twilight of high modernist formal innovation. For many literary historians, the definitive political disasters between these years hampered, even reversed, the astonishing revolutions in literary and visual culture that began at the turn of the century. A literary and cultural history that runs parallel with the Great Depression and the Second World War, Distressed Histories argues that these world-historical events reformulate the question of everyday life and, by extension, spur a new wave of aesthetic response. Neither the Heideggerian scene of ontological privation nor the grey, oppressive la quotidienne of the Marxists, the everyday emerges in late modernism as a symptom of this period's political conflicts and, consequently, as one of its foremost preoccupations. Part of what makes late modernism's confrontation with the everyday so compelling, and indeed so perplexing, is its unlikely combination of modernist formal techniquesÌ¢‰âÂ'montage, fragmentation, defamiliarizationÌ¢‰âÂ'with a scrupulous attention to the details of daily life. I argue that this volatile realignment of realist epistemology and modernist aesthetics converges with the influence of new documentary technologiesÌ¢‰âÂ'hand-held cameras, newsreels, broadcast radioÌ¢‰âÂ'to beget a 'documentary modernism.' The dissertation focuses on key texts by a group of writersÌ¢‰âÂ'Virginia Woolf, Mass-Observation, George Orwell, W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Elizabeth BowenÌ¢‰âÂ'who were integral to the changing priorities of modernist writing in the 1930s and 1940s. Ranging over the multiple genres these writers deploy and disfigure to capture the everydayÌ¢‰âÂ'the family chronicle, the autoethnography, the travel book, the short storyÌ¢‰âÂ'I show how the everyday emerges as a register of historical experience, bearing the traces of past events, internalizing the conflicts and contradictions of the present, and, perhaps, serving as a mute indication of possible futures.