Modernism and the ordinary: Joyce, Woolf, Stein, Stevens (James Joyce, Ireland, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens)

"Modernism and the Ordinary" addresses literary modernism's preoccupation with the habitual, unselfconscious actions of everyday life in the work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens. This dissertation challenges a widespread notion that modernism took ordinary experience and made it strange, or made it "new." While modernism is famous for its stylistic innovations and surprising juxtapositions, "Modernism and the Ordinary" argues that ordinary experience functions in resistance to highly symbolic representation. Moreover, habits, which stand at the center of so many modernist works, need not be disparaged or defamiliarized; quite often in modernism, they are valued for their gratifying sufficiency.; "Modernism and the Ordinary" questions the conception of literary modernism as a movement away from the conventions of nineteenth-century realism and towards an aesthetic of self-conscious interiority. A primary assumption of this dissertation is that privileging modernist moments of temporal transcendence fundamentally obscures modernism's commitment to the temporality of the everyday. "Modernism and the Ordinary" focuses on depictions of experience that are neither traumatic nor wholly internal, arguing that literary modernism strives to present and preserve the power of ordinary moments, untransformed by spiritual, psychological or ethical signification.; At the heart of this dissertation lies a paradox: while the ordinary is often the non-represented, the overlooked, the nature of literary representation is to look closely at its subject. To be in quest of the quotidian requires an understanding of its elusiveness; it can never be completely grasped or pinned down. Overall, "Modernism and the Ordinary" emphasizes the non-transformative power of the ordinary as its most compelling attribute: literary modernists depict day-to-day experience as a satisfaction with the material rather than the spiritual, the local rather than the exotic, the constant rather than the unknown, and the democratic rather than the privileged. Marked by equivalence and repetition---what Wallace Stevens describes as "round and round, the merely going round,/Until merely going round is a final good"---the ordinary endures in and of itself as a "final good," not something beyond our everyday world.