Shapes to fill the lack and lacks to fill the shape: Framing the unframed in modernist narratives

Preferring the relativity and fragmentation of the individual perspective to that of the supraindividual, the Modernist narrator no longer pretends to understand the world in its entirety. In its dismissal of traditional narrative omniscience, linguistic and metaphorical certainty and chronology, Modernism reframes the limits of perspective. My research considers why and how narratives change in response to both philosophical movements and experience of the modern world; how Modernism subsequently transforms critical discussions of narrative; and how Modernism redefines the narrative frame.; The Modernist text signifies a narrative "universe" comprised of multiple narrative worlds. Each of these worlds is signified by a frame---an oftentimes fragmented otherness, which the Modernist text sets off and examines as a narrative window auxiliary to the text's main diegesis. Modernist literature both creates and conceals narrative "windows"---frames of speculative possibility based on the disnarrated gaps generated by stylistic and perceptual variation.; I use the examples of William Faulkner, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein to demonstrate the modern text as a convergence of diegetic and hypodiegetic voices, which questions and complicates the narrative relationship between a discourse and the events that it recounts. Modernist experimentation relies on the stylistic exaggeration of the partition between story and discourse. The extremity of this separation, often compounded by the juxtaposition of multiple hypodiegetic discourses, fragments and blurs the story to raise questions of narrative validity.; I analyze how the chapter-frames of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying emulate the contentious relationship between diegetic and hypodiegetic frames. The disnarrated in Joyce's Dubliners invites us to apply the suggested fragments of possibility concealed behind the main diegesis to the incomplete narratives of the characters and events involved in "off-stage" deaths. In Ulysses Joyce challenges his reader to construct narrative bridges between the chaotic shifting of styles and voices, raising issues of narrative intelligibility and history. The chapter on Woolf considers how she refines Joyce's narrative strategies from stylistic variation of discourse to an interrogation of language itself as a sufficient framing device of meaning. In the final chapter I examine how Gertrude Stein adapts the painterly technique and theory of Braque and Picasso to her verbal portraits and still lifes. In Stein words are freed of their grammatical frames to disengage them from the lifeless fixity of meaning.; Modernism's opaque windows of simultaneous discourses, language, fragmentation, memory and spatial and temporal experimentation defamiliarize and limit our access to narrative. My research attempts to peer through these windows to understand how Modernism subverts traditional narrative and requires critical terms that perhaps have yet to be invented. As each chapter delves into diverse yet interrelated discussions surrounding the topic of narrative frames, I address how and why Modernism redefines narrative structures in its attempts to revitalize literature.