Fictions of the machine: Capitalism, technology, and the modernist novel

This dissertation argues that modernism's familiar strategies for differentiating the aesthetic object from the commodity depend upon a discourse of technology. I show how a range of modernist writers imagine that new technologies provide models for how the work of art might resist the epistemological structures of commodity capitalism. However, modernism's understanding of technology is structured around a constitutive contradiction: while these new devices might be useful figures for modernist art's autonomy from or revision of capitalism, those same machines cannot be completely stripped of their roles as functionaries in industrial production, commodification, and mass culture. The first chapter contends that in the New York edition prefaces, Henry James utilizes the figure of magic lantern projection to conceptualize how the modernist novel can avoid the instrumentalizing tendencies of a mass readership by becoming automatic and autonomous. But for Marx, the automatically-functioning magic lantern is a privileged metaphor for the commodity fetish itself. James deploys this characteristic of the commodity---automaticity---in order to save the high modernist novel from the effects of commodification. The second chapter traces this concept of aesthetic automaticity in relation to the broader economic frame of early 20th-century imperialism. I explore how Ford Madox Ford uses the figure of the telephone to theorize the novel as a network of moving pieces, implicitly reimagining the increasing mobility of the global, imperial economy as a narrative structure. In the third chapter, I show that while Wyndham Lewis polemically promotes the idea of the autonomous, autotelic artwork using a discourse of machines, his texts symptomatically betray a lack of confidence in the idea that the machine can be stripped of its association with industrial production and mass culture in order to become a model for the rarified modernist work. The final chapter looks at how Virginia Woolf, in essays such as "Flying Over London" and Three Guineas, offers an unexpected critique of the consumption-based economy through the figure of the airplane, which offers a new narrative perspective from which the novel might offer an alternative to definitions of subjectivity grounded in possessive individualism.