Marcel Duchamp and literary modernism: Stein, Woolf, and Beckett (France, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Ireland)

In this dissertation I forward Marcel Duchamp's diverse visual and textual work as exemplary of innovative modernist practices. I am particularly concerned with the political force of the historical avant-garde (principally in the works of Duchamp, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett) and its importance for twenty-first century writing and art-making. My chapters concern the avant-garde's mining of such "everyday" materials as bicycles, dust, urinals, and hand-bags---prosaic objects that nevertheless embody the rich political and aesthetic workings of modern history. Working against the seminal avant-garde theories of Peter Burger and Roland Barthes (both of whom characterize the negative critique of the avant-garde as inevitably constrained by capitalism), I argue that the avant-garde is "effective and affective" precisely because of its interconnectedness with mass modernity. The conclusion to my project, which builds upon recent materialist/post-modern theories of the avant-garde (Krzystof Ziarek, Barrett Watten, and Steve McCaffery) concerns the enduring ethico-cultural legacies of my chosen artists.