The fabrication text in modernism: Word, image, and procedure in Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp, and Jorge Luis Borges

This dissertation examines the relation of word and image in late modernism through the literary form of the "fabrication text." The fabrication text is an author's description of how a particular work was or could be made. Presented as documentary supplements to actual or prospective works, such texts are not always factual or even plausible. Still, whether factual or fictional, I argue, their claims constitute integral parts of the composition of the works and should be read as such. Between the 1920s and 1960s modernism's interest in demonstrating the shape and intensity of the work of making works found a flexible resource in the fabrication text. At the same time, modernists used these supplements to change the structure of an existing work in unanticipated ways. Fabrication texts thus allowed modernists to reconfigure the history of their earlier works or the relation of those works to specific institutions and traditions of production.; Modernism in both literature and the visual arts is characterized by opposing procedures of purification and hybridization. My study looks at exemplary descriptions of these procedures in late-modernist fabrication texts, focusing on Stein, Duchamp, and Borges. My first chapter reconstructs Borges's critique of formal purism, abstraction, and extravagance in "Pierre Menard." In chapter two, I follow Stein's project to isolate the ontological difference between sentences and paragraphs and to construct a new kind of "self-diagraming"sentence. I connect Stein's project of "saving the sentence" to her analysis of painting in Lectures in America and argue that her new sentences inhabit a zone between not only old sentences and paragraphs but old sentences and pictures. Chapter three pursues a systematic analysis of Duchamp's notes on the "infra-thin." I contend that Duchamp's View magazine covers reconfigure the conjunction between his Large Glass and Green Box in terms of the infra-thin. Together Glass and Box unfold an "inhuman" literary dimension of painting between modernist visual abstraction and an anthropomorphic literature. Examining these modernist fabrication texts reveals that what appear to be projects of either separating or mixing aesthetic categories are in fact precise cartographies of the regions, entities, and events between these categories.