Afterimages of the feminine: The emergence of modernist mass culture (James Weldon Johnson, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein)

My dissertation, “Afterimages of the Feminine: The Emergence of Modernist Mass Culture,” traces a connection between the language of gender and the cultural impact of mass communication in texts by James Weldon Johnson, Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein. Chapters focus on the automaton-like ragtime talent of Johnson's dandified narrator in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, the violent women of Barnes's sensational journalism, and Stein's filmic image and personality before an American public. I argue that these very different authors share an interest in the way an attraction to mass communication—one historically seen, as archival materials reveal, to be both dangerous and feminine—can collapse the distinctions between public and private and erode the very foundations of the literary. The female and often racialized figures in their work exemplify or induce in others an involvement of the body in the viewing experience, an attraction to spectacles of public violence, a fascination with the epistemological indeterminacy of racial passing and racialized entertainment, and an inability to distinguish viewing and reading. I argue, therefore, that these figures stand for an impossible literary consumption, or a modernist mass culture, for their authors and for the textual objects in which they are embedded. Why “afterimages”? In the context of film, the afterimage is an impression left on the retina that tricks the spectator into experiencing a perceptual continuity between disparate images. I use it here as a metaphor for the way each of these authors negotiates the potentials and perils of early mass media. They turn to a thematics of troublesome femininity to bridge the gap between a feminized culture of mass-reproduced sounds, printed words and talking-images, and the traditionally masculine concern with belatedness, repetition, and attention to language that characterizes early twentieth-century literary experiments with narrative form. In turn, my dissertation bridges a frequent gap in modernist studies between textual and historical analyses of constructions of femininity by highlighting the mutual interdependence of two kinds of material signifier—of literary experiment and of mass cultural encroachment—in shaping the meaning of gender and gender difference in early twentieth-century literary history.