Hearing Cinematic Modernism: Sound, Film, and Modernist Women's Prose

This dissertation focuses on the relationship between sound cinema and literary modernism in the interwar period. Recent scholarship on cinema and literature has provided important grounds of comparison between these two media. However, scholars have defined cinema as a visual medium when, in fact, perceptions and valuations of the cinematic medium were historically shaped by sounds as much as images. In this project, I read aural and visual representations in the literary texts of the British writers Vernon Lee, Dorothy Richardson, and Virginia Woolf in the context of contentious debates on the meaning of sound cinema in the 1910s and 1920s. Exploring the sounds of cinema in women's writing, I argue, asserts the importance of this medium to interwar prose without reverting to visual concepts (like the gaze) that claim a subject and object dichotomy along gendered lines. I conclude by focusing on two early women filmmakers, Alice Guy-Blache and Germaine Dulac, showing how their development of film sound resonates with the literary texts of Lee, Richardson, and Woolf. My central aims in this project are to explain the value of cinema for women writers in the interwar period and to establish a new means of conducting intermedial research between literature and film through a focus on the audiovisual as well as the visual elements of cinema.