Everyday modernism: Literary value and aesthetic experience in modern Anglo -American literature

This dissertation argues that literary modernism is largely a reaction to a crisis in value caused not only by the commodification of literature, but also by the ability of writers to turn unpopularity to their own advantage. The modernist writers I discuss, Henry James, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein, all represent in their works the idea of creating an absolute masterpiece as one possibility of overcoming this sensed disappearance of literary value. But, more importantly, they show the failings and impossibility of this approach by contrasting it with a more pragmatic and humanist attempt to restore value to art and life by emphasizing the inherent aesthetic qualities of everyday experience.;The dissertation begins by situating this argument within current debates about value in modernism. While these debates typically focus on the "hypocritical" stance of modernist writers who claim artistic autonomy while subtly using that claim to market their works, my project addresses the attempts of modernist writers to portray in their works an alternative to either treating art as a commodity or denying any interest in the market as means to promote aesthetic value. Each chapter shows how a modernist writer confronted the problem of asserting literary value neither as commodified product nor as disingenuous autonomy. All of the writers entertain, and to some extent, in their literary careers, pursue the idea of an absolute masterpiece as a solution to these problems. However, in their works, all of these writers try to dissociate aesthetics from the art object, while paradoxically trying to represent this dissociation in literary form. As the division in the literary marketplace increasingly polarized between popular and coterie writing from the time that Henry James penned his early short stories and Gertrude Stein composed her later works, these writers felt an increasing need to ground aesthetics in everyday life. The conclusion discusses Samuel Beckett's short play Krapp's Last Tape, and discusses the conundrums raised when modernist ideals of irony and economy of form clash with attempts to represent the aesthetics of the everyday.