Sensational modernism: Disfigured bodies and aesthetic astonishment in modern American literature and photography

This dissertation maps a previously unexplored tradition of literary and photographic texts that blend tropes and impulses from popular sensationalism with modernist techniques of rhetorical experimentation, crafting composite forms of expression for rendering the most vulnerable and "exotic" of modern metropolitan dwellers-outcasts and immigrants, hoboes and slum residents, criminals and cabaret dancers. Fusing a sensational emphasis on shock and social contrast with a modernist emphasis on formal innovation, the artists whose work this project explores---Stephen Crane, William Carlos Williams, Tillie Olsen, Richard Wright, Pietro di Donato, Aaron Siskind, Weegee, Romare Bearden, Meridel Le Sueur, Dalton Trumbo, Henry Roth---employ startling images of disfigured bodies to fashion experimental aesthetics of astonishment that challenge links between vision and discipline that critics have long argued are integral to dominant regimes of modern cultural power. Sensational modernism's disfigured bodies---bodies literally and symbolically wounded by regimes of racialization, industrial labor, ethnic prejudice---function both as emblems of critique, protesting industrial capitalism's subjugation of working and minority persons, and as emblems of cognitive disruption that destabilize conventional forms of naturalist, realist, and documentary aesthetics.; Ranging across a variety of genres and forms---from Stephen Crane's turn-of-the-century sketches of urban tramps, to Weegee's chiaroscuro photographs of New York murders and car crashes, to Richard Wright's best-selling novel about a young African American man's crime and punishment, to Romare Bearden's black and white photo-collages---the project engages and extends recent scholarship on modernism and mass culture, naturalism and documentary photography, critical and aesthetic theory, ethnic, African American, and proletarian literature. Arguing that a diverse range artists created forms of vernacular modernism that challenged conventional modes of representing modern culture's dispossessed populations in literature and photography, Sensational Modernism offers a new reading of the interplay between high and low, politics and form, vision and embodiment in twentieth-century American culture.