Modernist borders of our America: Intercultural readings in American literary modernism

In my dissertation, I take a postcolonial and intercultural approach to the study of American literary modernism. From a postcolonial perspective, I distinguish between metropolitan modernism, produced from the imperial European metropole and aimed at modernizing the literary and cultural traditions of Europe, and what I call border modernism, produced from the peripheral borderlands and aimed at modernizing the "native" literary and cultural traditions of the Americas. I suggest that metropolitan modernism, as conceived by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and standardized by New Criticism, is centrally concerned with verbal complexity, the written word, urban locales, formalism, and dissociation from the "other." In contrast, border modernism is characterized by simplification, orality, rural locales, historicism, and association with the "other." Using an intercultural approach, I compare in each chapter the work of a European or American modernist who turned to the borders of the Americas (D. H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, and Willa Cather) and the work of a Mexican, Native American, or Chicano writer from those borders (Mariano Azuela, John Joseph Mathews, and Americo Paredes) who engaged with modernist theories and practices. Rather than attempt to unify and universalize border modernism, I highlight the inherent tensions within this intercultural aesthetic---between elite and lower-class modes of migration in chapter one, individual and tribal forms of identity in chapter two, and syncretic and conflictual models of culture in chapter three. By examining the cross-cultural construction of this border aesthetic, my project contributes to current debates over the origins and development of American literary modernism by offering a more inclusive vision of the modernist borders of Our America. It also responds to recent calls for transnational and intercultural reconstructions of American literary history by providing one model for such a comparative and dialogical study.