Conspiratorial Modernism: Modernism and Conspiracy Theory in Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, and Musil

This project investigates the concurrent emergence of literary modernism and anti-Semitic conspiracy theory in Europe and America between 1894 and 1942. This period, stretching from the Dreyfus Affair to the beginning of the Endlosung (final solution), represents the most significant shifts in anti-Semitic discourse in Europe, and roughly outlines the most important years of modernism. By bringing these two discourses into conversation, this project documents their remarkably similar reactions to modernity's fragmentation and dislocation. Both modernists and conspiracy theorists believed that modernity had fractured an erstwhile total and complete reality. They therefore wrote vast, totalizing works that tried to create a complete worldview. The critical difference was that modernists concluded that such a worldview was no longer possible, while the conspiracy theorists were convinced that they are being thwarted by Jews. In uncovering a previously undocumented history, this study not only reveals the pervasive and multifarious influence of anti-Semitism on literature, but also contributes to a growing body of scholarship on modernism's relationship to other early twentieth century discourses.;Methodologically, this thesis is supported through a three-pronged approach that combines history, biography, and aesthetics. First, I construct a historical model that documents the transmission of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in Europe and across the Atlantic. Second, I situate Marcel Proust, James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Robert Musil within this context through their personal biography, especially their contact with anti-Semitism and anti-Semites. Third, I align the aesthetics of conspiracy theory with that of each authors' magnum opus, respectively, A la recherche du temps perdu, Ulysses, the Yoknapatawpha novels, and Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften .;In its historical approach, this study uses the current transnational approach in Modernism Studies, and applies this model to conspiracy theories. Traditionally, scholars have explained anti-Semitic conspiracy theories by situating them within a national discourse. My comparative approach highlights the substantially different antipathies that people had towards Jews in each of the countries studied, while at the same time revealing an extensive transatlantic economy of anti-Semitic ideas. Though often couched in nationalist rhetoric, anti-Semitism's theoretical underpinnings were established through this larger conversation.;This discourse of anti-Semitism touched the lives of all these authors in different ways, and shaped how they represented Jewishness in their texts. Through letters, journals, and other often-overlooked biographical material, I uncover biographical connections between each author and anti-Semitism. All the authors demonstrate various levels of sympathy for Jews, while also harboring negative stereotypes.;Beyond the historical and biographical overlap, modernism and conspiracy theory share a similar aesthetic. Modernist and conspiracy texts were encyclopedic and omnivorous in their scope. Consequently, the narrative drive of such texts relies on assembling and fashioning the work into a coherent whole. Yet, their sheer overwhelming size continuously resists complete comprehension. Further, at the center of each work is a region of unknowability that ostensibly masks a transcendental truth that, when revealed, will make the world complete again. I conclude that for the modernist the point is that such a transcendental truth no longer exists, and that for the conspiracy theorist this truth is obscured by a vast Jewish conspiracy. Modernism therefore undermines and resists the conspiratorial project by revealing totality as an impossibility. I structure the chapters around specific dates that indicate real and fictional moments of rupture that modernists attempt to reveal and conspiracy theorists try to close.