| Many modernist texts (white and non-white, male and female, queer and straight, bourgeois and proletariat) can be seen as "in flux" between modernism and postmodernism. Placing epistemologies of the postmodern in dialectic with the modern, I seek to revise how modernism is constructed as a period, enabling a reevaluation of the modernist subject. Challenging the universality of subjectivity in modernism and the schizophrenia of the postmodernist self, I see in American modernism a liminal subject, one that fluctuates between the cultural, ideological, and historical. To do this I deconstruct modernism's "narrative of centeredness," and examine Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Nella Larsen's Passing, and Djuna Barnes's Nightwood. I discover an "ontology of flux" that reflects the instability of postmodern conceptions of identity. While rooted in modernist history, these texts are permeated with subjects that confront its universalizing tendencies, moving beyond centeredness and into fragmentation, contingency, and politicization.;Current examinations of the modernist subject interpret it through postmodern lenses, limiting understandings of modernism's complexity. Rather, I see modernists that fragment stable notions of the self, anticipating postmodernism. In my examination of Jake Barnes in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, I extend discussions of "hard-boiled masculinity," arguing that Jake's modernism is based Benjamin's concept of the flâneur. This facade is consistently problematized, revealing instead a fluidity that indicates Hemingway's modernism as anticipating postmodern identities. In Passing, I argue that the fluidity of subjectivity that passing offered was utilized by Larsen to problematize black subjects' sometimes blind adherence to racial uplift ideology. In Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, I extend modernism's negotiations with queer identity. Unlike many who study Barnes' work, I see the "moments of laughter" that sprinkle the text as indicative of the breakdown of compulsory heterosexuality and stable gender identities. |
