Before Babel: Modernism, the nonsense tradition, and technologies of word production

"Before Babel: Modernism, the Nonsense Tradition, and Technologies of Word Production" presents a genealogy of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers in order to argue for the importance of nonsense to modernism. To generate nonsense, modernists tend to look backwards, and thus each chapter is invested in their extensions and evocations of the nineteenth-century nonsense tradition. Even as nonsense is often cast as a byproduct of serious writing, I argue for its unmistakable relevance to modernism.;"Before Babel" surveys a taxonomy of nonsense, with each chapter accounting for a particular branch: acoustic, handwritten, spoken, and typed nonsense. This taxonomy is framed by chapters about Virginia Woolf and Aldous Huxley, taking up their lesser-known texts in order to consider how these and other writers fix on the fallible body as a site of word production. Cumulatively, I argue that nonsense and word production were mutually defining. By documenting this mutuality, writers invest aesthetic importance in nonsense---not as a finished product, but as a generative part of the writing process. "Before Babel" thus brings forward a literary history that traces nonsense as an aesthetic pattern, one firmly situated amid social and cultural conditions.