Venice and the digressive invention of the modern: Retrospection's futurity (Italy, Henry James, Ezra Pound)

This dissertation shifts the gaze of modernist criticism away from Paris, toward an anachronistic haunt, exhausted of authority as a city-state, yet very much alive to modern authors as an interpretive site. Dead but irrepressible, post-Romantic Venice forms a crucible for modernist values because its topography and cultural heritage seem to embody all that prevailing models of progress need to pathologize and suppress: the fluid, the feminine, the "Oriental," the decadent---characteristics spurned in the 1910 Futurist manifesto "Against Passeist Venice." An aesthetic and amorous pause between capitals along the defunct Grand Tour, Venice presents modern artist-expatriates from ascendant nation-states with a living, material example out of which to imagine alternatives to Enlightenment conceptions of history. Venice's putrefying yet lasting lagoon monuments provoke artists to generate texts that resist the shelving of its past as well as the city's present imperative to reify the romance of its decay.; Pressed at once to erect an industrial port for the new Italian state and to pose as a museum piece, the city constitutes an unsteady touchstone for authors reworking the topos. Those in John Ruskin's wake who wish to instrumentalize Venice so as to forge counter-genealogies of the modern never locate the prelapsarian past they seek. Instead, they are moved to describe the contemporary predicament of preservation and passage they encounter in the amphibious cityscape itself. Given their perspectival shifts and proliferations, accounts of the urban complex through time become so tortuous and fissured as to compose labyrinthine aesthetic objects themselves, miming the place they self-consciously fail to capture. The frustrated periodization of Stones of Venice points toward Henry James's (re)"visitable pasts," the ruptures of Ezra Pound's "poem including history" (The Cantos), and ultimately to the refracted Venetian recollections of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. In attending to the formal experimentation of these aesthetic histories, my research argues for form's sociohistorical eloquence, showing that the texts' recursivity and errancy are born of acute attention to inassimilable matter and social contradictions within the urban matrix. Digressions and lacunae do not constitute the writers' historiographical failings, but rather their most radical contributions to post-Enlightenment "history."...