Cerebral Games: Modernist Critique of Rationality in Russian and American Literature and Film

This dissertation is a comparative analysis of Russian and American modernist texts and films that explore correlations between rationality, progress and modernist subjectivity. This interdisciplinary study primarily focuses on two modernist novels (Andrei Bely's Petersburg and William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury) and three films (Evgenii Bauer's After Death, James Sibley Watson Jr. and Melville Webber's The Fall of the House of Usher, and Charles Klein's The Tell-Tale Heart). Each of the primary texts and films addresses the challenges of "self"-construction," "self"-understanding and representation of the "self" in the time of rapid modernization and political/social instability. This project tries to show that modernist critique of rationality is essentially a critique of the project of Enlightenment, the realization of which modernists are witnessing at the beginning of the twentieth century (with its fullest manifestation in the technological and industrial rise of the time -- here united under the term of modernization). Thus modernist critique of rationality is essentially a critique of technology and power. However, in their critique, modernists create another myth -- of a once whole but now fragmented and lost subjectivity, and of a (utopian) possibility of its regaining. Their quest for knowledge feeds into the idea of a possible "universal truth" that is about to be found, while their stress on constant innovation and intertextuality only creates another artistic "ideology."...