| This dissertation examines the way the novels of the early twentieth century, written in the midst of a media revolution precipitated by the rise of film and the invention of phonographic recording, enrich our understanding of the book's status and various functions as a phenomenal object. By showing how the novels of three major modernist writers---Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf---draw attention to the books that transmit their texts, I develop an understanding of literature as a specific form of "mediation," a concept whose dual sense as a process of transmission and as a procedure by which two separate parties come into relationship, moves beyond, even as it encompasses, the critical framework of "representation.";I begin my argument by providing an alternative understanding of T. S. Eliot's statement that "the poet has, not a 'personality' to express, but a particular medium." I resuscitate the status of the "particular medium" of the book for works like Ulysses and Jacob's Room , whose extreme experimentalism renews our attention to the sensuous object on which the transmission of that writing relies.;In Chapter 1, "Sleeping with the Books of the Recherche," I discuss how the Proustian narrator's most peculiar instance of "involuntary memory," namely his discovery of George Sand's Francois le Champi at the end of the novel, betrays a sensory and affective relationship with the "book in a red binding" and the "grain of a particular paper" rather than an intellectual relationship with the narrative of its text. Indeed, Proust's own compositional methods---the "paperoles " which he created by pasting pieces of paper onto the edge of his manuscript notebooks---demonstrate how a similar kind of material awareness supplements his linguistic creation.;This impenetrability is a main facet of the book's function as an object which my subsequent chapters refine in more particular ways. In Chapter 2, "The Embodied Reader of Ulysses," I juxtapose Stephen Dedalus' overly intellectualized mode of reading in "Proteus" with Leopold Bloom's emphasis on the physical aspects of reading in "Calypso" and argue that Ulysses works to bring these two poles together. Not only does it describe scenes of embodied reading, such as Bloom perusing the Titbits magazine in the outhouse, but Ulysses also enjoins its own reader to use the body in the act of deciphering its text, most notably in the "musical" Sirens episode, as we see and try to pronounce the quasi-onomatopoetic phonemes that pepper this middle section of the novel. In so doing, Joyce's novel fleshes out the limits which the reader's physical body places on the mental act of reading.;In Chapter 3, "The Dark Print of Finnegans Wake," I argue that the impenetrability of the work's multi-lingual puns and portmanteaux---along with its intermittent typographical play---highlights the agency of its "dark print." Darkness, long a figurative framework for critics approaching the Wake, here becomes "literal" in the black shapes on the white page. By examining the famously obscure geometry lesson that Shem gives his brother Shaun, I develop the way these dark letters also function as the bodies of its main "characters," especially HCE and his son Shem. In doing so, I show how they facilitate a quasi-interpersonal acquaintance with its print that recasts reading in communal or social terms, as an act done with other people and mediated by a common experience of the object of the book.;Chapter 4, "The Pages in Jacob's Room," focuses on the function of the page itself. I explore how the large gaps that separate Woolf's short narrative vignettes both recondition our notion of reading and contribute to the novel's investigation of knowing another person. By putting the experimental page layout into conversation with Woolf's contemporaneous work at the Hogarth Press and larger object-centered currents in the visual aesthetics of early Bloomsbury, I highlight the agency of visual perception in reading and show how the blank spaces on the page subtly develop a relationship between reader and book based on sensation. As I examine the occurrence of the page spacing at key moments of connection for the characters, I elaborate a non-penetrative model of intimacy that functions as an alternative to the narrator's unsuccessful attempts to penetrate into the personality of the main character Jacob Flanders. I ultimately suggest that the novel extends this non-penetrative mode of intimacy beyond the strictly intersubjective to an exploration of our relationship with the larger, non-human world.;Finally, in Chapter 5, "The Binding of The Waves," I examine how Woolf's most experimental novel underscores the passing of readerly time by appealing to the turning of the book's pages. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
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