Gestural modernism: Performative choreographies in American modernist literature and modern dance

"Gestural Modernism" links the aesthetic innovations of early 20th century modern dance and modernist literature to their concurrent rejections of corporeal and narrative standardization. This project merges trends in modernist criticism that have often separated political and formal innovations, and considers how literary and dance texts of the period use movement to provide their readers with new corporeal heuristics beyond historical taxonomies and stereotypes. Textual practices common in modernist prose generate a kinesthetic sense of motion for its readers; I argue that this movement instantiates mobile, uncategorizable bodies, which allow for the exploration of alternate performances and valuations of gender, race, and sexuality. My research accesses this motion through a methodology that borrows heavily from dance studies for its focus on phenomenological bodies and the intricacies of their choreographed and quotidian movement. "Gestural Modernism" activates enactive gesture as a pivotal theoretical lens for interdisciplinary modernist work by studying how literal and figurative movement create new meanings, acts, and modes of existence through language and dance.