| This dissertation examines how four modernist writers utilized the Bildungsroman, or novel of development, to respond to a crisis that shook the European historical consciousness in the first half of the twentieth century. During this period, the rapid process of modernization that had attended the imperial scramble of 1870-1914 rendered the liberal ideal of human communities defined by shared practices and traditions obsolete. Instead, societies were now characterized by what Ernst Bloch has influentially called the "synchronicity of the non-synchronous": a confused coexistence of modern and pre-modern norms and values. These non-synchronicities acquired an especially palpable form during the First World War, in which largely agrarian populations were thrown into the inferno of mechanized combat. After the War had ended, they contributed to the ascent of totalitarian communities, which legitimated themselves through charismatic modes of address and were thus able to subsume conflicting forms of historical experience.The classical Bildungsroman, which depicts the formation of a unified individual in front of a uniform historical backdrop, was rendered obsolete by these developments. Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse responded to this formal crisis with the creation of what I call "syncopated selves": protagonists who are tossed back and forth between competing historical "rhythms" and thus also between non-synchronous experiences. The first half of my dissertation demonstrates, through readings of Lord Jim and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, how imperial expansion with its attendant complications destroyed the form of the traditional Bildungsroman and contributed to the invention of a distinctly modernist style. The second half, dedicated to analyses of The Magic Mountain and The Glass Bead Game, explores the competing models of historical representation developed by fascism and German epic modernism in the aftermath of the First World War, and asks whether literature was complicit in the rise of totalitarian communities. A theoretical introduction to the dissertation elaborates on the thesis that the temporal relationships that structure literature provide insights into cultural assumptions about the nature of history and traces the history of the form from Goethe to the end of the nineteenth century. |
