This study conceptualizes the formal difficulty of certain modernist novels by focusing on the way their construction of conversation represents how people occupy positions in a social world. Works by Gertrude Stein, Robert Musil, and Djuna Barnes share puzzling formal features (most notably frequent digressions that exceed their relationship to surrounding material and textual lacunae, especially in the transcript of a conversation) that cultivate an indeterminacy around how peculiarities of characters’ speech invoke typical social qualities. The dissertation argues that this rendering of conversation cultivates an understanding of sexuality as a multivariable social phenomenon. These novels show how sexualities, as thinkable identities, emerge and recede from view as other bits of information about a person shift around verbal utterances. Specifically, these novels generate insights on shades of sexual difference that depend on a context-bound orientation to language to be known and responded to. “Possibility,” “singularity,” and “disqualification” are terms these novels use to draw attention to such elusive pragmatic phenomena.
The project draws on the tools of close reading and linguistic anthropology to conceptualize how fictional structures critique the relationship between social identities and language use. In a similar if more illustrative way than linguistic analysis, novels’ sequencing of and commentary on conversation model how distinctive discursive signals index or “point” to motivating factors in the surrounding world. In particular, the concept of indexical indeterminacy clarifies the way works take discursive context—the structuring framework that gives interaction a generic form and functional trajectory—to be collaboratively achieved one utterance at a time.
This project intervenes in theories of modernist difficulty and the history of sexuality. Although queer theory has exploded a homo-heterosexual binary as the basis of a sexual politics, it has done so by dissolving sex as a coherent social practice. Scholars of sexuality understand that ostensibly identical acts can mean opposing things to different people, yet they still acknowledge the mark of sexuality to be distinctive and determining. The dissertation points toward a solution to this impasse. The experimental works studied here instruct us to think about sexuality in terms of its contested enactment in discourse, prompting one to consider the conditions for a practice to cohere as sexual difference and when the presumption of this difference is a meaningful public fact.