Weather ex Machina charts a pattern of the weather as a plot device in the twentieth-century novel, where its interventions have been overlooked and understudied. According to the prevailing critical narrative of the topic, the ubiquitous and overwrought weather that characterizes the notoriously dark and stormy novels of the nineteenth century all but disappears in those of the twentieth, its determinative force in fiction diminishing with the advancement of a science that secularized the skies. This dissertation pushes against that narrative, arguing that is precisely because modern meteorology seemingly stripped the weather – so long assumed to be divinely sourced – of its mythological associations that the trope becomes available for co-opting as the makeshift deus ex machina of the modern novel: the believable contrivance that, in functioning deterministically while appearing aleatory, replaces the providentialism of the nineteenth-century novel and resolves the crisis of causality in the twentieth-century plot.

For E.M. Forster, whose works are marked by an anxiety about formlessness and a belabored adherence to causal chains, the weather becomes a divine scapegoat, its inculpation imposing a predictable but passably accidental order onto his plots. Virginia Woolf, in contrast, turns to the weather not as a determinant but for its apparent indeterminacy, using the cloud as an organizing trope to forestall her plots and to project a sense of nebulousness onto even her most conventionally structured narratives. In Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov’s weather becomes anachronistically over-determined, as his dramatic stagings of supposedly coincidental lightning strikes and thunderstorms illuminate the bars of Humbert’s artistic cage. While in the novels of Salman Rushdie, the heat-induced blurring of cause and effect finally amounts to an inversion of climatic determinism itself, his hyperbolically humanist texts offering us fantasies of magically determined climates that ultimately prefigure the nightmarish reality of our current anthropocenic moment.

Less a matter of physics than of metaphysics, the meteorological aberration that is literary weather not only signifies a distinctly formal problem in the twentieth-century novel, but is itself the quintessentially chaotic form that these four writers are trying to represent in the constitution of their necessarily deterministic narratives. Used as a mode of emplotment to naturalize the fiction of strict causality, the weather thus emerges as the means through which the modern author is able to reckon with an increasing ambivalence towards classical theories of plot in a world that no longer believes in traditional laws of intelligible cause and effect.

In a study ranging from Futurist cookbooks to fast-food lyrics, this dissertation opens up new perspectives on modernist writing in relation to key developments in American food culture. It resituates popular culinary texts within a discourse of literary aesthetics and rereads literary texts as they reflect the conditions of alimentary production and consumption. Pairing chefs and poets -- Julia Child & Gertrude Stein, Poppy Cannon & Frank O'Hara, Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor & Harryette Mullen -- I show how a modernist fixation on the materiality of edible things, expressed through the language of food, became a way for American writers to respond to the culinary, political, and aesthetic tastes of a nation undergoing tremendous shifts: from an austere wartime sensibility of patriotic eating, to the postwar excess of culinary cosmopolitanism, and finally, to racially inflected supermarket pastorals in the second half of the century. My research engages an interdisciplinary cross-section of literary and visual forms, drawing on culinary history, art theory, cultural anthropology, race and gender studies, eco-criticism, and food studies, while remaining invested in literary analysis, to illuminate the correlating aesthetic economies of foodstuff and language, and to rethink the collision of popular culture and high art. I consider how modernism positions food as an innovative site for the ingestion and reflux of ideas, reconceptualizations of art, reflections on embodied humanity, and broader queries of taste. I argue that just as cooking makes an aesthetics of everyday food by lifting it from routine to art, literature reflexively uses food to address its own necessariness; sustenance for the physical and imaginary palates of Americans during moments of significant change.

Rhetorics of Scale in Literary & Scientific Discourse examines the problem of scale as a mode of qualitative description, a problem that quietly underlies many theorizations of scale in both literary-critical and techno-scientific contexts but becomes incandescently knowable at their intersection. This dissertation unfolds the tangle of rhetorical and logical ambiguities, paradoxes, and slippages in three such intersections across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the development of zoom technology and aesthetics, the theorizations of hierarchy in narrative structuralism, organicism, and cybernetics, and debates over traditional versus computational literary criticism. With this unfolding, Rhetorics of Scale argues that these ambiguities are not barriers to understanding scale problems, but rather interpretive frames that make the concept of scale deployable as an analytical category in the first place—a category that analyzes the uncertainties of knowledge and describes their conditions.

This study examines three very short poems from three distinct moments in recent literary history in order to determine the limits of the poetic virtue of concision and to consider the social and aesthetic issues raised by extreme textual reduction. Attending to the production, circulation, and afterlives of Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” (1913), Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool” (1959), and Aram Saroyan’s “lighght” (1966), I argue that such texts necessarily, and yet paradoxically, join simplicity and ease to difficulty and effort. Those tense combinations, in turn, make these poems ideal sites for examining how brevity functions as a shared resource through which writers define and redefine what constitutes poetic labor and thus negotiate their individual relationships to the poetic tradition. In tracing those negotiations, "Three Very Short Poems: The Verbal Economics of Twentieth-Century American Poetry" participates in the ongoing reassessment of the relationship between literary modernism and mass culture by foregrounding art-poems that have reached unusual levels of popularity. Each of the three central chapters combines standard literary and reception history with formal analysis in order to tease out how the origin of a specific famous poem relates to its subsequent reprintings and reworkings. Throughout, I treat textual economization as a set of formal techniques whose variable meanings are determined by how those techniques emerge from and respond to historically located discourses of brevity. Each chapter functions as a distinct case study of a particular issue—knowledge-work and efficiency at the turn of the century, racial and economic inequality in the immediate postwar era, intellectual labor and social support in the late 1960s—and this means that each makes its own independent claims, even as the chapters argue collectively that a commitment to brevity as a value in itself unifies the diverse poetic field of the twentieth century.

This project looks at representations of the daily newspaper in the modernist novel, focusing on the newspaper's frequent role as the agent of shock, surprise, or discontinuity. My central contention is that time in modernist novels is not, as some have asserted, simultaneous. Moments of stoppage and sudden recognition predominate in the modern novel, and its uneven temporality challenges accepted accounts of how novel and newspaper readers imagine the nation based on simultaneous time. In answer to two lines of recent questions in modernist criticism: one about the role of shock and the other about the relationship of modernism to nation, this dissertation illuminates the alternative communities produced by non-simultaneous, surprising time in the modern novel.

I begin with a brief discussion of Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts (1939), a novelistic testament to the constancy of British village life against the shock of war that figures the newspaper as part of that shock. I then turn to Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907), which contests the ground the novel has ceded to New Journalism by itself staging some of the New Journalism's terroristic assaults on readers. Chapter two looks at James Joyce's Dubliners (1914) and Ulysses (1922), works that offer a version of nationalism that makes other times instead of other places simultaneous, undermining the imperial simultaneity of Greenwich Mean Time. My last chapter considers the Newsreels of John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy, which I will argue index Dos Passos's increasing resistance to the rising tide of public relations. I argue that U.S.A. valorizes a common, anonymous American body over a corporate Americanism symbolized by simultaneous consumption. My coda considers Jennifer Egan's Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad (2011), drawing a comparison between newspapers in the early twentieth century and social media in the early twenty-first.

The Art of the Modernist Body explores the fraught relationship between corporeality and the genesis of new language in modernist literature. The dissertation argues that the history of disability in the early twentieth century facilitates a revised account of Anglo-American modernism; specifically, the modernists' formal preoccupation with loss, deficiency, and absence, long regarded as a vital aspect of the movement, can be re-imagined productively through the heuristic of disability theory. The project likewise reveals that many of modernism's signature novelties, including free verse, Imagism, and the embrace of ordinary speech, are influenced by artists' attempts to represent physical deviance. Each text in question is generated out of repeated encounters with extraordinary figures or forms, and the artists openly challenge the conceptual, social, and political parameters that delimit the ideal human body. Their literature also reminds us that the modernist period is a remarkably inchoate time in terms of how the body is imagined. Two World Wars, the rise of the machine age, and advances in prosthetic and rehabilitative medicine are just a few of the phenomena that brought the human form to the forefront of British and American culture, with politicians, cultural critics, industrial scions, workers, artists, and soldiers all tussling over the social and economic value of imperfect bodies. Accordingly, many accounts from the period resist any entrenched, discrete notions of normality and abnormality, and acts of corporeal discipline, normalization, and rehabilitation are neither roundly condemned nor applauded. The confluence of multiple visions of corporeality not only alters the cultural landscape, but it also affects the very language through which the experience of physical difference is articulated. The novelists and poets herein record both processes, namely by producing what might be called a "contingency of corporeality:" they define the superlative modernist body as a hybrid entity, a form that registers the dueling forces of normalization and destabilization.

“Reading from A to Z” argues for the significance of the alphabetic sequence to the transatlantic experimental literature and visual art from the modern period to the present. While it may be most familiar to us as a didactic device to instruct children, various experimental writers and avant-gardists have used the alphabetic sequence to structure some of their most radical work. The alphabetic sequence is a culturally-meaningful trope with great symbolic import; we are, after all, initiated into written discourse by learning our ABCs, and the sequence signifies logic, sense, and an encyclopedic and linear way of thinking about and representing the world. But the string of twenty-six arbitrary signifiers also represents rationality’s complete opposite; the alphabet is just as potent a symbol and technology of nonsense, arbitrariness, and (children’s) play. These inherent tensions between meaning and arbitrariness, sense and nonsense, order and chaos have been exploited by a century of experimental writers and artists who have employed the alphabetic sequence as a device for formal experimentation, radical content, and institutional and cultural critique.

“Reading from A to Z” argues that, as a result of the post-Saussurean linguistic turn of the twentieth-century humanities, the alphabetic sequence—the medium of language itself—became a vital means for artistic investigation. By bringing together works from across different genres and media, the dissertation suggests that most experimental alphabetic works have a push and pull effect: they admit a complicity in a mass culture of order that is standardized, segmented, and sequenced, while simultaneously expressing a desire for something other to that order. In the hands of writers and artists, the alphabetic sequence is both tyrannical and liberatory. For Virginia Woolf in the 1920s, the alphabetic sequence is a rational means of understanding a totalized world as well as a generative creative structure, while for John Baldessari and Martha Rosler in the 1970s, the sequence is an oppressive symbol of institutional and patriarchal power and also the means through which to imagine a resistance to that power. By taking on works as diverse as Gertrude Stein’s long-ignored writing for children and the recent spate of alphabetized texts by Kenneth Goldsmith and other conceptual poets, the dissertation finds commonalities across a century of experimental writing and art. It pushes past Bourdieuian sociological readings of the avant-garde to establish a common ground between experimental writing and art movements, and ultimately reveals the alphabetic sequence—as a formal structure, a metaphor for knowledge, a didactic tool, an organizational system, and a procedural method—as the paradigmatic trope of a language-obsessed century.

Puzzling Modernity approaches key issues in modernist scholarship, such as fractured subjectivity and modernism's notoriously vexed relationship with popular culture, from a distinctly new vantage point by situating American modernism within a previously unrecognized pattern of nationwide fascination with puzzles dating back to the 1880s. I argue that puzzles appealed to modernist authors as aesthetic models because they offer a framework for acknowledging the grim realities of modern life without sacrificing the possibility for reconnection and regaining a sense of wholeness, no matter how provisional. Yet, while puzzles offer a safe environment in which to test out solutions to life's dilemmas, they also participate in exclusionary discourses and advance regressive agendas, particularly when administered as intelligence tests. Far more than aesthetic models, then, puzzles serve modernist writers as tools for revealing and frequently subverting the rhetorical ends to which these seemingly innocent and trivial pastimes have been put. In the first chapter, I argue that the "cross-word puzzle school" label that detractors of modernism appended to T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound during the 1920s serves as a useful point of departure for reconsidering their poetics because it brings their abiding concern for order rooted in language into sharp focus. In part two, I contend that Djuna Barnes burlesques sexological formulations of homosexuality as a riddle to be solved through riddling prose of her own in Ladies Almanack (1928). She renders definitive statements about queer being impossible, and in so doing, restores the archaic definition of the verb "to queer" meaning to puzzle or flummox. Part three considers puzzling in relation to race. I track the convergence of degeneration theory, Positivist criminology, eugenics, and anthropology to their fixation on "abnormal" physiognomy and demonstrate how each of these disciplines encodes deviance in racial terms. Building off of this foundation, I analyze how Jean Toomer redeploys the central premise of the Changing Faces puzzle by crafting a series of portraits of African American and multiracial individuals in Cane (1923) that undercut and denaturalize the criminalization of facial features along racial lines enacted by anthropometry and eugenics.

Stewart Brand's Whole Earth publications (The Whole Earth Catalog, The Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog, CoEvolution Quarterly, The Whole Earth Review, and Whole Earth) were well known not only for showcasing alternative approaches to technology, the environment, and Eastern mysticism, but also for their tendency to juxtapose radical and seemingly contradictory subjects in an "open form" format. They have also been the focus of notable works of scholarship in the social sciences. Areas of exploration include their relationship to the development of the personal computer, the environmental movement and alternative technology, the alternative West Coast publishing industry, Space Colonies, and Nanotechnology. What is perhaps less well known is Brand's interest in the Beat poetry of Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Robert Creeley, David Meltzer, and Peter Orlovsky beginning with CoEvolution Quarterly in 1974.

Brand's decision to include ecologically based free-verse Beat poems is also indicative of a particular way of seeing science and technology. The term "coevolution" itself is biological in origin and refers to the evolutionary relationship between predator and prey: a lizard may turn green to fade into the grass, but an eagle, with its highly developed vision, will be able to spot the lizard hiding among the green blades. Brand thus used the term "coevolution" as Edward Said used the musical term contrapuntal: the meeting of opposites or conflicting sources in either a contrived or forced juxtaposition that offers the potential for new meaning and understanding.

Brand's decision to incorporate the humanities into his ecologically based publications reflected a paradigm shift in his vision of science and technology. In other words, poetry renders tools and technology more humane and sustainable as they all "coevolve" with Eastern mysticism in an "open form" or contrapuntal context, leading to (eco) consciousness expansion. In contrast to the notion that there is an inherent contradiction between poetry and technology within the realm of ecocriticism, or that the humanities lack relevance to the environmental debate, Brand's Whole Earth publications provide one historic model for the "coevolution" of literature, science, and the environment.