UCLA

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.