UC Berkeley

This dissertation develops an account of formal indirection arising in the context of anti-imperial revolutionary culture at two ends of Europe’s geopolitical map—Ireland and Russia. It is guided by an apparent contradiction: while the events broadly understood in Ireland and Russia as revolutionary were widely discussed and written about, they were resistant to narrative description. Though these two roughly contemporaneous moments of imperial contraction and collapse have rarely been considered together, writers of these periods negotiated a remarkably similar set of preoccupations regarding how to best to express the gulf between historical abstractions and lived experience. As they attempt to narrate the disintegration and reorganization of shared categories of nationhood and ethno-national identity, they turn to modes of narrative and rhetorical indirection that foreground the problem of perception. Irish and Russian modernist writers, that is, confront moments in which the categories of nationhood and empire, which had previously done the unreflective work of organizing political and narrative structures, are radically destabilized. In place of standard juridical and political accounts of revolution as intense, sudden, and definite, I emphasize the partial, the ambiguous, and the protracted. As a comparative project, Revolutionary Perception attends to the many ways British and Russian imperial crises resisted direct narrativization, and how their complex and uneven historical development shaped the limits of imaginative engagement.

Through focused chapters on James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Viktor Shklovsky, and IsaacBabel, I show that prose writers formulated the experience of waning imperial hegemony as a matter of literary form. These authors mobilize techniques—from Shklovsky’s sentimental estrangement, to the nominalist problematic of “politics” in Joyce, to Bowen’s language of indeterminacy, to Babel’s “factographic grotesque”—that encourage a perceptual realignment through their descriptive defiance, foregrounding of absence, and performative self-reflexivity. Across four chapters, Revolutionary Perception argues that aesthetic indirection is not only a response to these moments, but a strategy of describing the feeling of historical rupture: a way of apprehending the experience of an as- yet un-cognized, and yet-to-be-articulated, historical phenomenon. Reading these literary traditions alongside each other illuminates a shared attunement to problems of categorical instability, which emerge out of the dissolution of long-standing imperial frameworks. As such, my project reframes our understanding of comparative imperialisms by offering an aesthetic theorization of the very category of empire as a basis of narrative continuity and referential stability.