Wastepaper Modernism

Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Ruins of Print

Joseph Elkanah Rosenberg

Oxford Mid-Century Studies Series

Challenges the technological focus of recent approaches to modernism and media, arguing that at the same time that writers turned to cinema, photography, and radio, they also thought about the ephemeral nature of the book's own primary medium of paper
Exposes an anxiety about literature's status as a medium that long precedes current concerns about the death of the book
Examines a wide range of canonical and non-canonical works by Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, G.W. Stonier, Rose Macaulay, Vladimir Nabokov, and others

Wastepaper Modernism

Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Ruins of Print

Joseph Elkanah Rosenberg

Oxford Mid-Century Studies Series

Description

From Henry James' fascination with burnt manuscripts to destroyed books in the fiction of the Blitz; from junk mail in the work of Elizabeth Bowen to bureaucratic paperwork in Vladimir Nabokov; modern fiction is littered with images of tattered and useless paper that reveal an increasingly uneasy relationship between literature and its own materials over the course of the twentieth-century.

Wastepaper Modernism argues that these images are vital to our understanding of modernism, disclosing an anxiety about textual matter that lurks behind the desire for radically different modes of communication. At the same time that writers were becoming infatuated with new technologies like the cinema and the radio, they were also being haunted by their own pages. Having its roots in the late-nineteenth century, but finding its fullest constellation in the wake of the high modernist experimentation with novelistic form, "wastepaper modernism" arises when fiction imagines its own processes of transmission and representation breaking down. When the descriptive capabilities of the novel exhaust themselves, the wastepaper modernists picture instead the physical decay of the book's own primary matter. Bringing together book history and media theory with detailed close reading, Wastepaper Modernism reveals modernist literature's dark sense of itself as a ruin in the making.

Wastepaper Modernism

Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Ruins of Print

Joseph Elkanah Rosenberg

Oxford Mid-Century Studies Series

Wastepaper Modernism

Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Ruins of Print

Joseph Elkanah Rosenberg

Oxford Mid-Century Studies Series

Author Information

Joseph Elkanah Rosenberg, Assistant Professor, Program of Liberal Studies, University of Notre Dame, Indiana

<b>Joseph Elkanah Rosenberg</b> is an Assistant Professor at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, where he teaches in the Program of Liberal Studies.