Looking to Remember: Narrative, Image, and Technology in Twentieth-Century Literature

Looking to Remember argues that technological developments in visual culture produce a distinct literary tradition of modernist memory work that spans the long twentieth century. In the course of this century, innovations in glass architecture, photography, film, and digital processing made the lives of others suddenly appear as visible as one’s own. Against a broad backdrop of theoretical engagements with visual culture, modernism, and memory studies, I highlight four authors—Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, W.G. Sebald, and Teju Cole—whose narrative explorations of visual technologies expand the boundaries of individual memory. The tradition they constitute unites modernism’s familiar emphasis on private consciousness with its less familiar attunement to the reverberations of atrocity across national boundaries. By focusing on the aftermath of two World Wars, the Cold War, and the “War on Terror,” I propose a visual aesthetics of secondhand witnessing that reimagines individual subjectivity in the context of transnational communities. These authors connect disparate moments and places through a shared concern with the ethics of mediated witnessing. This dissertation interrogates the murky boundaries of war and peace, the public and the private, the seen and the remembered, from the early twentieth century to our own time./nMy dissertation begins by situating Woolf’s invention of her novelistic tunneling method within a broader European cultural scene that witnessed the construction of Bauhaus’s celebrated glass curtain wall and the emergence of Maurice Halbwach’s sociological term “collective memory.” By exploring the danger of seemingly transparent access to private and public memory in the aftermath of the twentieth century’s first “total war,” I demonstrate how Woolf resists the nationalism of the interwar period by cultivating a non-appropriative form of collective identification. From the deceptively transparent mediation of glass in Mrs. Dalloway, I turn to Nabokov’s interrogation of photography’s apparently unmediated access to distant times and places. Doubly displaced by the Russian Revolution and the Second World War, Nabokov initially rejects photography’s claim to objectivity in favor of memory’s imaginative idiosyncrasies. But he eventually includes nearly two-dozen family photos in the final version of Speak, Memory, recasting the Cold War era’s promotion of a monolithic history as a stereoscopic interplay of image and text. Confronted with the glut and precarity of images decades later, W.G. Sebald transforms Nabokov’s stereoscopic method into an oscillating cinematic vision. Fracturing glass slides and slowing Nazi films to a funereal pace, Sebald reframes remembrance as the perpetual fluctuation between imaginative projection and material screens. His readers confront the past through unending processes of visual identification and dis-identification with victims and perpetrators of atrocity alike. In dialogue with Woolf, Nabokov, and Sebald, novelist and photography critic Teju Cole expands the optics of witnessing derived from the human eye to drone technologies that obfuscate individual responsibility. By analyzing the foreshortened visual perspective and attenuated bodily remove of digital technology in Cole’s Open City, together with his writings on and about the Internet, I conclude my dissertation with an examination of a post-9/11 world in which technology instantiates, as well as records, acts of violence.

Advisor: Abel, Elizabeth