DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-310833
title: Mechanical failure: American modernism and the technics of history

description: Through chapters focused on the work of Mark Twain, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound, respectively, this dissertation examines the ways in which American modernism developed concepts of history through engagements with second-stage industrialization (1880-1945). I approach American modernism as an effort to find a mode of representation fit to overcome both the “crisis of historicism” and the technological “crisis of perception,” placing American modernism at the intersection of intellectual and material history in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The project traces a number of modernist articulations of historical rupture that emerged from the new experiences afforded by various speed technologies. These include Mark Twain’s separation of the nineteenth century from all centuries prior, inspired in large part by the Paige Compositor; Gertrude Stein’s articulation of the “continuous present,” the “time- sense” she locates in cinema and the assembly line; and Ezra Pound’s call to “Make It New,” developed alongside his aestheticization of machine parts in his unfinished book project, Machine Art (1927-1930). Through each of these case studies, I reveal how “mechanical failures” have compromised and redirected this modernist association between technological modernity and “the new.” ❧ Building on recent scholarship devoted to modernism’s relations to history and to technology, respectively, the argument of this dissertation unfolds in dialectical form. First, that technological modernity obscured its relations to the pre-industrial past. Second, that American modernism often embraced this fetishized, ahistorical present. From these two propositions, I argue that the mechanical failures illustrated throughout—moments when machines break or cease to operate—serve to endow the modernist present with images of its own historicity, while the otherwise obfuscated relations between past and present become as visible and material as the experiences afforded by modern machines. The specific mechanical failures of the Paige Compositor, Bob Brown’s reading machine, and Pound’s aestheticized machine parts illuminate a failure fundamental to American modernism itself—namely, its failure to coincide with technological modernity, which, in the modernist technological imaginary, constitutes a dehistoricized present. While these writers turned to the labor-saving efficiency, speed, and hyper-material form of the machine as an occasion for negating history, the mechanical failures traced throughout this project reintroduce the materiality of history into their claims to rupture. What results is a genuinely dialectical picture of American modernism: an aesthetic project both motored and limited by the material world of the machine age, a project whose claims to rupture, rather than negate the past, actually make materially present otherwise obscure or invisible historical relations. Mechanical failure situates the objective conditions of the machine age not as an antagonist to American modernism, but as a central player in its construction.