Minimalism, modernism, and the aesthetics of scale

This dissertation argues that literary minimalism is rightfully understood as an effort to make literature unproductive. Minimal fiction retreats from the production of meaning as literature’s epiphenomenon. It thus carries out a revaluation of textual surfaces and a critique of the logic of accumulation that inevitably subsumes sensuous particularity. Literary minimalism has previously been considered a movement among latetwentieth-century American short fiction writers who embraced a kind of brevity and tonal flatness that is invariably achieved through a deliberate process of exclusion in their fiction. Against this narrow view of minimalism, the project traces an original literary history of formal subtraction in the transnational narrative experiments of the last century. Through readings of Henry James, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, and Lydia Davis, I show how minimal writing renounces some of fiction’s most powerful tools. These writers often choose not to generate meaning by communicating and organizing information; they seek to build contingency, rather than significance, into their representations of the world. However, these projects for the weakening and lessening of literature’s expressive dominance also constitute a crucial alteration of its manner of address: towards embodied scale and concrete particularity. Minimal fiction seeks to imagine encounters marked by an apparent paucity of meaningful content, even as it attempts, at the same time, to model a cognate experience through its form. The texts in this project evince various methods of paring down in order to make the sound and physical presence of words felt. In The Ambassadors, James creates a suspended style, an anti-clarity that renders words less transparent, less efficient purveyors of meaning. Joyce and Woolf use fragmentation to disrupt the smooth unspooling of narrative; as a result, we sense the pieced-together quality of representation and the poverty of insight at its ground. Beckett’s Worstward Ho makes language enact the unaccustomed function of worsening/lessening communication. And, more explicitly than the others, Davis insists on the impossibility of something “beyond” the concrete; paradoxically, she means both the concreteness of language and at least one horizon of meaning “beyond” this concreteness, that of physical description. So, in various ways, these texts seek to call up the scene of reading or listening. The impossibly slim political content of this effect lies not in its evocation of alternate ways or being or acting in the world, but in its indirect recollection of the world. In recalling the world it has forgotten—or, rather, in recalling us to the world we have forgotten—the work of minimal fiction offers a way of encountering vast scale empty of attributes. In so doing, minimal fiction resists the drive to subsume particularity.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Emily Kevlin Zuberni