Nineteen Thirty-four: Generic Hybridity and the Search for a Democratic Aesthetic

This dissertation poses a fundamental question: why does a concern about the value of literary writing emerge during a felt crisis in public speech, especially in times of war? My focus is 1934, the year that Hitler became Führer and Socialist Realism was formulated in the USSR. In this year, Mikhail Bakhtin and Erich Auerbach developed the foundations of their narrative theory, while Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis embarked on new ventures in genre. Despite their differences, I argue, these writers all sought to challenge the linguistic basis of political power by developing new forms that engage readers in independent, active ways. Woolf, Eliot, and Lewis responded to totalitarianism with experiments in generic hybridity, believing that inter-generic dialogue could promote social dialogue and democratic modes of thought. My introduction analyses the political and aesthetic implications of German and Soviet propaganda in 1934. Chapter 1 establishes a theoretical frame through two works written in exile from these totalitarian regimes. Bakhtin’s “Discourse in the Novel” and Auerbach’s Mimesis both posit the centrality of genre to political freedom, but Bakhtin’s binary of monologic poetry and dialogic prose contrasts with Auerbach’s arguments for the political potential of mixed forms. Chapter 2 shows how similar concerns about pluralist voicing inform debates concerning the “death of poetry” in England; nonetheless, I conclude that the political poetry of Thirties Poets often privileged ideology over dialogism. Three chapters then explore the emergence of hybrid genres in Woolf, Eliot, and Lewis. I argue that Woolf’s unpublished “Ode to Cutbush” is a prose-poetic hybrid that employs poetic rhythm and free indirect discourse to instill democratic values of empathy and tolerance; that Eliot’s first completed play, The Rock, invokes the ideological complexities and unresolved political contradictions of his journalism and editorial practice to incite the audience’s active collaboration; and that Lewis’s novelistic poem One-Way Song attempts to escape the increasingly monologic voice of his political writings and return to the polyphonic style and polyvalent thinking of his earlier work. My conclusion demonstrates these writers’ continuing commitment to the democratic potential of generic hybridity during World War II.Ph