Dissertation Research

Areas of Interest

Pedagogical Research; Writing Instruction; Rhetoric and Composition Studies; First-year writing; Universal Design in Learning; Spatial Rhetorics; Transnational modernism; 20th-century American Literature; 20th-Century British Literature; 20th-Century Irish Literature

Dissertation Project

“When the Foreign Became Familiar: Modernism, Expatriation, and Spatial Identities in the 20th Century”

Download Dissertation Here

In the 66th General Assembly of the United Nations in 2011, the head of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees characterized the 21st century as a “century of people on the move,” citing the global refugee crises in Africa and the Middle East. Their research estimates that there have been 7.6 million newly displaced people due to conflict or persecution and 1.1 million new refugees as of 2011, the highest increase since 1999. In a political climate fraught with issues of spatial displacement, human migration, and the tension between national and global politics, my current project writes a history of the global surge in expatriation to Europe in the early 20th century in conversation with current attitudes surrounding refugee crises from the Global South­; for if the refugee is the figure of the early 21st century, the expatriate helped define the early 20th century. Though the economic and social motivations for the expatriation surge following World War I are vastly different than the war-weary migrations experienced by refugees in our own century, I argue the literature of early 20th century expatriation provides a means to work out issues of Western cultures’ relationships to space, national identity, and other spatialized systems in our own century.

My dissertation, “When the Foreign Became Familiar: Modernism, Expatriation, and Spatial Identities in the 20th Century” takes up expatriation, a loaded term in 21st-century politics through the literature of several famous Anglophone expatriate writers—Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce. My project offers a spatial mode of reading that identifies the intersections between the sociopolitical state of expatriation and art as a form. In order to excavate the exploitative politics of form through the mode of expatriation, I undertake a spatial reading of the physical spaces expatriates inhabit while abroad and write about in their work; by reading expatriate modernist texts through a spatial lens, the physical sites of expatriation become symbols of expatriate values and identity in conflict with local cultures and identities. This methodology exposes the exploitation inherent in expatriation as a form and proposes that literature is a site in which the politics of national identities and statelessness can be investigated.  My work builds on those who have challenged modernism as an apolitical paradigm.

I rely on the assumption that no literature is apolitical, despite many modernists’ claims that their work is. Instead, I argue that modernism is an intensely political movement, whose authors merely chose to eschew direct political commentary in order to expand their readership and marketability. The values that characterized popular understandings of expatriate modernism provided publication avenues and popular audiences for artists whose work may have otherwise been too avant-garde for mainstream publication. Faced with the potential for popular success, authors were left to reconcile their own ideological desires for cosmopolitanism and freedom from traditions with their desire for literary and public acclaim. I argue the tension between these desires lead many expatriates to exploit foreign cultures and coopt foreign spaces in pursuit of a cosmopolitan modernist aesthetic.

“When the Foreign became Familiar” details the spatial rhetorics at play in the fiction and life writing of some of the most famous modernist expatriates. The project is preceded by an introduction which roots modernist expatriation in late 19th-century trans-Atlantic narratives (à la Henry James) and establishes the project’s spatial methodology.  Chapter One, “Creating Expatriate Paris”, focuses its attention on Paris as the paradigmatic space of expatriate modernism. In it, I use Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast to argue that the heavy use of spatial representation in both texts encourages current and contemporary readers to view Paris largely through an American lens. In their fiction and life writings, both Stein and Hemingway construct a vision of the expatriate myth and, by extension, the Parisian expatriate lifestyle, that both advertised Paris as an attractive tourist destination and positioned the expatriate artist as an essential part of Paris as a space and cultural landmark.

In Chapter Two, “‘Hurray for the Foreigners!’” I extend the conversation of tourists and tourist objects in Chapter One into Ernest Hemingway’s relationship to Spanish culture. My analysis centers on Hemingway’s two Spanish novels, The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls to offer a rereading of both texts as tourist narratives centered around the personal development of the expatriate protagonists. This reading centralizes the expatriate figure, rather than local culture or plot, and focuses the novels around the expatriates’ relationships to foreign spaces as sites of self-discovery. I begin with a spatial reading of The Sun Also Rises to establish the spatial relationships in each novel, before turning to a more extended tourism reading of For Whom the Bell Tolls. In For Whom The Bell Tolls, I offer a reading of the expatriate Robert Jordan’s actions in the Spanish Civil War as modified slum tourism, steeped in exploitation and voyeurism. Reading the novel as a narrative of slum tourism transforms the war zone of the mountains and locals’ war experience into consumable objects that are used by Jordan to negotiate his own identity and that can be reproduced in the pages of a novel for other foreign readers to use on their own path to self-discovery.

Chapter Three, “Remembered Homelands”, turns away from the American-centric expatriate experience of Chapters 1 and 2 to study James Joyce and the literature of exile. Joyce’s fiction employs many of the same spatial representation strategies but with a focus on the homeland as a fraught, ideological space. In Chapter 3, I trace the shift in Joyce’s representations of Ireland from Dubliners, to A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, to Ulysses, to show how the texts become increasingly abstract and unsettled as Joyce is more and more ideologically and temporally distanced from his nation. The chapter begins with a consideration of spatial representation in Dubliners a text framed in explicitly spatial terms, knowable only to those familiar with its community and history. By Portrait, the now expatriate Joyce reconstructs Ireland as a personal space for the aspiring expatriate protagonist Stephen Dedalus and later as a mythic, potentially cosmopolitan space on par with the broader European tradition. In Ulysses, however, the cosmopolitanism of Stephen Dedalus in Portrait confronts the realities of Joyce’s own waning relationship with Dublin. Published 18 years after the author’s emigration and in the same year as the Irish Civil War, the text is frozen in time; it is set in 1904 and resorts to abstraction and experimentation to depict the national space that was once so intimate in Dubliners. I turn to “Wandering Rocks” in Ulysses to illustrate how Joyce’s depictions of Dublin as an exile become increasingly fragmented and telescopic throughout his oeuvre, demonstrating a rejection of the colonial space by rendering it unknowable to both the exile and the colonizer.

I conclude “When the Foreign Became Familiar” with a brief consideration of the current cultural implications of modernist narratives of expatriation through a close reading of 21st century tourist sites and texts that draw on the myth of modernist expatriation (e.g.  Steinian tours of Paris, Hemingway’s statue in Pamplona, annual Bloomsday celebrations, etc.). I discuss how these tourist objects can equally be subjected to a spatial reading to illustrate how the ubiquity of modernist expatriation has led to the prevalent cosmopolitan view of Europe as a travel destination. I argue that by extending the spatial methodology to 21st century byproducts of modernism, we can see how early 20th century notions of expatriation and literature have permanently altered our perspective on globalism and the “foreign” spaces of Western Europe.