The Politics of Intermediality: Late Modernist Circulations of the Event

This dissertation examines late modernist, intermedial representations of events, considering art as an event and how art depicts and circulates events. Through cross-media close readings and interdisciplinary theories and methods derived from media studies, music and sound studies, intermedial theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and literary theory, I study multimedia opera, civilian bombardments during the Spanish Civil War, the 1943 Harlem riot, and the atomic bombing of Japan in order to evaluate media practices from a range of cultural and historical contexts. Employing eventalization, my research illuminates intersections of media, gender, race, nation, and sexuality. Some of the artists I engage with include Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, Virginia Woolf, Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar, Langston Hughes, Jacob Lawrence, Ann Petry, Mina Loy, John Hersey, Shda Shinoe, and Nagai Takashi.

The four chapters comprising this project take up fluctuating interactions among sonic, verbal, and visual mediations that were produced between 1927 and 1949, juxtaposing various newer media (photojournalism, radio, and others) with works of art (poetry, fiction, and painting). Stein and Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts, transposed first into a staged opera and then as a radio broadcast, highlights how its many remediations offer formal innovation while reinforcing historical inequities. Picasso and Woolf's collage-like responses to war in Spain demonstrate hypermediacy and immediacy—remediation's twinned impulses—with each artist treating public and private divisions (as materials and as politics) differently. In their depictions of state violence against Black Americans, Hughes, Lawrence, and Petry draw differently on sonic, visual, and verbal modes. Hughes and Petry's fictional rioters publicly express dissatisfaction and challenge the containment strategies used during the actual riot. My concluding chapter also considers how intermediality resists containment, tracing the disparate availability of media in North America and Japan. Simultaneously empty and excessive, these atomic media reveal the ways knowledge and power produce nuclear subjects.

My findings reveal that late modernism offers a particularly resonant set of texts and contexts from which to evaluate literature as a medium. Moreover, literature's porous borders enable multiple movements and engagements. The eventalization of these circulations reveal the political stakes and uses of intermediality.