Strange Dwellings: Inhabiting American Literary Modernism

This dissertation probes the relationship between sexuality and the home in American literature from the early twentieth century, asserting forms of dwelling that challenge the values given to itinerancy and vagrancy in criticism on queer modernism. Within queer theory, which since its inception has prescribed an anti-social, anti-normative position, scholars have mined modernist texts for their transgressive potential. Indeed, modernist texts frequently exhibit precisely the qualities that American culture negatively associates with queerness: urbanism, exile, dislocation, disorientation, loss, and infertility. However, I argue that narratives of queerness that privilege anti-social behaviour risk occluding more granular discussions of the murky relationships that queer subjects have with ordinariness and normativity. The basic premise of “Strange Dwellings” is, therefore, that sexuality in American modernism indexes a range of concomitant concerns and anxieties, including a pervasive fascination with home. Affective ambivalence permeates many of the texts in this project, which simultaneously express profound nostalgia and strain toward new aesthetic, social, and political realities. While the home may find its form in the house, home is ultimately an affective state, I conclude, rather than a material space. I re-direct our attention to the ways in which modernist texts refuse to assimilate to traditional social and literary formations, and yet strive to recuperate and transform them. “Strange Dwellings” examines instantiations of the queer home in texts by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Willa Cather, and James Agee. While my aims extend well beyond those of a revisionist project, I deliberately return to well-trodden critical ground in order to consider modernism’s fraught relationship to the peripatetic. Rather than pursuing questions of recovery or canonicity, I contend that the authors I take up envision their place within literary history by conceiving of place in physical terms. Just as their texts come to constitute forms of housing, writing serves as an act of homemaking. These authors mobilize form itself as a dwelling space, recasting the home as a site of endurance. In doing so, they treat writing as a practice with the capacity to aesthetically re-imagine the social.

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