Losing the Plot: Film and Feeling in the Modern Novel

NOVEL THEORY

SPEAKERS: Pardis Dabashi, Bryn Mawr College; Paul Saint-Amour, University of Pennsylvania

The modernist novel sought to escape what Virginia Woolf called the “tyranny” of plot. Yet even as twentieth-century writers pushed against the constraints of plot-driven Victorian novels, plot kept its hold on them through the influence of another medium: the cinema. Focusing on the novels of Nella Larsen, Djuna Barnes, and William Faulkner—writers known for their affinities and connections to classical Hollywood—Losing the Plot links the moviegoing practices of these writers to the tensions between the formal properties of their novels and the characters in them. Even when they did not feature outright happy endings, classical Hollywood films often provided satisfying formal resolutions and promoted normative social and political values. Watching these films, modernist authors were reminded of what they were leaving behind—both formally and in the name of aesthetic experimentalism—by losing the plot.

About the Speakers

Pardis Dabashi is Assistant Professor of Literatures in English and Film Studies at Bryn Mawr College, where she is also affiliated with the Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and North African Studies (MECANA) Program. Her work has appeared in such venues as Modernism/modernity, PMLA, Arizona Quarterly, Early Popular Visual Culture, Textual Practice, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, and elsewhere. She is co-editor of The New William Faulkner Studies (Cambridge UP, 2022), and co-editor of the Visualities forum on Modernism/modernity Print+. Her first book, Losing the Plot: Film and Feeling in the Modern Novel (U Chicago P, November 2023) studies the status of plot in the modernist novel and the classical Hollywood cinema. And her next book project, tentatively titled Reading and Revelation: On the Experience of Criticism, studies the practice of aesthetic criticism as a form of revelatory, faith-based experience.

Paul K. Saint-Amour, Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, works on Victorian and modernist literature and has special interests in the novel, law, trauma, and visual culture studies. He has been a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, the Center for the Humanities at Cornell, and the National Humanities Center. Saint-Amour's The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Intellectual (Cornell UP, 2003) won the MLA Prize for a First Book. His articles have appeared in journals such as Comparative Literature Studies, Critical Inquiry, Diacritics, Modernism/Modernity, Nineteenth-Century Studies, Novel, Post45, Public Books, Theory, Culture, and Society, and Representations, whose special “Counterfactuals” issue he co-edited with Catherine Gallagher and Mark Maslan.

How To Join

Please add your name and email address to this registration page. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with a link and passcode to the event. The passcode for the event is also the password to the pre-circulated paper attached to this page below.

If you have any questions, please contact Deidre Lynch at deidrelynch@fas.harvard.edu or Yoon Sun Lee at ylee@wellesley.edu.