Belated Modernism

Abstract

This dissertation argues that literary modernism is structured by a logic of belatedness—its sense, that is, of having arrived too late. Belatedness thus perceived entails a reconsideration of late modernism, illuminated as it has been by scholars such as Jed Esty, Tyrus Miller, and C.D. Blanton. Because modernism is constituted first and foremost by its fraught relation to time, and, specifically, to the present and its representations, any discussion of late modernism must begin by interrogating the “afterlife” of this temporal predicament. Following Edward Said’s claim that modernism is a late-style phenomenon, Belated Modernism challenges the construct “late modernism” given that the notion of lateness is constitutive of modernism itself. This project necessitates a thinking beyond the generic, nationalistic, linguistic, and disciplinary distinctions that have informed most of the critical discourse on (Anglo-American) late modernism. To that end, Belated Modernism addresses a constellation of European writers whose late style emerges in modernism’s late phase: the strange parenthesis of 1939–1941, when the war had already begun but its magnitude was as yet unknowable. Focusing on the final works of Sigmund Freud (Moses and Monotheism [1939]), Walter Benjamin (“On the Concept of History” [1940]), and Virginia Woolf (Between the Acts [1941]), I argue that the singular conjunction of late style and late modernism reveals, in light of individual and world-historical ends, an intensification of the philosophical problem of belatedness that has haunted modernism since its origins.