Hospitalities: Modernist Culture and the Politics of Welcoming
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Weidman, Sean
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 17, 2021
- Committee Members:
- Magali Armillas-Tiseyra, Outside Unit & Field Member
Kevin Bell, Major Field Member
John Marsh, Major Field Member
Janet Lyon, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
David Loewenstein, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- hospitality
modernism
yeats
wharton
dorothy day
ford madox ford
tagore
empire
colonialism
decolonial
anticolonial
imperialism
WWI
refugees
sociability
cosmopolitanism
nationalism
immigration
Great Depression
homeness
catholic worker
haunting
hosting - Abstract:
- This dissertation argues that in the wake of World War One, the Great Depression, and European imperialism, modernists sought, invoked, re/produced, and relied on forms of hospitality in their efforts to rethink modern community. These hospitable forms, entailing the practice—sometimes actual, sometimes conceptual—of welcoming others into shared spaces, may be found throughout modernist literature and modern culture, and I claim broadly that the conditions of modernity and early-20th-century upheaval compelled new accommodations (and sometimes rejections) of those in need of welcome. I unravel some of the nuances of modernist hospitality in order to reveal the ways that modern writers and figures negotiated social, legal, and cultural systems and their often-fraught politics of welcoming: structural means of determining whom they were to accept as familiar, alike, and safe enough to be among, and whom they were to reject as unlike, unsafe, and unwelcome in spaces shared. Each chapter relates a different aspect of hospitality’s use in early-twentieth-century literature, cutting across and joining several divergent critical contexts through the purview of welcoming. Together, these five modernist case studies—of Yeats, Tagore, Ford, Wharton, and Day—aim to demonstrate that the contours of modern hospitality extended beyond localized cultural phenomena and instead animated a shared, global approach to the modern ethics of welcoming, which were then taken up as directives for modernist thinking and writing about the reconfiguration of local and inter/national communities. My argument is primarily historicist, but as it proceeds through a range of literary and cultural evidence (fiction, poetry, journalism, histories, essays, lectures, legislation, architecture), it also mobilizes the political philosophy of thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Hannah Arendt. Alongside the modernists I study, these scattered theorists help me to advance a genealogy of 20th-century political welcoming and to describe, in a new vocabulary, its lasting effects on modernist art and modern life. Although most research on hospitality addresses its ancient histories (e.g. James Heffernan and Gideon Baker) or contemporary applications (e.g. Mireille Rosello and Lyndsey Stonebridge), this dissertation begins to fill in the modern record, illuminating some of the ways modernists leveraged, repurposed, and contended with the ethical force of hospitality in the aftermath of modern crisis and great catastrophe.