On the Circuit: Transatlantic Modernism and the U.s. Lecture Tour, 1880-1945
Open Access
- Author:
- Volpicelli, Robert Angelo
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- November 17, 2014
- Committee Members:
- Janet Wynne Lyon, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Mark Stewart Morrisson, Committee Member
Michael Francis Berube, Committee Member
Jonathan Paul Eburne, Committee Member
Robin G Schulze, Committee Member - Keywords:
- modernism
lecture tour
Oscar Wilde
W.B. Yeats
Gertrude Stein
W.H. Auden - Abstract:
- In his 1963 ballad, “On the Circuit,” W.H. Auden describes how the U.S. lecture tour transforms the modern poet into an “air-borne instrument” to be “jet-or-prop-propelled” around the country. Although Auden mostly uses his poem to grumble and complain about such an experience, this dissertation takes seriously the idea that the circuit operated as a means of high-speed literary propulsion. In the pages that follow, I offer an account of the U.S. lecture circuit as an underappreciated vehicle for transatlantic exchange that had the particular consequence of bringing international modernist writers into contact with a variety of American popular cultures and regional audiences. Tracing the routes these authors frequently traveled on their tours across the U.S. social landscape, I show how the practices of lecturing and traveling on the tour served a vital role in shaping the production and reception of transatlantic modernist literature. From the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, the lecture tour imported a series of modern authors from overseas, including Oscar Wilde and W.B. Yeats from Ireland, Rabindranath Tagore from Bengal, Gertrude Stein from France, and W.H. Auden from England. While such a line-up immediately suggests how this circuit fits in with the transnational currents that have become so important to modernist studies in recent years, the lecture tour generally remains a topic that has garnered little scholarly attention. Some critics have gestured at lecturing as a conduit for fame. But the heavily mediated experience of celebrity only speaks to one aspect of the tour, which generated its own distinctive form of literary circulation capable of shuttling authors everywhere from large metropolitan areas and prestigious universities to small country fairs and Western frontier settlements. To provide a better sense of what this process meant to both its authors and audiences, I assemble a wide-ranging archive of materials that allows me to analyze the history of the lecture circuit along with its aesthetic implications. Each chapter here focuses on the lecture tours of one or more of the writers listed above. The first two chapters—covering Wilde, Yeats, and Tagore—center on the experience of the lecture tour itself and the way in which it prompted modernist writers to develop self-reflexive forms of authorship that facilitated their appeals to a variety of American audiences in a culture industry based on both education and entertainment. The next two chapters—on Stein and Auden respectively—shift from issues of circulation to aesthetics in order to take a closer look at how lecturing came to bear upon modernist writing. In all of these chapters, I am invested in revealing the circuit as a transformative process, one that not only reshaped poets into projectiles but also rerouted their careers by infusing their literary practices with newfound concern for such issues as public pedagogy, oral recitation and delivery, and audience.