Multitude Modernism: Democratic Epiphany in American Interwar Literature

Abstract

My dissertation develops a theory of “Multitude Modernism” by examining signal instances of what I call “democratic epiphany” in literary works by writers of color and leftist artists in the 1930s and 1940s, notably Richard Wright, H.T. Tsiang, Zora Neale Hurston, and John Steinbeck. My study analyzes narrative moments, often in the plot’s climax, where a compassionate protagonist momentarily unites, sometimes even merges with, their broader social communities. During these surrealistic moments of “democratic epiphany,” surrounding populations are transformed into a single entity, a transcendent social collective no longer bound by repressive structures of race and class. I contend “democratic epiphany” can be understood not only as radical writers’ imagined alternative to oppression but also as the aesthetic of an era. Drawing on the scholarly contributions of Michael Denning, Alan Wald, Floyd Chueng, and Michael Tratner, my dissertation examines American writers’ subversion of High Modernist practice to forge a modernism of their own making. Though significant work has been done in recovering the existence of a distinctly leftist modernist movement, few studies formally account for these strange moments of social synthesis. Attending to writers from an array of ethnic affiliations, my chapters seek to account for the ways in which democratic epiphany articulates the convictions of a multiethnic pluralism that blossomed throughout the interwar period.