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Losing the Plot: Film and Feeling in the Modern Novel
An examination of the relationship between literature and classical Hollywood cinema reveals a profound longing for plot in modernist fiction.
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 the cinema. Focusing on the novels of Nella Larsen, Djuna Barnes, and William Faulkner—writers known for their affinities and connections to classical Hollywood—Pardis Dabashi 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.
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 the cinema. Focusing on the novels of Nella Larsen, Djuna Barnes, and William Faulkner—writers known for their affinities and connections to classical Hollywood—Pardis Dabashi 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.
305 pages, Paperback
Published November 6, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 14, 2025
Djuna Barnes + Marlene Dietrich? Nella Larsen + Greta Garbo?? Faulkner's youthful cinephilia? Max Ophüls? I've rarely come across a book that feels plucked quite so directly, almost uncomfortably, from some dream or fantasy of mine!
While I do wish I could recommend this unreservedly, I'll say right out it is highly theoretical academic scholarship that a general reader might well find quite inaccessible for long stretches. But if you're into that—& I can be—it's a deeply researched, imaginatively conceived, & at times breathlessly expansive consideration of unexpected connections that can be drawn between modernist experimental writing & writers with the most glamorous stars of classic Hollywood. Whether comparing an "erotics of unattachment" in Nightwood & von Sternberg's Morocco or expanding on a peripheral biographical note that Larsen went & watched Cukor's Camille over & over in a time of crises & its possible subsequent influence on Quicksand , I was constantly dazzled by Dabashi's insights, & in turn found it deeply generative to my own thinking.
A tour-de-force, & a pleasure.
"Understanding what happened to plot in modernism thus involves understanding what happened to it in the cinema... Losing the Plot shows that while these writers were withdrawing from plot as the unwanted inheritance of the 19th century novel, they were also seeing legacies of it in the commercial narrative cinema—through which plot returns to the novel in a deeply ambivalent form."
While I do wish I could recommend this unreservedly, I'll say right out it is highly theoretical academic scholarship that a general reader might well find quite inaccessible for long stretches. But if you're into that—& I can be—it's a deeply researched, imaginatively conceived, & at times breathlessly expansive consideration of unexpected connections that can be drawn between modernist experimental writing & writers with the most glamorous stars of classic Hollywood. Whether comparing an "erotics of unattachment" in Nightwood & von Sternberg's Morocco or expanding on a peripheral biographical note that Larsen went & watched Cukor's Camille over & over in a time of crises & its possible subsequent influence on Quicksand , I was constantly dazzled by Dabashi's insights, & in turn found it deeply generative to my own thinking.
A tour-de-force, & a pleasure.
"Understanding what happened to plot in modernism thus involves understanding what happened to it in the cinema... Losing the Plot shows that while these writers were withdrawing from plot as the unwanted inheritance of the 19th century novel, they were also seeing legacies of it in the commercial narrative cinema—through which plot returns to the novel in a deeply ambivalent form."
January 18, 2024
Dabashi speaks with clarity and precision about the deeply and intimately felt experience of watching films and, in so doing, provides a detailed historical account of formative moments in Hollywood Cinema and the work of three authors that witnessed them.
Her analysis of the human desire for and attachment to normalcy, as it is expressed by the appeal of a 'secure narrative architecture' in fiction, shifts the terms of Modernism and the aesthetic principles most commonly associated with it.
For anyone interested in film analysis, Modernism, or how to write beautifully about the relationship between personal desire and art (and so the significance of biography to the task of interpretation), this book is necessary and wonderful reading.
Her analysis of the human desire for and attachment to normalcy, as it is expressed by the appeal of a 'secure narrative architecture' in fiction, shifts the terms of Modernism and the aesthetic principles most commonly associated with it.
For anyone interested in film analysis, Modernism, or how to write beautifully about the relationship between personal desire and art (and so the significance of biography to the task of interpretation), this book is necessary and wonderful reading.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews