@article{THESIS,
      recid = {12335},
      author = {Gortmaker, Christopher  Laurens},
      title = {The Market Architecture of Modernist Fiction},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2024-06},
      number = {THESIS},
      pages = {240},
      abstract = {Many accounts of Anglo-American modernist fiction  presuppose its postwar termination and the consequent  anachronism of its commitment to autonomous artistic form—a  commitment that is now often understood as a merely  sociological matter of taste and, as such, a dissimulation  of social reality. This dissertation challenges these  positions. Building on recent reappraisals of aesthetic  autonomy, I demonstrate how the modernist commitment to  art’s autonomy can be understood not only in more formally  rigorous and less sociological terms than are conventional  but also in more historically capacious terms. I explore  how a modernist principle of aesthetic autonomy emerges in  antagonism to fin-de-siècle processes of marketization and  persists today within fiction whose circulation is subsumed  by the market. I base this expanded periodization of  modernist fiction on an analysis of how works can assert  the autonomy of their aesthetic meaning in mass-market  contexts where this autonomy has not been analyzed as it  has been within the market-insulated contexts of canonical  modernism. Taking up key works of Anglo-American fiction  whose modernist form has been neglected or misunderstood, I  show how these works assert aesthetic autonomy through and  against the way they must fashion themselves for  mass-market circulation and, in this way, embody a form of  realism rooted in irony. What I call the “market  architecture” of modernist fiction consists of  medium-specific conceptual structures that transform the  external, instrumentalizing pressures of market demand into  internal, aesthetic problems of self-legislating form. By  analyzing the structuring presence of market architecture  in forms like popular genre fiction, experimental novels  about race, political performance art, and the contemporary  sequel novel, I show how cultural problems and projects  often deemed antithetical to autonomous art can actually be  intrinsic to it.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/12335},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.12335},
}