Under construction: infrastructure and modern fiction

Abstract

In this dissertation, I argue that infrastructural development, with its technological promises but widening geographic disparities and social and environmental consequences, informs both the narrative content and aesthetic forms of modernist and contemporary Anglophone fiction. Despite its prevalent material forms—roads, rails, pipes, and wires—infrastructure poses particular formal and narrative problems, often receding into the background as mere setting. To address how literary fiction theorizes the experience of infrastructure requires reading “infrastructurally”: that is, paying attention to the seemingly mundane interactions between characters and their built environments. The writers central to this project—James Joyce, William Faulkner, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Mohsin Hamid—take up the representational challenges posed by infrastructure by bringing transit networks, sanitation systems, and electrical grids and the histories of their development and use into the foreground. These writers call attention to the political dimensions of built environments, revealing the ways infrastructures produce, reinforce, and perpetuate racial and socioeconomic fault lines. They also attempt to formalize the material relations of power inscribed by and within infrastructure; the novel itself becomes an imaginary counterpart to the technologies of infrastructure, a form that shapes and constrains what types of social action and affiliation are possible