Harry Ransom Center - "A Continuous Present": The Long Sentence as a Novel Response to Contemporary Socio-political Disorder

My doctoral research provides the first study of the long sentence, focusing on its development, history, and its resurgence in contemporary Anglo-American fiction as a stylistic, narrative, and formal response to the pressures of neoliberalism, media hyper-saturation, and anthropogenic climate change. It is only the second sustained piece of research which prioritises the sentence. The sentence was a substantial site of modernist and postmodernist literary experimentation. As with its antecedents, contemporaneous use of the long sentence suggests wider formal and aesthetic shifts in literary form. Many of these prior examples are found in the Harry Ransom Center's extensive collection of modern and postmodern manuscripts. Access to this material would provide my work with vital historical examples of its aesthetic development, as well as material examples of possible editorial interventions in their construction. Archival research will focus on: "Handwritten draft and corrected galley proofs of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!" (containing some of the longest sentences ever written) essential to my introduction. The "extensive corrections" on the final manuscript proofs of Ulysses would shed light on Joyce's experimental methods which culminate with his definitional example of the long sentence. Gertrude Stein's letters would generate contextualising detail of the social conditions and networks which facilitated experiments with the sentence in Paris. The material on Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon will be essential in understanding the aesthetic shifts between the modernist and postmodern eras. The David Foster Wallace archive will contribute even more substantially to my work on the late-post-modernism of the early '00s.