Audrey Jaffe's paper offers a backdrop to the panel’s modernist emphasis, pointing out that the novel has long relied on its ability to trouble traditionally recognized boundaries: between self and other; interior and exterior; thought and speech. Emphasizing generic difference, however, Dickens presented his early novel Oliver Twist as a superior alternative to stage melodrama. Prompted by a scene of reading from that novel, in which the Newgate Calendar’s pages are said to turn “red with gore” as its descriptions of bloody executions transform Oliver into the rapt and terrified spectator of his own mental productions, “The Novel as Mental Melodrama” explores the relation between such depictions of porousness and the novel’s own generic concerns.

Beth Blum will consider the phenomenon of “self-talk” in modernist fiction. Self-talk designates moments where the mind speaks to itself, addressing itself as the sole intended recipient of its remarks. The ostensibly “private” speech of self-talk reveals the incursion of the social into moments of deep interiority, suggesting that we are never free of others or untainted by their imagined presence. This self-consciousness has temporal implications, for even the solitary present is punctured by projections and replayings. Self-talk shows characters not synchronized with the present but estranged from it, whether through anticipation, remediation, or self-direction. In this way, self-talk adds a new dimension to considerations of modernist temporality; rather than stressing “pure duration,” as modernist stream of consciousness is thought to do, self-talk indicates the challenge of trying to achieve presence of mind in the midst of urban stimulation, domestic anxiety, and crisis.

Zoë Henry will turn our attention to the theatricality of Black fiction. After publishing The Street in 1946, Harlem Renaissance novelist Ann Petry retreated from public life, though she did not stop writing about the tension between the Black woman’s interiority amidst the demands of urban sociality. Her final novel, The Narrows (1953), features a Black female landlady who oversees the intimacies of a working-class apartment complex in a fictional New England city. This paper reads the landlady as theatrical spectator and stage director of her tenants, who ultimately introjects their movements as a kind of mental play. Petry thus draws on the conventions of the theater in representing the inner life of a complicated character, as it unfolds in concert with the needs and movements of the novel’s public others.

Elinor Hitt will discuss two pairings of Irish and American texts that bookend the modernist period—each demonstrating how dance scenes can stretch the novel form to its limits, giving outward, choreographic shape to interior experiences. Considering dance scenes in Ulysses (1922) and Quicksand (1928), she observes how James Joyce and Nella Larsen transfer the Austenian trope of the neighborhood ball onto hedonistic backdrops in Dublin and Harlem, alongside Lucky’s dance in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953) and the “dancing doll” episode in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), which exemplify how writers were representing dance in a more self-consciously theatrical way by mid-century. By imagining or watching dance, the onlooking characters and the readers or viewers intuitively rehearse or reenact the performer’s movements within their own bodies, getting a feel for otherwise private experiences of subjugation or exclusion. Hitt draws on work by Ellison, Susan Foster, and Henri Bergson to illustrate the interplay of dance, empathy, and interiority in the novel.