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ABSTRACT Title of Document: BRITISH MODERNIST ... - DRUM

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section one<br />

LINGUISTIC LEPROSY<br />

Allegro non troppo<br />

sexshuntwo<br />

THE CASE OF THE<br />

MISSING (RE)MEMBER<br />

Andante<br />

section three<br />

DE REBUS<br />

Scherzo and Fugue<br />

section four<br />

LET IT ALL COME BREAKDOWN<br />

Allegro Energico e Passionato<br />

CODETTA<br />

Più allegro<br />

While each section <strong>of</strong> In Transit has, to a certain extent, its own themes and its own<br />

poetics, the middle which takes us from Section 2 to Section 3 represents a<br />

fundamental shift in the novel’s dominant. We can see this reflected in the section<br />

titles themselves. LINGUISTIC LEPROSY foregrounds both language and<br />

disintegration, both prototypical modernist concerns. The chapter itself follows the<br />

narrator’s decision to remain in the international transit lounge <strong>of</strong> an airport,<br />

memories <strong>of</strong> childhood trauma and transplantation from Ireland to England, as well as<br />

the difficulties <strong>of</strong> knowing the world through language, especially given the<br />

internationalization <strong>of</strong> language(s). THE CASE OF THE MISSING (RE)MEMBER,<br />

as a title, echoes detective fiction, McHale’s genre-fiction twin <strong>of</strong> modernism. It<br />

concerns the narrator’s struggle to determine his or her gender. Both <strong>of</strong> these sections<br />

take place in a stable, realistic world—the difficulty for both narrator and reader is in<br />

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