Pardis Dabashi's Losing the Plot revises the way modernist plot can be conceived in conversation with narrative film, though the two are rarely linked. At first, the book's aim is to show the breakdown of plot in nineteenth-century “realism.” After locating itself through various theoretical underpinnings, the book reaches toward “Hollywood mainstream cinema” as necessarily “palliative” for the three writers discussed: Nella Larsen, Djuna Barnes, and William Faulkner, finding more livability in silver-screen “plots.” If in their own work, they “lose the plot,” they are nevertheless drawn to narratives remarkably similar to those by Dickens, cited by Sergei Eisenstein as precursor to film through elaborate plot, textured montages, multiple voices. Dabashi ultimately calls for an “affective dimension,” the “feeling” element in her title, her authors, characters, and stars experiencing longing and loss.
Seemingly uninterested in definitive modernist boundaries, Dabashi corrals three specific writers between 1920 and 1940 who simultaneously resisted...
