The dissertation posits that the concept of improvisation is a key aspect of American modernism, enabling artists of the era to explore ways to articulate a form that is diverse and multicultural, yet unified without succumbing to homogeneity. With the nationalist concern during modernism of imagining America as distinctly different from European traditions, the idea of America as a nation of democracy, still in the process of making itself, provided a significant symbolic form for the intellectuals and artists of American modernism to articulate their own version of what the nation and its art should be. This “still in the making” image of America provides a fundamental backdrop for the culture of improvisation in American modernism. Through improvisation, the authors of American modernism incorporate the dissident voices of the Other into their writing, cultivating their own aesthetic theories and practices to shape a yet-to-be-realized community of the unknown future. While the pragmatist philosophy of William James and John Dewey reveals a form of improvisational thinking, and the emergence of jazz offers an exemplary practice of musical improvisation, the dissertation instead investigates the American literary modernists’ utilization of both the practice and theory of improvisation. The Introduction lays out how improvisation can be situated within the particular intellectual context of American modernism, introducing key concepts about improvisation, such as “process,” “negotiation,” and “problem-finding,” by referring to discussions in the field of critical studies of improvisation. The first chapter repositions Anzia Yezierska, an immigrant Jewish writer, within a critical framework traditionally associated with jazz and other African American improvisational cultures, investigating how she challenges assimilationist narratives by employing improvisational aesthetics to articulate the “otherness” of her immigrant experience. Subsequent three chapters explore William Carlos Williams’s engagement with improvisation both as a practice and as a theory. Moral perfectionism, a concept linked to Emerson but distinct from pragmatism, allows for a broader exploration of improvisation within the American intellectual tradition, highlighting Williams’s vision of a democratic America characterized by diversity and an authentic American expression. The dissertation also investigates the influence of physiology on Williams’s poetics, particularly his integration of medical knowledge into his literary work, positioning his body as an automatic writing machine. By investigating the nineteenth-century intellectual context about the body/machine dynamic and the technological and gender shift in writing, it becomes clear how Williams’s improvisation shares the same context with the automatic writings by spiritualists, psychologists, and physiological devices. The final chapter examines Claude McKay’s Banjo: A Story without a Plot, using Michel de Certeau’s theory of tactics to understand improvisation as a vehicle for spontaneous, self-organized resistance against oppressive nation-states. This analysis places McKay’s work in a broader conversation about imperialism and colonization, challenging the notion of jazz as a uniquely American phenomenon and portraying improvisational music culture on a transatlantic scale. Overall, this dissertation unveils the culture of improvisation in American modernism as a complex, multifaceted entity that interacts with the aesthetic and political discourses of a nation “still in the making,” offering new insights into the interplay of improvisation with racial, ethnic, and national identities.

During his stay in Europe in 1924, William Carlos Williams composed an unfinished manuscript
titled “Rome.” In this work, he bridges the gap between the spontaneity of improvisational prose
and the clarity of his objective verse. To illuminate both the work itself and the role of Williams’s
improvisations in the development of his materialist poetics, this essay examines“ Rome” alongside A
Voyage to Pagany, a closely related novel, from the perspective of self-transformation.
In “Rome,” Williams links the purification of words through improvisation with the dissipation
of the habitual self into transparent clarity. A notable section in “Rome” illustrates the author’s
deconstruction of self, which can also be interpreted as a precursor to his objective poetry. Drawing a
parallel between the essential elements of self and disassembled, polished components of a machine,
this passage reveals how Williams nurtured the concept of a poem, resembling a machine, as an
autonomous work of art rooted in the dissipation of the author’s self to subordinate it to the“ will” of
language.
A Voyage to Pagany reinforces this perspective by depicting a scene in which an artist
imaginatively morphs into “a steam engine with eyes” and prepares to appreciate the pluralistic
beauty of the world, a central ideal in Williams’s poetry.
The essay then analyzes a passage from Williams’s collaborative improvisation, “Man Orchid,”
to highlight the limitations of the author’s pluralist poetics within the context of self-transformation.
Although the poet’s transformation of self as a pure medium of language allows him to embrace
the beauty of a pluralistic universe, this approach inadvertently manifests as a form of whiteness, as
it objectifies the complex realities experienced by people of other races and reduces them to mere
subjects for artistic appreciation.