Modernism and Subjectivity
Modernism and Subjectivity

Author: Adam Meehan

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2020-06-03

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 0807173592

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In Modernism and Subjectivity: How Modernist Fiction Invented the Postmodern Subject, Adam Meehan argues that theories of subjectivity coming out of psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and adjacent late-twentieth-century intellectual traditions had already been articulated in modernist fiction before 1945. Offering a bold new genealogy for literary modernism, Meehan finds versions of a postmodern subject embodied in works by authors who intently undermine attempts to stabilize conceptions of identity and who draw attention to the role of language in shaping conceptions of the self. Focusing on the philosophical registers of literary texts, Meehan traces the development of modernist attitudes toward subjectivity, particularly in relation to issues of ideology, spatiality, and violence. His analysis explores a selection of works published between 1904 and 1941, beginning with Joseph Conrad’s prescient portrait of the subject interpolated by ideology and culminating with Samuel Beckett’s categorical disavowal of the subjective “I.” Additional close readings of novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Nathanael West, and Virginia Woolf establish that modernist texts conceptualize subjectivity as an ideological and linguistic construction that reverberates across understandings of consciousness, race, place, and identity. By reconsidering the movement’s function and scope, Modernism and Subjectivity charts how profoundly modernist literature shaped the intellectual climate of the twentieth century.

Modernity and Subjectivity
Modernity and Subjectivity

Author: Harvie Ferguson

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9780813919669

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Few concepts have come to dominate the human sciences as much as modernity, yet there is very little agreement over what the term actually means. Every aspect of contemporary human reality--modern society, modern life, modern times, modern art, modern science, modern music, the modern world--has been cited as a part of modernity's distinctive and all-embracing presence. But what is the exact nature of the reality to which the term modern refers? Has not such a promiscuous, ill-defined concept come to obscure and confuse rather than clarify a genuine understanding of our experience? Harvie Ferguson proposes a new view of modernity, arguing that, although it may variously be associated with the Renaissance, the European discovery of the New World, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, and many other significant ruptures with primitive or premodern society, modernity fails as an idea if it only defines itself against what it replaced. Instead, he writes, modernity finds its clearest definition through an exploration of subjectivity. For the modern world there is no higher authority than experience. No longer is the human world subordinate to a divine reality beyond the capacity of its own senses. This idea finds its greatest expression in the philosophy of doubt originated by Descartes. Doubt seemed the radical starting point from which to found a wholly modern philosophy that makes the distinction between subject and object, but those who came after Descartes soon reached the limits of self-discovery and became trapped in deepening levels of despair. This despair in turn found expression in the concepts of self and other, and eventually in a dialectic of ego and world, which distinguishes and links together the most important social, cultural, and psychological aspects of modernity. Moving beyond these dualities of subject and object, mind and body, ego and world, and replacing them with the triad of body, soul, and spirit, Ferguson redraws the map of contemporary experience, finding links with the premodern world that modernity's self-founding concealed.

Modernism and Subjectivity
Modernism and Subjectivity

Author: Adam Meehan

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2020-06-03

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 0807173584

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In Modernism and Subjectivity: How Modernist Fiction Invented the Postmodern Subject, Adam Meehan argues that theories of subjectivity coming out of psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and adjacent late-twentieth-century intellectual traditions had already been articulated in modernist fiction before 1945. Offering a bold new genealogy for literary modernism, Meehan finds versions of a postmodern subject embodied in works by authors who intently undermine attempts to stabilize conceptions of identity and who draw attention to the role of language in shaping conceptions of the self. Focusing on the philosophical registers of literary texts, Meehan traces the development of modernist attitudes toward subjectivity, particularly in relation to issues of ideology, spatiality, and violence. His analysis explores a selection of works published between 1904 and 1941, beginning with Joseph Conrad’s prescient portrait of the subject interpolated by ideology and culminating with Samuel Beckett’s categorical disavowal of the subjective “I.” Additional close readings of novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Nathanael West, and Virginia Woolf establish that modernist texts conceptualize subjectivity as an ideological and linguistic construction that reverberates across understandings of consciousness, race, place, and identity. By reconsidering the movement’s function and scope, Modernism and Subjectivity charts how profoundly modernist literature shaped the intellectual climate of the twentieth century.

The Subject of Modernity
The Subject of Modernity

Author: Anthony J. Cascardi

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1992-03-19

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780521423786

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The question of modernity has provoked a vigorous debate in the work of thinkers from Hegel to Habermas. Anthony J. Cascardi offers an historical account of the origins and transformations of the rational subject of self as it is represented in Descartes, Cervantes, Pascal, Hobbes and the Don Juan myth.

Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject
Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject

Author: K. Michael Hays

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9780262581417

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Drawing on both the work of modern theorists like Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Siegfried Kracauer, and more recent poststructuralist thought, K. Michael Hays creates an entirely new method of reading architectural production. Drawing both on the work of modern theorists like Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Siegfried Kracauer and on more recent poststructuralist thought, K. Michael Hays creates an entirely new method of reading architectural production. Challenging much of the traditional wisdom about modernism and the avant-garde, Hays argues that a rigorously articulated "posthumanist" position was actually developed in the modernist architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer. He reinterprets their buildings, projects, and writings as constructions of this new category of subjectivity.

The Senses of Modernism
The Senses of Modernism

Author: Sara Danius

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2019-01-24

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 150172116X

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In The Senses of Modernism, Sara Danius develops a radically new theoretical and historical understanding of high modernism. The author closely analyzes Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, and James Joyce's Ulysses as narratives of the sweeping changes that affected high and low culture in the age of technological reproduction. In her discussion of the years from 1880 to 1930, Danius proposes that the high-modernist aesthetic is inseparable from a technologically mediated crisis of the senses. She reveals the ways in which categories of perceiving and knowing are realigned when technological devices are capable of reproducing sense data. Sparked by innovations such as chronophotography, phonography, radiography, cinematography, and technologies of speed, this sudden shift in perceptual abilities had an effect on all arts of the time.Danius explores how perception, notably sight and hearing, is staged in the three most significant modern novels in German, French, and British literature. The Senses of Modernism connects technological change and formal innovation to transform the study of modernist aesthetics. Danius questions the longstanding acceptance of a binary relationship between high and low culture and describes the complicated relationship between modernism and technology, challenging the conceptual divide between a technological culture and a more properly aesthetic one.

Modernism and Mimesis
Modernism and Mimesis

Author: Stephen D. Dowden

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-09-26

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 3030531341

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This book offers a bold new view of the way in which modernist fiction, painting, music, and poetry are interlinked. Dowden shows that modernism, contrary to a longstanding view, did not turn away from mimesis. Rather, modernism operates according to a deepened understanding of what mimesis is and how it works, which in turn occasions a fresh look at other related dimensions of the modernist achievement. Modernism is neither “difficult” nor elitist. Instead, it trends toward simplicity, directness, and common culture. Dowden argues that naïveté rather than highbrow sophistication was for the modernists a key artistic principle. He demonstrates that modernism, far from glorifying subjective creativity, directs itself toward healing the split between subject and object. Mimesis closes this gap by resolving representation into play and festivity.

The Vanishing Subject
The Vanishing Subject

Author: Judith Ryan

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1991-10-08

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780226732268

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Is thinking personal? Or should we not rather say, "it thinks," just as we say, "it rains"? In the late nineteenth century a number of psychologies emerged that began to divorce consciousness from the notion of a personal self. They asked whether subject and object are truly distinct, whether consciousness is unified or composed of disparate elements, what grounds exist for regarding today's "self" as continuous with yesterday's. If the American pragmatist William James declared himself, on balance, in favor of a "real and verifiable personal identity which we feel," his Austrian counterpart, the empiricist Ernst Mach, propounded the view that "the self is unsalvageable." The Vanishing Subject is the first comprehensive study of the impact of these pre-Freudian debates on modernist literature. In lucid and engaging prose, Ryan traces a complex set of filiations between writers and thinkers over a sixty-year period and restores a lost element in the genesis and development of modernism. From writers who see the "self" as nothing more or less than a bundle of sensory impressions, Ryan moves to others who hesitate between empiricist and Freudian views of subjectivity and consciousness, and to those who wish to salvage the self from its apparent disintegration. Finally, she looks at a group of writers who abandon not only the dualisms of subject and object, but dualistic thinking altogether. Literary impressionism, stream-of-consciousness and point-of-view narration, and the question of epiphany in literature acquire a new aspect when seen in the context of the "psychologies without the self." Rilke's development of a position akin to phenomenology, Henry and Alice James's relation to their psychologist brother, Kafka's place in the modernist movements, Joyce's rewriting of Pater, Proust's engagement with contemporary thought, Woolf's presentation of consciousness, and Musil's projection of a utopian counter-reality are problems familiar to readers and critics: The Vanishing Subject radically revises the way we see them.