The Modernist Imagination: Education of the Senses in Woolf, Mann and Joyce

• Main Author: Lee, SunJoo
• Other Authors: Christensen, Paul
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: Modern Literature; British and Irish Literature; Comparative Literature; German Literature; Virginia Woolf; Thomas Mann; James Joyce; Theodor Adorno; Gaston Bachelard; Critical Theory; Phenomenology
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2011-05-9248

This dissertation examines literary modernism as foremost an endeavor that concerns the imagination. Gaston Bachelard, whose studies on material and dynamic imagination provide the theoretical underpinning for the dissertation, defined the imagination as "nothing other than the subject transported inside the things." Reformulation of subject-object relations, clearly suggested in that definition, is indeed an important element in the aesthetics of Bachelard and that of Adorno, another thinker whose thought informs the dissertation. As the principle behind modernist responses to the crisis of the modern world, the crisis Georg Lukács captured in the phrase "transcendental homelessness," reformulation of subject-object relations impels the mobilization of creative energies in the way that may very well be called "the modernist imagination." I first state the premise for the dissertation and situates it in the present landscape of modernist scholarship. Then I examine Adorno and Bachelard at the intersections of their thoughts, in preparation for a theory of the modernist imagination. Next I consider Mrs. Dalloway as a modernist probing of the sensual, in which familiar dualisms – subject vs. object, the external vs. internal, life vs. death, mind vs. body – collapse. Following this, I examine The Magic Mountain as an attempt at what Adorno calls materialist metaphysics. The novel's preoccupation with death in all its aspects, its problematizing of the human body and the imagination of cold are examined in light of Adorno's view on reviving metaphysics in modernity. Then I read in Ulysses water's lyricism, a lyricism learned from water, into which important modernist themes (not least the ones considered previously in the dissertation) converge. Lastly I look at a film – Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris – and a science fiction novel from the 1950s – Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 – in light of what may be called the "philosophy" of modernism. The spirit of modernism – the primacy of the object as a modernist dictum, modernism‘s resistance to identity thinking and its dismantling of dualisms – is shown to continue in genres other than literature and in the period now called "post"-modern.