The sublime text: Journeys toward consciousness in Henry James, Edith Wharton, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Leaving the house of the father, walking the city of others, and entering the text of consciousness.
Item
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Title
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The sublime text: Journeys toward consciousness in Henry James, Edith Wharton, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Leaving the house of the father, walking the city of others, and entering the text of consciousness.
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Identifier
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AAI9630441
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identifier
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9630441
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Creator
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Brooks, Catherine.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Joan Richardson
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Date
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1996
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American | Literature, Modern
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Abstract
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Between the 1880s and the 1920s, three American novelists, Henry James, Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald transform the nineteenth-century English novel of social manners into a twentieth-century American text of consciousness. Their themes and voices, in an American conversation familiar since Emerson's transcendental idealism and William James's moral pragmatism, explore conscious elisions of agency and temporality. A new complicity between reader, narrator, character, and author emerges in this turn-of-the-century novel form.;Their heroines and heroes emerge from the social environment of the nineteenth-century novel--built from metaphors of marriage, home, and moral knowledge--to undertake a journey toward consciousness, the construction of a textual home for twentieth-century metaphors of change, uncertainty and consciousness. Figuratively, they turn away from the social mirror of the nineteenth-century English novel, replacing the house of the heroine's father/husband, to initiate the interior conversation of the twentieth-century novel, an imaginatively constructed text for consciousness, occasions for intense explorations of art, experience, and spirit within the text.;Consciousness and potentiality overcome perception and experience, to create texts capable of encompassing the alert, highly unstable senses of the modern heroine as well as the new and changing forces of the world she inhabits. Catherine Sloper locks herself inside her father's house with her "morsel of fancy work," Isabel Archer chooses the husband who will collaborate in her psychic self-immolation, and Maggie Verver labors over the "pagoda in the air" from which she can exercise an author's control, but not a lover's collusion. Lily Bart burns the letters which tie her to social engagement, choosing the deathly dream of perfect words and perfect love. Jay Gatsby and Dick Diver represent the ultimate transfiguration of the "only personal" conflicted and tragic modern hero into an artist of timelessness. By their art these heroines and heroes both affirm and conquer the power of time over experience, and of the text over the world.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy Restricted.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.