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The Vanishing Subject - Early Psychology and Literary Modernism (Hardcover, New)
Loot Price: R1,489
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The Vanishing Subject - Early Psychology and Literary Modernism (Hardcover, New)
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Total price: R1,509
Discovery Miles: 15 090
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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.
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