Modernism, Narrative and HumanismCambridge University Press, 2002 M08 1 - 234 pages In Modernism, Narrative and Humanism, Paul Sheehan attempts to redefine modernist narrative for the twenty-first century. For Sheehan modernism presents a major form of critique of the fundamental presumptions of humanism. By pairing key modernist writers with philosophical critics of the humanist tradition, he shows how modernists sought to discover humanism's inhuman potential. He examines the development of narrative during the modernist period and sets it against, among others, the nineteenth-century philosophical writings of Schopenhauer , Darwin and Nietzsche. Focusing on the major novels and poetics of Conrad, Lawrence, Woolf and Beckett, Sheehan investigates these writers' mistrust of humanist orthodoxy and their consequent transformations and disfigurations of narrative order. He reveals the crucial link between the modernist novel's narrative concerns and its philosophical orientation in a book that will be of compelling interest to scholars of modernism and literary theory. |
Contents
1 | |
1 Narrating the animal amputating the soul | 24 |
homo ex machina | 56 |
after the fall | 87 |
time out of mind | 121 |
voices descant stories still | 150 |
CONCLUSION Humanness unbound | 180 |
Notes | 193 |
217 | |
231 | |
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Common terms and phrases
aesthetic animal anthropometric anthropomorphisation anthropos antihumanism Beckettian become beginning Bergson Bildung Bildungsroman Birkin Cambridge University Press causal chapter characters Chicago Clarissa cogito compulsion condition consciousness contingency critical cultural D. H. Lawrence Dalloway darkness Darwin Dasein death Descartes discontinuity discourse entity ethical evolution existence experience fiction Foucault's Harmondsworth Heidegger Heidegger's Heideggerian human humanist Ibid immanent impersonality individual inhuman Joseph Conrad kind Lawrence's Lawrentian Levinas living London Lord Jim machine man's Marx means mechanical mechanistic metaphysical mind modernist modernist novel Molloy moral narrative form narrativisation narrativistic narrator nature Nietzsche Nietzsche's nonhuman Nostromo novelistic Oxford parahuman Penguin Phenomenology philosophical posthuman potential Ramsay recognises relationship Routledge Samuel Beckett scepticism Schopenhauer Schopenhauer's Schopenhauerian sense Septimus social Sons and Lovers soul story struggle subjectivity suggests temporal theoretical theory things thought tion tradition transcendence transformation trilogy trope uncertainty unconscious voice Women in Love Woolf writes York