The interpellated subject -- The void of subjectivity -- The subject in process -- Spatialized subjectivity -- The negation of subjectivity.
Summary:
""Modernism and Subjectivity: How Modernist Fiction Invented the Postmodern Subject" 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. Adam Meehan finds versions of this 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 in a selection of works published between 1904 and 1941. Detailed close readings of novels by Samuel Beckett, Joseph Conrad, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Nathanael West, and Virginia Woolf establish that subjectivity in the modernist novel is conceptualized as an ideological and linguistic construction which 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"-- Provided by publisher.
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