Unit:
Department of English Language and LiteratureLibrary of the School of Philosophy
Dissertation committee:
Μίνα Καραβαντά, Αναπληρώτρια Καθηγήτρια, Αγγλική Γλώσσα & Φιλολογία, ΕΚΠΑ.
Άννα Δεσποτοπούλου, Καθηγήτρια, Αγγλική Γλώσσα & Φιλολογία, ΕΚΠΑ.
Αγγελική Σπυροπούλου, Αναπληρώτρια Καθηγήτρια, Θεατρικές Σπουδές, Πανεπιστήμιο Πελοποννήσου.
Ασπασία Βελισσαρίου, Καθηγήτρια, Αγγλική Γλώσσα & Φιλολογία, ΕΚΠΑ.
Θανάσης Γκιούρας, Καθηγητής, Πολιτική Επιστήμη, Πανεπιστήμιο Κρήτης.
Εύη Μήτση, Καθηγήτρια, Αγγλική Γλώσσα & Φιλολογία, ΕΚΠΑ.
Αικατερίνη Κίτση-Μυτάκου, Αγλλική Λογοτεχνία, Αριστοτέλειο Πανεπιστήμιο Θεσσαλονίκης
Original Title:
Henry James, Dorothy Richardson, Walter Benjamin: Turn-of-the-Century Writing and the Benjaminian Archiving of the Modern
Translated title:
Henry James, Dorothy Richardson, Walter Benjamin: Turn-of-the-Century Writing and the Benjaminian Archiving of the Modern
Summary:
Drawing on the feverish archival impulse that pervades Walter Benjamin’s work and attests to his effort to rescue a specific experience of modernity from oblivion, I propose a comparative reading of Henry James’s and Dorothy M. Richardson’s work. The Portrait of the Lady (1881), the 1908 Preface to the novel, “The Real Thing” (1892), and the travelogue that records James’s 1905 return to the U.S, The American Scene (1907), are comparatively discussed with selections from Richardson’s thirteen volumes of her long novel Pilgrimage (1915-1935), her 1924 essay “About Punctuation,” and the 1938 Foreword to Pilgrimage. I argue that through the literary act James and Richardson construct a metaphorical archive-making that is thematically and methodologically comparable to the Benjaminian paradigm. James’s and Richardson’s literary archives offer insight into the late nineteenth-century city as the par excellence locus of western modernity, the gradual integration of professional women in the arena of the labor market, and modernism’s increasing focus on the common and the everyday, as well as on the material, the object, and the commodity. My aim is to show how the texts of James and Richardson formulate a rather intriguing turn-of-the-century genealogy of the modern subject as regards his/her experience of the mundane and the everyday. Urban spaces, class and labor power, and the object/thing or its manifestation as commodity persistently return in the texts as the thematic expressions of this modern quotidian, while both authors’ handling of their textual matter is performed in ways that are proleptic of Benjamin’s cultural critique on modernity.
Benjamin’s archival methodology, visible in a variety of his texts, offers a critical paradigm that provides fertile ground for a comparative reading with James and Richardson. Benjamin’s short pieces that comprise One-Way Street (1928), his selection of early life reminiscences as snapshots of experiences in Berlin Childhood around 1900 (1938), and the massive compendium of citations in The Arcades Project (1982) illustrate his persistent archival logic. The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928) presents a critical context in which the baroque is posited as an artistic paradigm to discuss the “immersion in the most minute details of subject matter” (34) and the effect of extinguishing “the false appearance of totality” (176). Written in the late 1930s, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (1969) offers the reading of Baudelaire as the par excellence modern poet violently thrust in the realities of urban commodity capitalism. The 1931 essay “Unpacking my Library” offers insight into the world of the collector and his objects, “The Storyteller” (1936) discusses the shortcomings of conveying experience in the modern world, and “The Author as producer” (1934) provides a contextual framework for the productive politics of authorship.
Three different but affiliated methodological tropes are discussed: The first is Benjamin’s spatio-temporal dialectics that telescope the past through the present, in other words, his tendency to read the historically sedimented layers in phenomena and things. The second method is his reverence for the minute, which I will argue microscopes the whole through the fragment by way of attending to the minor. Both methods are closely connected to Benjamin’s formulation of the dialectical image that showcases his dialectics at a standstill; the crucial moment when past knowledge and present perception are reconfigured, or the moment when the fragment is read to stand for the whole. The third methodological trope discussed in both James and Richardson is the fascination with the commodity that embeds texts within the capitalist context and bespeaks the commodification of human relations. In this context, I propose a reading of James’s and Richardson’s modernist writing that reveals the archival practice of the authors, a literary praxis that depicts the experience of the modern subject, which, in this constellation of texts, revolves around the notions of urban space, labor power/class status, and the commodity as capital, intertwining historical, cultural and materialist interests.
Main subject category:
Language – Literature
Keywords:
modernity, modernism, Benjamin, James, Richardson, capitalism, dialectical image, montage, class, labour power, commodity, city, archive, archiving.
Number of references:
315
