Literature, Life, and Modernity (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Literature, Life, and Modernity James Searle Richard Eldridge . Literature, Life, and Modernity. New York: Columbia UP, 2008. xi + 178 pages. Richard Eldridge's Literature, Life, and Modernity attempts to formalize and think through several twentieth-century debates concerning the role of literature in the modern world, with an eye focused on specific philosophical issues. Eldridge, professor of philosophy at Swarthmore College, treats the three broader themes that make up his title in six chapters, each of which connects literary and philosophical texts. Central to Eldridge's argument is the idea of modernity as both a period of history and as a subjective condition of experience. Eldridge writes that within modernity, the stresses that force themselves into consciousness—stresses to which the work of art then responds—come increasingly from the late eighteenth century on to involve conflict between the claims of the sensible (what we discern and attach ourselves to through embodied feeling) and the intelligible (what we discern and attach ourselves to via distantiation and the controlled measurement of what there is)." (7–8) Modernity is understood through the duality Kant investigated in his third Critique, between concepts of nature and concepts of freedom—between an [End Page 1244] outward natural world of law (the sensible) and a world of human values and ideals (the intelligible). For Eldridge this duality establishes a tension which brings about anxiety, crisis, and a sense of hopelessness. The modern subject is faced with "either competitive individualism or competitive factionalism" and the "chances of learning to live out a common humanity with more depth become increasingly attenuated"—yet the murkiness of this description is manifest when we consider these experiences across a wider historical scope. Are these problems distinctively "modern" or are they perennial challenges humanity has faced? Regardless of problems concerning the concept of modernity, Eldridge's primary focus is on the opportunity for contemporary subjects to realize a more attentive, responsive, and wholehearted way of life through the study of literature (4). Today an author making claims for literary value or the value of a group of texts we can call literature faces a number of challenges that have destabilized the term "literature," first from theoretical questions concerning meaning (particularly in the practice of deconstruction following Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida), and, second, by the subsequent rise of American Cultural Studies in the early 1990s. Eldridge is aware of these challenges and tries to carve out a unique space for literature and literary value that responds both to the socio-historical and political questions Cultural Studies raises, as well as to epistemological and interpretive skepticism inherent in deconstruction. The theoretical concerns marked by these two approaches fit neatly into the story of modernity Eldridge is attempting to tell: both are responses to the tension between the causal world of material objects and the ideal of freedom for meaning-making human subjects. Towards the close of his introduction, "Subjectivity, Modernity, and the Uses of Literature," Eldridge asks: [W]hy then might anyone still bother with the vain effort to articulate what we say, feel, or respond to, knowing that any such effort is doomed to partiality and so to a form of failure? The worry is that without such efforts we abandon ourselves to a modern, materialist, competitive, value-denigrating individualism that destroys all circuits of the mimesis of response and so destroys the very life of subjectivity as such . . . . Hence it may be worthwhile, at least sometimes, to persist in the vain effort to form both communities of interpretation and evaluation and a more stable and fully invested life for individual subjectivity in and through the common acceptance of what we say. The effort to do this is a defining ambition for philosophy, literature, and criticism that it would be impoverishing to forego, however impossible it is to complete it. "Ich kann nicht anders." (25–26) One should be a bit hesitant to follow Eldridge down this road, giving up ground on the notion of something like definite meaning, only to adopt a soft sort of pragmatism. It is not so much that Eldridge's choice is the wrong one, but instead it signals the end of a line...