The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism

Abstract

Is thinking personal? Or should we not rather say, it thinks, just as we say, it rains? In late nineteenth century a number of emerged that began to divorce consciousness from notion of a personal 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 as continuous with yesterday's. If American pragmatist William James declared himself, on balance, in favor of a real and verifiable personal identity which we feel, his Austrian counterpart, empiricist Ernst Mach, propounded view that the self is unsalvageable. The Vanishing Subject is first comprehensive study of 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 genesis and development of modernism. From writers who see 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 self from its apparent disintegration. Finally, she looks at a group of writers who abandon not only dualisms of subject and object, but dualistic thinking altogether. Literary impressionism, stream-of-consciousness and point-of-view narration, and question of epiphany in literature acquire a new aspect when seen in context of psychologies without self. Rilke's development of a position akin to phenomenology, Henry and Alice James's relation to their psychologist brother, Kafka's place in 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 way we see them.