Alfred Doblin Research Articles

Roland Dollinger , Wulf Koepke , Heidi Thomann Tewarson (review)

MLR, 100.2, 2005 561 sonae. The many myths which have emerged from this shifting self-depiction are examined by Anthony Northey in 'Myths and Realities in Kafka Biography', which provides a useful overview of the many misconceptions surrounding Kafka's life and work in an attempt to provide a clearer picture. Also valuable in providing orientation for scholars is Osman Durrani's contribution, 'Editions, Translations, Adaptations'. The inclusion of such a wide range of material in this volume makes it an ideal in? troduction to Kafka's work. The material is presented lucidly, and each contribution takes into account previous reception as well as presenting new readings and interpre? tations. The volume also benefits from English translations throughout, thus serving an interdisciplinary as well as a Germanist readership. The interdisciplinary value of the collection is further highlighted by the inclusion of Martin Brady's and Helen Hughes's contribution, 'Kafka Adapted to Film', which explores the problematic na? ture of bringing Kafka's work to the screen. This insightful study concludes by highlighting the tension between the consolidatory nature of filmas a synthesis of images, words, and sound, and the form of language employed by Kafka, which is embedded in the discreet and the moderate. It is this and similar tensions which have made Kafka the subject of so much scholarship and myth-creation in the years since his death. As a writer and a man, Kafka seems destined to remain at odds with a changing world. University of Wales, Bangor Carol Tully A Companion to the Works of Alfred Doblin. Ed. by Roland Dollinger, Wulf Koepke, and Heidi Thomann Tewarson. (Studies in German Literature, Lin? guistics and Culture) Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2004. xvi+ 309 pp. ?60; $85. ISBN 1-57113-124-8. The prolific work of Alfred Doblin, the 'German James Joyce', is virtually unknown in the Anglo-Saxon world. In Germany, there have been sporadic flurries of inter? est whenever leading authorities, notably Hans Mayer, Gunter Grass, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, have endeavoured to raise awareness of his influence. Herbert Ihering may have pleaded fora Nobel Prize, Lion Feuchtwanger may have serenaded Doblin as a second Homer, but among more recent tributes W. G. Sebald's reference, in his Der Mythus der Zerstorung im Werk Doblins (Stuttgart: Klett, 1980), to 'irritierende Gewalt' is not untypical. The present volume serves two purposes: to introduce the author to an Englishspeaking audience and to review his status within a wider context. The firstis an impossible task, given that only a minuscule proportion of Doblin's many sprawling novels, dramas, essays, autobiographical, philosophical, religious, and medical writ? ings in prose and in verse have ever appeared in English. One might have expected the chapter on Berlin Alexanderplatz to make specific reference to the sadly dated version by Eugene Jolas, but Gabriele Sander devotes much of her essay?translated from German?to literaryand linguistic influences from Goethe's Werthervia Schiller and Kleist to Keller and more ephemeral figures. This foray into intertextuality left me wondering if Sander's findings would enrich or frustrate our target readership's per? ception of the most accessible if not the most typical of Doblin's novels. The foreign reader, at least, is unlikely to be troubled by the designation of Hedwig CourthsMahler (whose firstnovel appeared in 1904) as a 'nineteenth-century' author. Several contributors revisit the ambiguity that determines Doblin's public standing . His articles were 'much criticized and much appreciated' (p. 8), his 'formally and thematically interesting' plays (ibid.) were rarely applauded, and reviews ranged 'from enthusiastic praise to total rejection' (p. 9). The public were either fascinated by his extraordinary imagination or repelled by the pomposity of his vision. Even Berlin 562 Reviews Alexanderplatz is presented in the editors' twenty-page introduction as only partially successful. Doblin's philosophy went largely unnoticed. It is easy to forgetthat this is the writer who provided, in Die Ermordung einer Butterblume, a paradigmatic model of Expressionist prose, the man who introduced Brecht to China and Grass to modernism, the only major novelist of the Weimar Republic to have experimented with science fiction,the inspiration behind Fassbinder's most ambitious film,and the author of the greatest...

A Companion to the works of Alfred Doblin

A Companion to the works of Alfred Doblin

The critical reception of Alfred Doblin's major novels

The critical reception of Alfred Doblin's major novels

Die Apokalypse in der Weimarer Republik by Jürgen Brokoff (review)

MLR, 98.4, 2003 1057 tion in a 1939 letter to his son Klaus, quoted here in Paul Bishop's illuminating essay on the intellectual world of Thomas Mann: 'But in the end, to inherit something, one has to understand it; inheritance is, after all, culture' (p. 41). University of California, Irvine Jens Rieckmann Doblin, die Stadt und das Licht. By Oliver Jungen. (Cursus, 15) Munich: Iudicium. 2001. 200 pp. ?16.50. ISBN 3-89129-465-4(pbk). It is not the least of the virtues of Oliver Jungen's study that it packs a great deal into a very brief compass, and italso packs a considerable (theoretical) punch. Almost half of the argument is taken up by a discussion of the implications of light and light imagery within the Western European tradition. They are (as one would imagine) manifold. There are, for example, weighty theological inflections to be noted, and also cultural-historical resonances (having to do, for example, with the metaphorics of Enlightenment, with the growth of the modern city as the site of technically producible light). Moreover, images of light being shed in dark places link suggestively with (often self-reflexive) notions about the work of art itself, with certain forms of divinatory reading, with manifestations of hermeneutic epiphany. Yet light has not been a universally welcome or beneficent phenomenon: light, in the form of torches, lamps, searchlights, can be symptomatic of surveillance and oppression. Oliver Jungen is marvellously alive to the range of his chosen theme and metaphor; and in the second part of his study he exemplifies the meaning(s) of light with refer? ence to Alfred Doblin's work. If I find the textually interpretative part of his study a little disappointing, it is, I suspect, because he chooses to range over the whole of Doblin's vast oeuvre. In the process we tend to be rushed from one example of light to the next, without time and space being allowed forthe thematic and stylistic instances to find their appropriate expressivity in the context of the individual works. However, I do not want to end on a negative note. Jungen's study is a lively and vigorous account of a key preoccupation of the modern literary imagination, and one is grateful for the range and urgency of his writing. University College London Martin Swales Die Apokalypsein der WeimarerRepublik. By Jurgen Brokoff. Munich: Fink. 2001. 187 pp. ?30.60. ISBN 3-7705-3603-7 (pbk). Jurgen Brokoff's book, the result ofthorough doctoral research, concentrates on an in? creasingly fashionable subject. Klaus Vondung, a venerable predecessor of Brokoff's, offeredan ambitious study of the topic, Die Apokalypse in Deutschland (Munich: dtv, 1988), which is both wider and less focused in terms of intent and design. Vondung's reader benefits from the vast panorama of the motif he sketches in the book and from the numerous parallels and rich allusions; but the inclination towards a certain omnivorousness is hard to miss: almost every conceivable fact and detail of German culture proves related to the apocalyptic in Vondung's interpretation. Brokoff is thus determined to delineate more acutely the boundaries of his subject, and he wisely suggests that he is not interested in the apocalyptic as a particular mental disposition or spiritual experience, but would rather explore it as a discursive formation by paying attention to the intersections between particular ideas and uses of language that produce the modern apocalyptic. To do so, he discusses the work of four authors: 1058 Reviews Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Jiinger, and Adolf Hitler, with one chapter devoted to each of the four, with the exception of Jiinger, who enjoys two chapters (on Der Arbeiter and on the war writings). Brokoff's choice is a safe one, and so are, for most of the time, his interpretations of these four authors. His decision to turn to Benjamin and Jiinger is well argued; the preference for Schmitt (who is totally absent from Vondung's book) and Hitler is understandable when itcomes to the need to examine specific ideas, but more difficult to sustain on the level of discourse analysis. Nevertheless, it is somewhat surprising to read a book on the apocalyptic...

Döblin, die Stadt und das Licht by Oliver Jungen (review)

MLR, 98.4, 2003 1057 tion in a 1939 letter to his son Klaus, quoted here in Paul Bishop's illuminating essay on the intellectual world of Thomas Mann: 'But in the end, to inherit something, one has to understand it; inheritance is, after all, culture' (p. 41). University of California, Irvine Jens Rieckmann Doblin, die Stadt und das Licht. By Oliver Jungen. (Cursus, 15) Munich: Iudicium. 2001. 200 pp. ?16.50. ISBN 3-89129-465-4(pbk). It is not the least of the virtues of Oliver Jungen's study that it packs a great deal into a very brief compass, and italso packs a considerable (theoretical) punch. Almost half of the argument is taken up by a discussion of the implications of light and light imagery within the Western European tradition. They are (as one would imagine) manifold. There are, for example, weighty theological inflections to be noted, and also cultural-historical resonances (having to do, for example, with the metaphorics of Enlightenment, with the growth of the modern city as the site of technically producible light). Moreover, images of light being shed in dark places link suggestively with (often self-reflexive) notions about the work of art itself, with certain forms of divinatory reading, with manifestations of hermeneutic epiphany. Yet light has not been a universally welcome or beneficent phenomenon: light, in the form of torches, lamps, searchlights, can be symptomatic of surveillance and oppression. Oliver Jungen is marvellously alive to the range of his chosen theme and metaphor; and in the second part of his study he exemplifies the meaning(s) of light with refer? ence to Alfred Doblin's work. If I find the textually interpretative part of his study a little disappointing, it is, I suspect, because he chooses to range over the whole of Doblin's vast oeuvre. In the process we tend to be rushed from one example of light to the next, without time and space being allowed forthe thematic and stylistic instances to find their appropriate expressivity in the context of the individual works. However, I do not want to end on a negative note. Jungen's study is a lively and vigorous account of a key preoccupation of the modern literary imagination, and one is grateful for the range and urgency of his writing. University College London Martin Swales Die Apokalypsein der WeimarerRepublik. By Jurgen Brokoff. Munich: Fink. 2001. 187 pp. ?30.60. ISBN 3-7705-3603-7 (pbk). Jurgen Brokoff's book, the result ofthorough doctoral research, concentrates on an in? creasingly fashionable subject. Klaus Vondung, a venerable predecessor of Brokoff's, offeredan ambitious study of the topic, Die Apokalypse in Deutschland (Munich: dtv, 1988), which is both wider and less focused in terms of intent and design. Vondung's reader benefits from the vast panorama of the motif he sketches in the book and from the numerous parallels and rich allusions; but the inclination towards a certain omnivorousness is hard to miss: almost every conceivable fact and detail of German culture proves related to the apocalyptic in Vondung's interpretation. Brokoff is thus determined to delineate more acutely the boundaries of his subject, and he wisely suggests that he is not interested in the apocalyptic as a particular mental disposition or spiritual experience, but would rather explore it as a discursive formation by paying attention to the intersections between particular ideas and uses of language that produce the modern apocalyptic. To do so, he discusses the work of four authors: ...

Literary Research: Narration and the Epistemology of the Human Sciences in Alfred Doblin

There are novels which display their characters in a constrained, ineluctable situation and observe plot development as in a laboratory-mostly, so as to count corpses at end. Such novels are poetic experiments, they probe cause and effect, rules and processes brought to light by their exemplary narratives. Their intent is less representational mimesis than an analysis of natural laws. They are, as Michel Butor put it, laboratoires du recit2 in which truth and knowledge are to be demonstrated based on evidence of a typical case. The literary experiment, like all research, is conducted in a given historical context of knowledge and knowable; it is part of an 'archive,' which Michel Foucault defined as the law of what can be said, system that governs appearance of statements as unique events.3 Literature explores this space of possible statements

Klaus-Dieter Bergner (review)

the lyric and the few dramas.Arnold's examination of Rene Schickele'santhology Menschliche Gedichte im Kriege highlights the importance of its thematic range as opposed to itsformalexperimentation.The contrastwith Sturm-Abende is well made, and a more balanced assessmentthan usualof the lesser-knownpoets emerges.This is generally a well-writtenbook, free fromjargon, that offersa useful surveyof the two periodicalsand theiroften neglected anthologies of lyrics. MELLEN UNIVERSITY, IOWA BRIANKEITH-SMITH NaturundTechnik inder Literatur desfriihen Expressionismus. ByKLAUS-DIETER BERGNER. Frankfurta.M.: Lang. 1998. 348 pp. (33. Klaus-Dieter Bergnerstateshis credentialsfrom the startas a concerned ecologist. Ginter Grass'sDieRdttin and CarlAmery'sDasGeheimnis der XKypta serveasexamples of recent specific warnings about and analyses of the dichotomy between nature and destructive technological progress, already traced in nineteenth-century and earlytwentieth-centuryscientificstudies.As a former studentof German literature and of biology, Bergneris well qualifiedto tacklethe early short storiesand novels of Alfred Doblin as writer and medical doctor. His analysis of the short stories, especially of 'Die Ermordung einer Butterblume' and 'Die Segelfahrt', take into accountpublishedresearchandrelatethesetextsto problemsof the self,the dualism between spiritand nature,the potentialforharmonywith nature,and the spectreof spiritualand biological regression.In his early prose worksDoblin accords nature an importantrole as a powerful and autonomous force, owing much to his reading of Spinoza and Nietzsche and balanced by precise experiments as a doctor. His emphasis on the independence of the human body from the will, and on the link between nature and man's animal forebears,allowed him to relate the mechanical world of the modern city to the world of ideas formulatedby the futurists.Bergner shows nature as the seniorpartnerto technology, operatingirrationallyas a cosmic force that can call man back to order when he strivesbeyond his allotted scope. Where Doblin portrays individuals striving away from this pattern, Benn shows individualsstrivingforunitywith it. A rich use of nature imagery that depicts man's place in an evolutionarysystem helped Benn to criticizethe emphasison a strangeindividualitythatisolatesitselfin the false belief that it can measure and explain everything. As an illusory compensation, Benn's Novellendescribe characters that long for moments of dionysiac ecstasy. This urge, summed up as the lure of the South, is not helped by technology. Benn's world of nature remains serenely indifferent to man's puny attemptsto come to termswith it. Carl Einstein's criticism of bourgeois culture, especially in the novel Bebuquin, focused on the loss of identity, and proposed madness as an apparent solution. Nature as a finallyinscrutableproblem presentsself-centredman with a challenge, faced by the dangers of destruction by mechanical forces. Even the mastery of nature through such achievements as street-lighting is revealed as an illusion, turningman into a two-dimensionalbeing with no innerspace of his own. The most original part of the book comes in the section on comparative use of vocabulary by the three writers for the fields of nature and technology, but also parts of the human body, medicine, science, architecture, and communications. Not surprisingly,the resultssupportthe findings of the earlier analyses, and in his final summing-up,Bergnerreworksthe contrastsby the threewritersin theiruse of nature, technology, and critique of civilization. Bergner contrasts the dominance today of technological advances with their works, where nature is already under the lyric and the few dramas.Arnold's examination of Rene Schickele'santhology Menschliche Gedichte im Kriege highlights the importance of its thematic range as opposed to itsformalexperimentation.The contrastwith Sturm-Abende is well made, and a more balanced assessmentthan usualof the lesser-knownpoets emerges.This is generally a well-writtenbook, free fromjargon, that offersa useful surveyof the two periodicalsand theiroften neglected anthologies of lyrics. MELLEN UNIVERSITY, IOWA BRIANKEITH-SMITH NaturundTechnik inder Literatur desfriihen Expressionismus. ByKLAUS-DIETER BERGNER. Frankfurta.M.: Lang. 1998. 348 pp. (33. Klaus-Dieter Bergnerstateshis credentialsfrom the startas a concerned ecologist. Ginter Grass'sDieRdttin and CarlAmery'sDasGeheimnis der XKypta serveasexamples of recent specific warnings about and analyses of the dichotomy between nature and destructive technological progress, already traced in nineteenth-century and earlytwentieth-centuryscientificstudies.As a former studentof German literature and of biology, Bergneris well qualifiedto tacklethe early short storiesand novels of Alfred Doblin as writer and medical doctor. His analysis of the short stories, especially of 'Die Ermordung einer Butterblume' and 'Die Segelfahrt', take into accountpublishedresearchandrelatethesetextsto problemsof the...

Todliche Prasens/zen. Uber die Philosophie des Literarischen bei Doblin

Dronske, Ulrich. Todliche Prasens/zen: Uber die Philosophie des Literarischen bei Alfred Doblin. Wurzburg. Konigshausen & Neumann,1998. 185 pp. DM 58.00 paperback. Despite its ambivalence, the book's concluding sentence contains a negative judgment when it states that Alexanderplatz lacks the minimal coherence that is shared by Doblin's other works. What Dronske really thinks of Dublin's other works of fiction remains unspoken since he restricts his analysis chiefly to the mentioned novel and to how it relates to a number of Dublin's theoretical works. The latter is where the real strength of this book lies since it gives the reader a view of Dublin's philosophy of nature and of literature, a view that is both informative and comprehensive considering the large body of relevant texts. Central to Donske's discussion of Dublin's philosophy of nature are the notions of the UrIch (Anonymous I of the World) and the beseelte Zeichen (Individual I's), which mutually reflect and condition each other. While the latter is in constant motion and breeds violence, the former is static and reaffirms order, with death being the unifying harmonizer between the two forces. Dublin's views on nature are directly connected to his theory of literature, especially his call for a rebirth of writing and his concurrent disparagement of the psychological novel. Although Dronske sees a certain continuity in what, at different stages of his development, Dublin defined as epic style (including the contemporaneity of events and their concentration on a moment in time as well as the independence of individual narrative parts), he also noted a progression from the writer's proclamation of the Berlin Program (the subtitle to the essay An Romanautoren and ihre Kritiker) of 1913 and his later essay of 1928, Der Bau des epischen Werks. Dublin's steinerner Stil (granite style) of sticking to empirical facts gradually gave way to a playful use of the freie Phantasie (inventive imagination). The common denominator between the two phases of development, as well as their joint link to Dublin's philosophy of nature, is reflected in the title of Dronske's book. Prasens stands for the author's intended immediacy of his narration in time; Prasenz for the element of the writer's representing things in a physically limited space; and todlich (deadly) refers both to the extinction of the individual in death and its simultaneous unification with the Ur-Ich and to the mortal crystallization of the spoken language (from which the emanates) in the literary work (die Verschriftung der Literatur). …

Franz Karl Biberkopf als sein-zum-tode. Das 'lied des todes' in Alfred Dôblins Berlin Alexanderplatz als vorlaufendes todesbewusstsein Heideggers

The critical literature on Alfred Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz offers many different readings of the novel's ending. Thus the question, whether the protagonist Franz Biberkopf follows a new individualism or finally fits into an understood community in the last chapters has not satisfactorily been answered. Yet there is agreement on two things. First, that a fundamental change takes place within Biberkopf and leads him to an elementary insight. Second, it is undoubtedly his encounter with death that gives rise to this insight. Proceeding from these assumptions, this article investigates the similarities of Berlin Alexanderplatz and Heidegger's philosophical theory. An existential-ontologic approach to the figure of death enables us to explain how Franz Biberkopf can survive his own death. Furthermore, this reading of the novel helps to clarify the seemingly inconsistent ending and tries to solve the antagonism between individualistic and collective interpretations.

»Unter den Hufen von Staat und Industrie«

Alfred Doblin’s criticism of »futurist« positions gives insight into one of the crucial questions of »Literaturwissenschaft«; the relations between rhetorical and literary techniques and modern, industrial technologies. From Walter Hollerer’s concept of »Language in the Age of Technology« to concepts of »Media History« Literary Criticism in Germany deals both with Technique as metaphor and metonomy. Traditionally, the »technical« discourse was marginalized. Critical equiry should apply insights of rhetorical theory as technology on the difference of arts and sciences, of »Worttechnik« and »Grostechnik«, and their reflection in literary criticism.

Some Theses Regarding Women's Writing

Born in Czechoslovakia, Libuše Moníková was one of two invited guest speakers at the 1996 Women in German annual conference in St. Augustine, Florida. Her works have been recognized with numerous prizes, including the Alfred Döblin Prize in 1987, the Franz Kafka Prize in 1989, the Adalbert von Chamisso Prize in 1991, and the Berliner Literaturpreis and the Johannes Bobrowski Medal in 1992. This essay was previously published in Die Zeit . A bibliography of the author's book-length works is appended to this essay.

Theorie und Praxis des Hörspiels

Reinhard Dohl’s topic deals with the medium radio. In the first part of his artic1e he presents this medium with regard to the genre of the radio play by examining its nonliterary aspects in early radio-plays written by Oskar Mohring and Alfred Doblin (»Biberkopf«). The second part analyzes theories on radio and radio plays at its early stage around the 1930s in connection with the contemporary political rightist and leftist tendencies and theories of intellectuals like Richard Kolb, Alfred Doblin, Arno Schirokauer, Hermann Pongs, Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin.

Franz Biberkopf und das Wissen des Wissens zum Schluss von Alfred Döblins Berlin Alexanderplatz unter der Perspektive Einer Theorie der Beobachtung der Beobachtung

The ending of Alfred Doblin's novel Berlin Alexanderplatz has been controversial in literary criticism from its first publication until today. Critics have either rejected the ending as being merely a philosophical, utopian, construction or tried to solve the supposed contradiction of an active and a passive attitude of the hero Franz Biberkopf by favouring one attitude or the other or, thirdly, have accepted the paradoxical coexistence of both attitudes without making rationally transparent the structure of that paradoxical coexistence itself. This article describes the hero's transition from first order to second order observation against the background of a concept of second order cybernetics as developed by G. Spencer Brown, G. Gunther and N. Luhmann. In this way it becomes possible to see the ending of the novel as logical and consistent both from a narratological and from an epistemological point of view.

Before the rainy season

A story of a Nazi fugitive in Bolivia. In a guarded hacienda a strange assortment of humanity is dependent on Heinrich von Ung, now known as Don Enrique. He lives in fear, and the older he gets, the more his fear grows. German author won the Alfred Doblin Prize for The Spectacle at the Tower.

The Berlin Novels of Alfred Doblin: Wadzek's Battle with the Steam Engine

The Berlin Novels of Alfred Doblin: Wadzek's Battle with the Steam Engine

Weimar Intellectuals and the Threat of Modernity

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION Part One: Tempted by Distance: Intellectuals and the Gey Republic Part Two: The Problem of Experience 1. The Threatened Self: Walter Rathenau and the Politics of Wholeness 2. Ulrich, a Life: Robert Musil and the Experiment of the Real 3. OPlacet Experiri?O Thomas Mann and the Charms of Entelechy Part Three: The Seductions of Redemption 4. Marxist Creationism: Walter Benjamin and the Authority of the Critic 5. The Magic Spaces of Terror: Ernst Junger and the Aesthetics of Authenticity 6. Redemptive Narration: Hermann Broch, Alfred Doblin, and the Metaphysics of Community Epilogue: That Certain Grey Veil of West German Boredom Notes Index

The Berlin novels of Alfred Doblin: Wadzek's Battle with the steam turbine, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Men without mercy, and November 1918

The Berlin novels of Alfred Doblin: Wadzek's Battle with the steam turbine, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Men without mercy, and November 1918

The Berlin Novels of Alfred Doblin. Wadzek's Battle with the Steam Turbine, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Men without Mercy, and November 1918

The Berlin Novels of Alfred Doblin. Wadzek's Battle with the Steam Turbine, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Men without Mercy, and November 1918

The language of violence in alfred döblin's novelberlin alexanderplatzand its translation into english

Summary The article concentrates on the language of violence as the novel Berlin Alexanderplatz by the German author Alfred Doblin manifests it, and the difficulties of translating these signs into the English language which has its own ritualised codes of action, ideologies and cultural associations as signs. Traditional imagery in the form of metaphor or personification is more or less transferable, but next to this Doblin works with song motifs which by means of association underpin the signs of violence and aggression inherent in everyday language. These motifs are autonomous images of substantiated figurativeness, to which the other images and metaphors are referred. The associative fields are very specific manifestations of the historical experience structures of the German language, whereas similar codifications, conventionalisations and typifications inherent in the English language are linked to different functions and significations. As a result the problem arises for the translator that, before...

The Vanishing Subject: Empirical Psychology and the Modern Novel

AbstractThe interaction between literature and psychology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is an important factor in the transition from realism to modernism. Empirical psychology, as developed by William James and Ernst Mach, unmasked the traditional concept of “self” as a delusion, replacing it by a new emphasis on the intentionality of consciousness. Writers such as Henry James, Robert Musil, and Hermann Broch had direct contact with empirical psychology and experimented overtly with modes of rendering this new understanding of consciousness; others, like Alfred Doblin or Virginia Woolf, while less directly influenced by empiricism, nonetheless reflect in their novels a similar attempt to abolish the “self” as a discrete entity. In this respect they differ radically from other modern novelists (e.g., Joyce and Faulkner), and they also resolve quite differently the technical problem of presenting consciousness in fiction.