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The Post-Expressivist Turn: Four American Novels and the Author-Function” Proposes a Model of the Author-Function As a “Diagnostic” Tool

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The Post-Expressivist Turn: Four American Novels and the Author-Function” Proposes a Model of the Author-Function As a “Diagnostic” Tool The Post-Expressivist Turn: Four American Novels and the Author-Function. Mark Caldicott Department of English, University of Adelaide Submitted for the Degree of PhD in May 2005 for my Mother and Father Contents. Introduction. 1 1. From Romanticism to Poststructuralism: A Critical Account of the Author-Function. 6 - The Rise of the Expressivist Model of the Author 15 - Problematising the Model of the Expressivist Author 24 - Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels 32 - Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault 34 - The Author-Function: Towards a Workable Diagnostic 44 2. Contextualising the Author: The Bostonians. 56 - Situating James’s Narrative Viewpoint 58 - The American Literary Tradition in Relation to The Bostonians 71 - The Bostonians: A Contextual Model of the Author-Function 93 - James’s Break with the Expressivist Author 107 3. Modernism, the End of Modernity, and the Problem of Narrative Viewpoint: The Great Gatsby. 117 - The Great Gatsby and the End of the Modern Ethos 119 - Traditional Interpretations of Narrative Viewpoint in The Great Gatsby 127 - Callahan’s Reinterpretation of Narrative Viewpoint in The Great Gatsby 134 - The Great Gatsby and the Problem of Modernism 142 - The Great Gatsby and the Author-Function 177 4. Denaturalising a Modernist Poetics: V. 183 - Benny Profane and Herbert Stencil: The Problem of Viewpoint 185 - The V.-Histories and the Problem of Historical Understanding 201 - V. as a Work of Late Modernism 209 - V. as a Critique of a High Modernist Poetics 216 - The Operation of the Author-Function in V. 224 iii 5. Enunciating the Text: Democracy. 231 - The Problematic of Viewpoint in Democracy 233 - Democracy and the Question of Postmodernism 242 - The Author-Function and the Act of the Enunciation 254 - The Enunciation, Democracy, and Modernity 259 - The Bostonians to Democracy: The Post-Expressivist Turn 288 Conclusion. 298 Works Consulted. 306 iv Abstract. “The Post-Expressivist Turn: Four American Novels and the Author-Function” proposes a model of the author-function as a “diagnostic” tool. An “author-centred” mode of critique can interrogate the hegemonic narrative of liberal humanism, or “liberal modernity”, in Western culture. The argument in this thesis proceeds from the recognition that the hegemonic convention of the author in contemporary Western culture (that is, the “expressivist” convention of the author) has been disarmed of its claims to ideological innocence and commonsensicality. This thesis utilises the insights of poststructuralism, specifically the discourse theory of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, to deploy a new model of the author- function which foregrounds the ideological and discursive precepts that the expressivist model of the author has been assumed to transcend. The thesis examines four novels: The Bostonians by Henry James, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, V. by Thomas Pynchon, and Democracy by Joan Didion. Taken together, these encompass a hundred-year trajectory defined by the literary schools of late realism (The Bostonians), modernism (The Great Gatsby), late modernism (V.), and postmodernism (Democracy). Each of these novels is deployed as a stage in a cumulative trajectory which foregrounds a “post-expressivist” operation of the author. This post-expressivist model of the author presumes no claims to epistemological self-evidence or commonsensicality. Consequently, the author-function in each of these novels is freed from its traditionally displaced, reified position in the cultural milieu. Instead, the author is re-engaged in the Western body politic as a discursively- situated material event. It is this discursive engagedness which once more installs the author as a productive diagnostic, as a productive means of interrogation of the hegemony of liberal modernity. This is effected through an interrogation by this post- expressivist author-model of the perceived efficacy of the project of American liberal humanism as a basis for the realisation of a democratic, rational utopia. In tracing a progressive denaturalisation of the author as an extra-contextual function (The Bostonians), through to a foregrounding of the author as an enunciative function (Democracy), this thesis delineates an “author-centred” model of critique relative to a trajectory that recognises the position of pre-eminence still enjoyed by the author in late-capitalist Western culture. v Declaration. This work contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution and, to the best of my knowledge and belief, contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference has been made in the text. I give consent to this copy of my thesis, when deposited in the university library, being available for loan and photocopying. Mark Caldicott May 2005 vi Acknowledgements. The writing of this thesis, though never dull, was a somewhat tortuous and protracted process. There are a number of people to thank, people who helped shepherd this thesis to its eventual conclusion. First, and most of all, I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Catherine Driscoll, who has been unstinting in her reading of the successive drafts of my thesis, and who (in spite of many other calls on her time) worked diligently to critique my work. In spite of my repeated, and somewhat neurotic, reshaping of my thesis topic, she never once lost her cool. Thanks are also due to Dr. Heather Kerr and Professor Ken K. Ruthven, whose perceptive questions with regard to my thesis at a seminar presentation I gave helped shape the final direction of my argument. Thanks to everybody in Room 602 – Catherine Wait, Sandra Lyne, Guy Carney, and last (though certainly not least) Malcolm Walker. Their wit, good humour, and like minded commitment to their own PhDs helped keep the academic fires burning. Room 602: the room with the vibe! Thanks to Sarah Minney, for extended, digressive discussions about Michel Foucault. Thanks to Geoff Carter, for friendship, and for keeping extra copies of various drafts of my thesis in the event of some unforeseen catastrophe depriving me of my own drafts. Thanks to Nick Prescott and Dr. Rebecca J. Vaughan, for friendship also, and for being with me throughout the journey. Thanks to Dr. Cally Guerin and Maggie Tonkin for their inspired copy editing. Guys, I owe you one! Thanks to my mother and father, Jane and Ron Caldicott (to whom this thesis is dedicated), whose love and support over the years has been unqualified and unstinting. General thanks, finally, to all the staff and postgraduate students in the English Department at Adelaide University. Professional editorial intervention in the preparation of this thesis has been restricted to Standard D of the ASEP guidelines. vii Introduction. The position of hegemony enjoyed by the convention of the expressivist author in Western culture – or, strictly speaking, the “mainstream”, “populist” representations of this culture – is itself a reflection of the status of the expressivist author in Western society as an implicitly accepted norm. The convention of the expressivist author – the convention which valorises the author as an autonomous, ideologically innocent locus and initiator of a coherent, univocal meaning position within a text – has been installed within the Western body politic as an adjunct to the ethos of liberal modernity which developed in England, Europe, America, and ultimately across the world, as a result of the philosophical and political transformations effected by Renaissance humanism and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The expressivist model of the author is the progeny of the Romantic period, during which, in the United Kingdom for example, figures such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley helped institute a convention of artistic production which privileged, first, the poet, and eventually the artist generally, as an entity possessed of a superior “organic”, “imaginative” sensibility (Wordsworth 1974, p. 126) in human society. Emerging concurrently with the rise of liberal modernity, which privileges the individual subject as a centred, self-determining origin and agent of individual liberty and individual and collective progress (Coates & White 1970, p. 6), the expressivist convention of the author was initially developed as a response to both the incorporation of the artist into the newly emergent commercial “literary market” and of opposition to the emergence and expansion of industrial capitalism (Williams 1967, pp. 30-36). It is as a result of these develpments that the expressivist author was first instituted in Western culture as a “diagnostic”, as a means by which a specific cultural 1 embodiment of certain human values – validated in the domain of art – could be used to critique or (in the specific case of the Romantic movement) criticise both the epoch of industrial capitalism and the ethos of liberal humanism, or modernity, which had risen to prominence by the early years of the nineteenth century (Williams 1967, p. 36). The question, however, as to how the author might operate as such a diagnostic of industrial capitalism and modernity is a problematic one. The author-function is a term that comprises not only a definition of the author as the origin and privileged arbiter of meaning in a text, but also implies that the text is brought into the world as a coherent and unproblematic reflection of the semantic and artistic intent of the author. The
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