HENRY JAMES AND ROMANTIC REVISIONISM: THE QUEST FOR THE MAN OF IMAGINATION IN THE LATE WORK A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (OF ENGLISH ) By Daniel Rosenberg Nutters May 2017 Examining Committee Members: Daniel T. O’Hara, Advisory Chair, English Alan Singer, English Steve Newman, English Robert L. Caserio, External Member, Pennsylvania State University Jonathan Arac, External Member, University of Pittsburgh © Copyright 2017 by Daniel Rosenberg Nutters All Rights Reserved ii ABSTRACT This study situates the late work of Henry James in the tradition of Romantic revisionism. In addition, it surveys the history of James criticism alongside the academic critique of Romantic-aesthetic ideology. I read The American Scene, the New York Edition Prefaces, and other late writings as a single text in which we see James refashion an identity by transforming the divisions or splits in the modern subject into the enabling condition for renewed creativity. In contrast to the Modernist myth of Henry James the master reproached by recent scholarship, I offer a new critical fiction – what James calls the man of imagination – that models a form of selfhood which views our ironic and belated condition as a fecund limitation. The Jamesian man of imagination encourages the continual (but never resolvable) quest for a coherent creative identity by demonstrating how our need to sacrifice elements of life (e.g. desires and aspirations) when we confront tyrannical circumstances can become a prerequisite for pursuing an unreachable ideal. This study draws on the work of post-war Romantic revisionist scholarship (e.g. Northrop Frye, Frank Kermode, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, and Paul de Man) as well as French theory (e.g. Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida) and other traditions (e.g. Kenneth Burke, R.P. Blackmur, and Lionel Trilling) to challenge new instrumentalizing scholarly methodologies that aim to overcome the ironies of critical vision. I argue that James’s man of imagination not only presents a critical agency that profits from criticism’s penchant for ironic repetition but also a politics that can help us navigate the tension between artistic self-stylization and the social constraints intrinsic to the liberal rule of law. iii FOR MY TEACHERS iv Few critics, I suppose, no matter what their political disposition, have ever been wholly blind to James’s greatest gifts, or even to the grandiose moral intention of these gifts … but by liberal critics James is traditionally put the ultimate question: of what use, of what actual political use, are his gifts and their intention? Granted that James was devoted to an extraordinary moral perceptiveness, granted, too, that moral perceptiveness has something to do with politics and the social life; of what possible practical value in our world of impending disaster can James’s work be? And James’s style, his characters, his subjects, and even his own social origin and the manner of his personal life are adduced to show that his work cannot endure the question. - Lionel Trilling (1946) The would-be specific literary intellectual who wants to work for social change will … have to fight off two demons of self-doubt: one from the orthodox left, who will tell him that his work is bullshit and that real political work lies in the organization of the workers; the other from the ultra left who will tell him that he must connect his work on traditional texts directly to the “real” situation, our contemporary political situation, or risk total apolitical rarefiction. My answer to these demons is that genuine political work for the Henry James scholar, as Henry James scholar, becomes possible when contact is made with the activity of James’s writing, with all possible emphasis on its act . - Frank Lentricchia (1984) v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There is a unique difficulty that arises from writing a study that looks backward to Henry James and forward toward the future of literary critical practice. It is the problem Northrop Frye identifies when he differentiates between intensive and extensive reading: the necessity of possessing a single author fully and demonstrating a breadth of literary context that adequately frames the critical reading. Frye believes the dissertation is the perfect forum to encourage intensive reading even though extensive reading requires time for maturation. The scenario is the reverse today. Context dominates and is prioritized: one must first find the appropriate setting – often a non-literary or historical-cultural setting – in which to read an author. I have nonetheless remained faithful to Frye. By trying to split the difference between intensive and extensive reading, I am quite sure of relative failure at each end. I desired to possess James in his entirety but the sheer size of his corpus and the professional demand of studying a specialized field (e.g. “Nineteenth- Century American Literature” or “Global Modernism”) took precedence. I wanted to go beyond the fixed limits set by the modern academy. I wanted to read James within an expansive history of literature and criticism that moves from the Romantics to our present moment yet I also felt that I occasionally lost sight of him. Luckily I follow James’s assumption that our errors are redeemable through revision. Any of my success, however, is surely attributable to my teachers. Their influence is recognizable in my topic, its scope, and its goals: below the surface in the textual unconscious; through inflections in my style; and most visibly in the footnotes, no doubt where academic battle lines are drawn, but also where critical debts are paid in full. Historical chance has afforded me the opportunity to learn from a unique array of vi thinkers. At the professional level, they have introduced me to a range of critical styles, polemical tactics, theoretical approaches, the necessity of intellectual revision, and the exigent questions that have driven me to continue learning. At the personal level, they have helped me mature. While their criticism and teaching set the highest bar, it also motivates the ephebe, demonstrating that emulation is a noble goal and not an impossible task. Like a young Henry James, aged thirty-two, encountering Flaubert and his coterie: “Tu vois que je suis dans les conseils des dieux - que je suis lancé en plein Olympe.” With me at the base of the mountain are my peers. Friends far and near, in the academy and beyond, who continually offer me encouragement. Colleen Kropp and Vanessa Loh listened with patience to my ravings and provided the necessary compassion and censure in return. Chris Winkler’s pugnacious precision in language and intellectual rigor awakened my dormant thoughts. He has provided a lasting friendship and reminded me that attempting to scale Olympian heights is an act of heroism. Before them there was always my family – my parents, Ellen and Frank, aunt Lisa, and grandparents Hattie and Bob – whose magnanimity is unrivaled and has guided me to the place where I am now. But that is still, alas, at the bottom of the mountain. By dedicating this study to my teachers, I am acknowledging that the best of them remain, to the core, Promethean, offering a guiding light and bestowing upon their pupils the most important of gifts: Literature is [an] imaginative giving that is also a gaining, since it produces creations that live a more intense life than we – writers and readers alike – share in common. Criticism, then, should essentially be the appreciation and general dissemination of this gift of imaginative life. Whatever else it is, or performs, criticism should begin in such appreciation and aim for such dissemination, even if it means cutting the monumental figure of the famous critic, the elite expert, down to human size. vii PERMISSIONS I kindly thank the editors of the Henry James Review and the Arizona Quarterly for permission to reprint material that has now been disseminated throughout this study. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... iii DEDICATION ................................................................................................................... iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. vi PERMISSIONS................................................................................................................ viii PREFACE ............................................................................................................................x 1. HENRY JAMES AND THE ROMANTIC-MODERN TRADITION ..........................1 2. THE GRASPING IMAGINATION ............................................................................43 3. THE PENETRATING IMAGINATION .....................................................................79 4. THE CRUCIBLE OF IMAGINATION.....................................................................115 5. HENRY JAMES AND THE ROMANTIC-CRITICAL TRADITION .....................149 CODA ..............................................................................................................................188 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................200 ix PREFACE Waiting on the subway platform beneath Philadelphia’s City Hall, I noticed that