The Ontological Imagination: Living Form in American Literature Benjamin Welner Barasch Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2019 © 2019 Benjamin Welner Barasch All rights reserved ABSTRACT The Ontological Imagination: Living Form in American Literature Benjamin Welner Barasch “The Ontological Imagination: Living Form in American Literature” proposes a new theory of the imagination as a way forward from the long academic critique of the human subject. It is unclear how we should conceive of the human—of our potential, for example, for self-knowledge, independent thought, or moral choice—after the critiques of self-presence, intentionality, and autonomy that have come to define work in the humanities. This dissertation offers an image of the human responsive to such challenges. I argue that a set of major nineteenth-century American writers (Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, Henry James, and Walt Whitman) held a paradoxical conception of the imagination as both the mark of human uniqueness—the faculty that raises the mind above the world’s sheer givenness, allowing for creative action—and the space of our greatest intimacy with the nonhuman world. For these writers, the highest human achievements simultaneously differentiate us from the rest of nature and abolish our difference from it. Chapter 1, “Emerson’s ‘Doctrine of Life’: Embryogenesis and the Ontology of the Fragment,” presents an Emerson whose investigations of emotional numbness reveal a disintegrative force immanent to living beings. In the new science of embryology—a model of life at its most impersonal—he finds a non-teleological principle of growth by which a human life or an imaginative essay might attain fragile coherence. Chapter 2, “‘Concrete Imagination’: William James’s Post-Critical Thinking,” claims that James’s multifaceted career is best understood as a quest for an intellectual vitality that would not abandon self-consistency. I argue that an ontology of thinking underlies his seemingly disparate projects: his theory of the will as receptivity, his conception of faith as mental risk, and his late practice of exemplification over sequential argument. Chapter 3, “‘The Novel is a Living Thing’: Mannerism and Immortality in The Wings of the Dove,” argues that Henry James envisions the novel as an incarnation, a means of preserving the life of a beloved young woman beyond her death. Through formal techniques inspired by painterly mannerism, James creates a novelistic universe that unfixes the categories of life and death. Chapter 4, “‘Like the Sun Falling Around a Helpless Thing’: Whitman’s Poetry of Judgment,” emphasizes the figural and perspectival features of Whitman’s poetry at even its most prosaic in order to show how the imagination grounds us in a common world rather than detaching us from it. In opposition to an ethics for which realistic recognition of the world demands suppression of the imagination, Whitman’s realism requires acts of imaginative judgment. In sum, “The Ontological Imagination” hopes to reorient study of nineteenth- century American literature by revising both its traditional humanist reading and its recent posthumanist critique. On the level of the discipline, by defining literary form as a singular space in which the human imagination and impersonal life are revealed as indivisible, I make a case for the compatibility of the new formalist and ontological approaches to literary study. TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. ii INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER ONE: EMERSON’S “DOCTRINE OF LIFE”: EMBRYOGENESIS AND THE ONTOLOGY OF THE FRAGMENT ...................................................................... 10 1. Ontology: Life Against Itself .................................................................................... 15 2. Ethics: “The Universal Impulse to Believe” ............................................................. 32 3. Aesthetics: “A New Picture of Life” ........................................................................ 48 CHAPTER TWO: “CONCRETE IMAGINATION”: WILLIAM JAMES’S POST- CRITICAL THINKING .................................................................................................... 58 1. Will as Willingness to Live: James’s Transubstantiation of Emerson ..................... 65 2. Beyond Critique: “The Inalienable Right to Run Risks” .......................................... 78 3. “Concrete Imagination” ............................................................................................ 87 CHAPTER THREE: “THE NOVEL IS A LIVING THING”: MANNERISM AND IMMORTALITY IN THE WINGS OF THE DOVE ......................................................... 95 1. “Life” in James: Experience, Intensity, Renunciation .............................................. 97 2. Minny Temple’s “Taste for Life as Life” ............................................................... 104 3. Versions of Mannerism ........................................................................................... 109 4. Mannerism and Immortality ................................................................................... 116 5. Ontological Style: Economies of Life and Death in The Wings of the Dove .......... 121 5.1: The Value of the Portentous ............................................................................ 122 5.2: Everything/Nothing: Mannerism, Melodrama, Tragedy ................................. 128 5.3: The Overcoming of Tragedy ............................................................................ 136 CHAPTER FOUR: “LIKE THE SUN FALLING AROUND A HELPLESS THING”: WHITMAN’S POETRY OF JUDGMENT .................................................................... 140 1. Whitman and the Question of a World ................................................................... 140 2. Judging Whitman Judging: D. H. Lawrence on Life Against Mechanism ............. 146 3. Kantian Judgment as “Enlarged Thinking” and “The Feeling of Life” .................. 155 4. Whitman’s Acts of Judgment .................................................................................. 166 5. Two Versions of Realism ........................................................................................ 179 6. Judgment and Repair ............................................................................................... 189 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 198 i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It is a pleasure to thank my dissertation committee. Ross Posnock has been a continual source of encouragement and provocation: the best kind of instruction. His warm irreverence, deep erudition, and uninhibited intellectual curiosity are an inspiration, and our conversations over several years have sustained me. Branka Arsić is a force of nature: her astonishing energy and commitment to the thrill of thinking have kindled my own. I am grateful for her manifold support and for the example of her bold and original work. Andrew Delbanco has been a generous mentor and dissertation nudge. I thank him for his inspiring teaching and incisive comments on my work. Thanks to two teachers from earlier in my graduate school career who participated in my dissertation defense: Sharon Cameron and Bruce Robbins. Sharon led transformative seminars, and has provided me through her writing and teaching with a high ideal of attentiveness and intellectual intensity. Bruce was an extraordinary guide to the big questions and stakes of literary study. I am grateful to undergraduate teachers and mentors whose insights continue to inspire my work: to Harold Bloom, who first ignited my passion for the American Sublime, and to David Bromwich, Louise Glück, and Kevin Hicks, who nurtured it. Many students provided thoughts and provocations that stimulated my thinking, and I thank especially Elena Burger, Margaret Corn, Mercedes Fissore-O’Leary, Miya Matsumoto-Lee, and Emre Tetik. I am grateful to the friends and colleagues who contributed to this project: Kareem Amin, Jeremy Blackman, Casey Blake, Tim Donahue, Paul Franz, Katie Gemmill, Michael Golston, Russell Goodman, Paul Grimstad, Dave Jang, Doug Mao, ii Susan Monserud, Roosevelt Montás, Alex Nelson, Jonathan Polan, Aaron Ritzenberg, Gary Schlesinger, Ric Sonder, Maura Spiegel, Sarah Stemp, and Valeria Tsygankova. Thanks to Danny Braun for the rare gift of his intellectual companionship and deep friendship. Thanks to Tom Fogg, great mate, for camaraderie and musical collaboration. Thanks to Joe Quinn for friendship from a dusty road in Karelia to the banks of the Brandywine. I owe everything to my family. Mary Lou Costanzo and Walter Payne are beloved friends, steadfast through thick and thin: the true meaning of family. I am grateful for the universe I share with the inimitable Karl Evans, a kosmos. Thanks to my uncle Al Welner for his constant love and support. I am grateful to Jo and Richard Lowe, Jenny Lowe, Jeff Bott, and Cyrus Bott-Lowe, for welcoming me into their family with incredible generosity. My grandparents Rose and Motek Welner showed me the meaning of courage; their perseverance made everything possible. My brother, Sam Barasch, has my love, always. My father, Alan Barasch, has given me the gift