Anti-Humanist Modernism: Thinking Beyond the Human in Early Twentieth-Century Literature
Open Access
- Author:
- Kuhn, Elizabeth
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- August 27, 2009
- Committee Members:
- Janet Wynne Lyon, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Janet Wynne Lyon, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Michael Francis Berube, Committee Member
Mark Stewart Morrisson, Committee Member
Jeffrey Nealon, Committee Member
John Philip Christman, Committee Member - Keywords:
- interrelationality
anti-humanism
modernism - Abstract:
- My dissertation, titled _Anti-Humanist Modernism: Thinking Beyond the Human in Early Twentieth-Century Literature_, explores the concept of anti-humanism within the historical context of modernism in order to show modernism’s complex co-development with specific anti-humanist modes, and to recover a version of modernism that is as invested in representing exteriority and interrelationality as interiority and subjectivity. While literary modernism tends to be thought of in terms of formal experiments that heighten access to the human subject or to “life itself,” such as impressionism and the stream-of-consciousness novel, this study considers the various critiques mounted by modernist writers of an autonomous human subject claiming to be the agent of history. In _Anti-Humanist Modernism_, I argue that these critiques of humanism emergent in the modernist period were not limited to writers who were sympathetic to fascism or other authoritarian movements – rather they proliferated among writers interested in considering the potential of life outside the constraints of the strictly human and addressing the possibility that even if we agree that humans are not innately good (as humanism supposes) it does not necessarily follow that they should be controlled by some super-human figure or structure. Through readings of W.B. Yeats, D.H. Lawrence, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Henry Green, Elizabeth Bowen, and Christopher Isherwood, _Anti-Humanist Modernism_ aims to make anti-humanism legible as an impulse animating much of early twentieth-century writing. This study reconsiders the history of anti-humanist thought as a whole, by suggesting through these specific readings that the formation we know as anti-humanism is not simply a branch of French poststructuralism, but a system of thought complete with its own literary traditions and tactics that continued to develop from its beginnings in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche throughout the modernist period. While anti-humanism has long persisted on the edge of modernism and modernist studies, this study argues that anti-humanism is a larger formation that informed modernism much more broadly than has previously been suggested; further, anti-humanism connects modernism – the first half of the twentieth century – to poststructuralism, postmodernism, and our own contemporary moment.