The subject and matter [electronic resource] : the body and the space of narration in early-twentieth century literature
Keywords: Comparative Literature

My dissertation, The Subject and Matter: The Body and the Space of Narration in Early-Twentieth-Century Literature, explores how literature can respond to the disembodiment of the post-Enlightenment subject through the staging of sensuality and embodiment, both in terms of the representation of sense experience and in a self-reflexive articulation of the text's own status as material object. While the question of embodiment has by no means been neglected in literary criticism, my research seeks to explore a new dimension of this concept, a type of reflection which I believe has not heretofore been possible. Our generation of scholars is writing in a unique moment—the burgeoning transition from a print-media culture to an electronic-media culture. For most of our lives the text has been indissolubly bound to the book, thus the shift to electronic media is experienced as a rupture, as discontinuous and, for many, disconcerting. Of late, much has been made of what we stand to gain by such a transition, but without denying these profits I feel the time is also ripe for some reflection on what we may have to lose, what is unique about the book, and how it contributes to our experience of literature. Engaging with the material presence of the book is avoided by most literary-critical discourses, which tend to reduce the book to the abstract narrative, the page to the disembodied text. Scholarship on the history of the book, from which I have taken inspiration, is concerned with the book's status as a material object, yet tends to eschew a synthetic analysis of textual materialism, remaining at the level of the particularities of a given work. My project seeks to develop a discourse of literary criticism that brings these modes scholarship together in an analysis of the aesthetics of print media. While engaging with the historically specific situation of a text, I also seek to bring texts together in a comparative context towards developing a phenomenology of readerly experience. Through close-reading and formal analysis, I consider how the encounter with the material book inflects the practice of reading. The organization of text in space, across the space of the page, as an element of the text's mechanism of meaning-making, has long been a part of the study of poetics, and modernist poetics in particular. To cite Willard Bohn, the extent to which "the visual dimension" and, I would add, the space of the page, "is an integral part of the poem, developing and expanding the verbal text" is taken as a matter of course. However, I would argue that this is not a defining feature of poetry but rather the condition under which all reading takes place. The authors with whom I engage in my dissertation—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Samuel Beckett, and Ernest Hemingway—thematize the encounter between reader and text, mobilizing the space of their works to interrogate this relationship. To borrow from Rigolot, they explore the interaction between "l'activité littéraire" and "l'activité littérale, " between the discursive and the presentational. I argue that such works simultaneously reveal the extent to which our construction of space is implicated in the generation of expectation and thus in the activity of judgment while unseating the normalized patterns according to which this process is accustomed to take place.