The Contextures of Things : Objects, Humans and Material Relations in Henry Parland, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf

This thesis examines the ways in which the writings of Henry Parland, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf works to foreground things and decenter humans. While the exploration of human inner life is a well established theme within Modernist literature, the period’s fascination with the material and non-human remains underexplored. When objects have gained scholarly attention, the focus has frequently been on the single object as motif, and objects have mainly been conceptualized in relation to a perceiving subject. Contrary to this tendency, my study seeks to shed light on another kind of thing in Modernist literature, which is not primarily depicted in relation to human experience, and often forms part of a whole assembly of objects, indicating a contexture of things in which humans may also be implicated. The aim of the thesis is to highlight this Modernist exploration of the object world, which anticipates the turn to things and the critical assessment of anthropocentrism in contemporary thought. I argue that the foregrounding of things and the decentering of humans works as a critique both of the literary convention of centering human concerns, and of the Western tradition of thought which conceives of man as autonomous in relation to the material environment. The material being analyzed consists of three works from the 1920’s in which the foregrounding of things and decentering of humans is especially pronounced: the collection of poems Idealrealisation (1929) by Parland, the chapter “Ithaca” in Ulysses (1922) by Joyce, and the novel Jacob’s Room (1922) by Woolf. The study asks what literary techniques these texts use in order to highlight things and decenter humans, and what implications this has for an understanding of the relation between humans and things. I consider these texts as part of a literary history of desymbolizing and particularizing things. Drawing on a theorethical framework of materialism and process philosophy, things are further conceptualized by making use of Gilbert Simondon’s concept of individuation. This conception implies that things carry a history of material relations and interactions, which go beyond the uses and meanings that humans ascribe to them. In looking for the individuation of things I pay special attention to the ways in which they are depicted as changeable, multiple, heterogenous and relational. Furthermore, I explore the ways in which these texts make use of voice, point of view, narrative structure and scale in order to shift the focus from humans to things. In the first chapter I analyze the ways in which Parland’s Idealrealisation works to foreground things through an unstable lyrical voice. I argue that the poems question a lyric tradition of anthropomorphism while also employing animation as a means of directing attention to the materiality of objects. The second chapter explores Joyce’s “Ithaca” chapter and shows how it’s emphasis on multitude and heterogeneity sets it apart from most of Ulysses by not framing things according to their human usages and meanings. Furthermore, I argue that the chapter works as an inversion of the epiphanic theory presented in the earlier novel Stephen Hero. The third and final chapter centers on Jacob’s Room by Woolf. I argue that the novel launches a critique of humans as autonomous actors shaping the course of history, and that the novel counters this conception by stressing material circulation and chance encounters