The sentimental disposition of modernism: Perspectivism and representation in the novel

This work argues that a central strand of literary modernism is in part a repetition of eighteenth-century sentimental literature. Critical writings on modernism have long been centered on the trope of irony, a feature which modernist texts share with many novels of sensibility (Stern, Mackenzie). My analysis suggests that the novels of modernism, like the novels of the eighteenth century, are often sentimental as well as ironic: the history of critical opposition between these two terms has in fact led to the impoverishment of both, and to an impoverished literary history as well. In an introductory chapter, I demonstrate how a modern, Cartesian and perspectival form of representation offers a key toward the definition and analysis of both ironic and sentimental writing. In this section, I analyze and comment on the sentimental rhetoric of Burke and Rousseau, on the character of sympathy in David Hume and Adam Smith, as well as discussing the representation of sensibility in Clarissa, The Man of Feeling, and The Female Quixote. By means of this literary (and extraliterary) history, I outline that perspectival representation of identity which, established--although not invented--in and by the narratives of the eighteenth century, has subsequently been deconstructed in the fictions of the twentieth. After a short excursus on The House of Usher, the chapters which follow take three modernist texts (Faulkner\u27s As I Lay Dying, Beckett\u27s Malone meurt and Juan Jose Saer\u27s El limonero real) as their objects. Each of these works in some way documents the breakdown or critique of perspectival ordinations alluded to above; each must be characterized as sentimental as well, in that the object position is given a determining place within its representational field. A concluding chapter describes the three modernist texts as moments in a common narrative strategy and also contrasts my description of narrative and representation in the novel with the work of two influential theorists of realism in the novel, George Lukacs and Rene Girard