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From the first stirrings of modernism to contemporary poetics, the modernist aesthetic project could be described as a form of phenomenological reduction that attempts to return to the invisible and unsayable foundations of human perception and expression, prior to objective points of view and scientific notions. It is this aspect of modernism that this book brings to the fore. The essays presented here bring into focus the contemporary face of ongoing debates about phenomenology and modernism. The contributors forcefully underline the intertwining of modernism and phenomenology and the extent to which the latter offers a clue to the former.
The book presents the viewpoints of a range of internationally distinguished critics and scholars, with diverse but closely related essays covering a wide range of fields, including literature, architecture, philosophy and musicology. The collection addresses critical questions regarding the relationship between phenomenology and modernism, with reference to thinkers such as Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Michel Henry and Paul Ricoeur. By examining the contemporary philosophical debates, this cross-disciplinary body of research reveals the pervasive and far-reaching influence of phenomenology, which emerges as a heuristic method to articulate modernist aesthetic concerns.
List of contents
Contents: Kevin Hart: Preface - Carole Bourne-Taylor/Ariane Mildenberg: Introduction: Phenomenology, Modernism and Beyond - Ariane Mildenberg: Openings: Epoché as Aesthetic Tool in Modernist Texts - H.W. Fawkner: Self-Evidencing Life: Paradoxes of Reduction in Modernism, Phenomenology and Christianity - Raymond Monelle: Proust, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and a Musical Phrase - Hanna Meretoja: Against Pre-Established Meanings: Revisiting Robbe-Grillet's Relation to Phenomenology - Eoghan Walls: A Flaw in the Science of Transcendence: Hopkins and Husserl on 'Thisness' - Matt Ffytche: 'The Arduous Path of Appearance': Phenomenology and its Uncertainties in the Work of George Oppen - Filip Mattens: On the Origin of Space - Minna Niemi/Justin Parks: Home, Homelessness and the Wayward Subject in the Novels of James Joyce and Claude McKay - Martin Leer: 'I Already Live in the Landscape': Phenomenology and Modernist Landscapes - Jean-Jacques Wünenburger: The Paradoxical Ontology of Image - Michel Collot: Phenomenology and Literary Experience - Carole Bourne-Taylor: Figures of Immanence/Imminence: 'Enigma Variations' in Michel Deguy's Work.
About the author
Carole Bourne-Taylor is Supernumerary Fellow in French at Brasenose College and Lecturer at St Hildäs College at the University of Oxford. She is the author of L¿Univers imaginaire de Virginia Woolf (2001).
Ariane Mildenberg is Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Kent. Her work focuses on the interaction of phenomenology with modernist literature and art.
