Dennis Tredy, Annick Duperray and Adrian Harding, eds. Henry James and the Poetics of Duplicity (original) (raw)
Related papers
Henry James: Recent criticism (since 1985)
Henry James in context, 2010
In 1996, I published a book-length bibliographical survey of Henry James studies. 1 It was organized around three key-terms that seemed to cover a lot of work, especially of the 1980s and 1990s: style, ethics, history-and especially the intersection of the three in a new understanding of what the historical means. When asked some ten years later to discuss recent James criticism for the present volume in the context of the evolving changes within literary and American studies, I find that the trend I saw as emergent back then very quickly became dominant. That is what John Carlos Rowe has aptly summarized in the title of one of his books as our scrutiny of The Other Henry James (1998)-the Henry James who ‗is valued because his hopes and worries still speak to us', because ‗the changes we have passed through are readable historically from James and his contemporaries to us'; not the Henry James who left us a ‗testament to some dubious universal truth '. 2 James studies up to the late 1970s were by and large what we used to call ‗liberal humanist' in orientation. What we meant by that was the proclivity for deriving from James's work general lessons for ‗Man'. A good example is the common reading of ‗The Beast in the Jungle', which held that John Marcher realizes too late in life that the big life-changing event he kept on waiting for had been under his nose all along: his true love was his dear friend, May Bartram. There was always a strong moralizing thrust to such readings: James's work was indeed a ‗testament to some dubious universal truth,' as Rowe puts it; and it was an object-lesson in how characters, and by natural, self-evident extension, readers, ought to conduct their lives, then as now. James himself, for liberal humanist study, fulfilled the idealized author function: he never married, because he was too dedicated to his muse. This so-called fact was documented biographically, at length, by Leon Edel, while Adeline 2 Tintner, in a similar spirit, shed encyclopedic light on the creative process, in particular its sources in what James could have been acquainted with. 3 James studies, from around the early 1980s, heavily participated in the theoretical turn away from such universalizing and, often, in the case of literary interpretation, flattening tendencies. And it seems to me that the manipulation of the theoretical screw has, in that quarter century or so, received, not one but at least two turns, bringing us to quite uncanny heights (or depths?) of Jamesian delight.
LITERATURE, LOGIC AND THE LIBERATING WORD: THE ELUCIDATION OF CONFUSION IN HENRY JAMES
Journal of philosophical research, 2010
Henry James is an author who has on the one hand attracted the attention of many leading philosophical interpreters of literature even while on the other hand he poses a certain kind of difficulty for a tradition which has tended to prioritize what is said while relegating how it is said to the margins: the philosophical gravity of James’s work seems clearly to lie in the manner in which James writes, especially in the difficult style which characterizes his late phase. Many of James’s philosophical interpreters have recognized this but they nevertheless characterize the philosophical interest of how James writes in such a way as to leave the emphasis, in the end, still on a philosophical “what”: what philosophical view his difficult style implies or corroborates. I develop an interpretation of the philosophical significance of James’s late style that does not reduce it in this way to a philosophical “what.” I argue that features of James’s late style—its compression and rigor—invite a comparison between his literary forms of representation and the logically perspicuous modes of representing thought developed by Gottlob Frege. One use to which Frege puts his Begriffsschrift is as a tool in the task of clarifying forms of philosophical confusion. I argue that what is most philosophically important about James’s literary forms of representation is that they can be used to represent a reader’s life, to the reader herself, in such a way as to make it possible for her to recognize her confusion.
The Reader in It: Henry James’s “Desperate Plagiarism”
European journal of American studies, 2016
Although numerous scholars have considered Henry James a master of realism, some of his fictions have been interpreted as "writable" or "impossible" texts, in Roland Barthes's terms, for exposing the reader to a distressing practice of reading. A "writable text" entails not only the reader's uneasy experience of reading, but also the writer's loss of mastery in "desperate plagiarism" (Barthes, The Pleasure 22). "The Story in It" (1902)one of his shortest texts-stages both James's mastery and its loss through characters' conversations about novels and romances. On the one hand, these dialogues reflect some of James's discussions regarding the possible representations of love, passion, sexuality and female characters, while on the other hand they create a mise en abyme by dramatizing the characters' own contamination by the act of storytelling. Problematizing the border between the story and its teller as well as the story and its reader, "The Story in It" locates its characters in a position that they themselves question and judge. While this dramatization amounts to the story's own loss of origin, James's conceptualization of realism in this bottomless abyme, together with his writing style, turn the incongruities to a performance actualized by an ironic spiral. I aim to discuss the contagious nature of this performance which affects not only the characters but also the writer and the reader. 1. Reading French versus British Novels 2 "The Story in It" opens with a scene of writing and reading. With the rainy and stormy weather in the background, Mrs. Dyott writes letters, while her visitor Maud Blessingbourne reads an "obviously good" novel. As the third-person narrator informs us, the reader is happy with her book and her happiness illustrates that she probably reads a French author. After a silence of half an hour, the two ladies begin to converse about reading and living. Maud Blessingbourne draws a sharp border between the two when she tells Mrs. Dyott, "I know you don't read, ... but why should you? You live" (309). This The Reader in It: Henry James's "Desperate Plagiarism"
The Mystery of “Collaboration” in Henry James
Humanities, 2021
This article argues for the importance of collaboration as a species of literary relation in Henry James’s work. Collaboration was increasingly popular towards the end of the nineteenth century, and yet, James’s interest in and occasional practice of this compositional mode has been largely overlooked. This is partly due to James’s own ambivalent and contested relationship with multiple authorship, most obviously in his contribution to The Whole Family. However, James’s frequent identification of collaboration as a “mystery” indicates the extent to which it exerted a considerable influence over his imagination and thinking, and its association with some of his most formative moments of novelistic and vocational self-awareness. “Collaboration” is also a literary subject in its own right, most obviously in James’s 1892 story of that name, and the depiction of the practice as a unifying, if occasionally divisive, ideal offers a complex and often enigmatic vision of sociable reciprocity.
Henry James at the Ethical Turn
The influence of aestheticism on James’s late style has often been taken to exemplify a proto-modernist fictional mode that teaches readers to suspend ethical judgment, refusing the clarity of predetermined thought for the ambiguity of surprised feeling. This paper defends a more philosophical view of Jamesian ethics that accounts for his novels’ totalizing impulses towards abstraction, systematization, and thought. In keeping with James’s description of The Ambassadors as a “fusion of synthesis and picture,” it examines how the novel uses its character system not only to disrupt ethical categories but to synthetically construct and analyze them. By systematically juxtaposing Strether’s ethos of imaginative exploration alongside Mrs. Newsome’s administrative efficiency, Chad Newsome’s polished suavity, and Maria Gostrey’s discriminating synthesis, the novel both informs and challenges the ethical judgments of its characters, and by extension, its readers. By inviting readers to perceive the contrast between the judgments of characters as they evaluate the social world, James’s novel does not disrupt structures of thought with immediate feeling, so much as it shapes immediate feelings into structures of thought.
2008
This paper frames the figure of the object -a libidinally invested and desired object-in terms of its progression and development in Jamesian narrative, emphasizing how Henry James's discourse on possession -the process of striving to secure the central object in narration-gains complexity and sophistication in his so called 'major phase' -from 1880 to 1905. Jamesian narratives continually foreground the implication of the novel itself in the plot of 'thwarted desire' these fictions criticize. The narratological tensions in James's texts attest to the self-critical aspect (of the novel by the novel) of this internally directed critique. I have based my analysis of Jamesian late realism upon The Aspern Papers and 'The Figure in the Carpet', representative texts of James's short fiction and novellas, in which objects -art or aesthetic objects such as literature, epistemological objects such as secrets or money -are foregrounded and which explore the circuitous routes of desire, systematically thwarted desire, and of libidinal and bourgeois possession.