Browsing by Author "Moi, Toril"

*Designated as an Exemplary Final Project for 2014-15*

"Existential Realism: Modernism and the Ethics of Agency in the Franco-American Existentialist Tradition, 1937-1955” unearths the pivotal role American fiction played in the development and dissemination of the French existentialist ethics of agency. French intellectuals regarded American fiction as a reinvention of novelistic realism based on its engrossing quality. Through readings of novels by John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, and Patricia Highsmith, I show how such immersive narratives invite readers to inhabit characters’ agency. These novels illuminate a dimension of character agency that has gone overlooked in the prevailing modernist accounts of twentieth-century literature in that they allow the reader experience by proxy moral clarity and blindness. By tracing agency through the motif of gratuitous murder, I show that this fiction critiques a notion of authenticity that prizes overweening ability of one’s own ability to act. Ultimately “Existential Realism” shows both how existentialist thought enriches our appreciation of a strain of American fiction, and also how action-driven fiction dramatizes the triumphs and failures of agency.

The Art of Distances or, a Morality for the Everyday shows how British, French and German writers have dramatized the dilemmas of the ethical life with others in the twentieth century, and taken up the challenge of imagining new forms of community. Framed by an encounter between the thought of Theodor Adorno and Roland Barthes, the study traces an exemplary arc from 1933 to 1999, bringing together works of fiction, philosophy, critical theory, autobiography, social reportage and anthropology authored by deeply intriguing or controversial figures such as George Orwell, Paul Morand, Henry Miller, Elias Canetti, Iris Murdoch, Walter Benjamin, Annie Ernaux, Günter Grass, and others. Negotiating the ethical and the political, the role that intellectuals can, or should assume in the conflicts and debates of their time, trying to find adequate forms to express their dilemmas, these writers share a sustained attention to the question of the ideal distance between oneself and others in an age deprived of a shared morality.

This dissertation takes the paradoxical role of Colette in the canon of French and women's writing, from her earliest works to present, as an entry into a radically new interpretation of her life and literary oeuvre. This work is distinguished from previous works on Colette both in its approach and in the scope of its research, relying on extensive archival research revealing unpublished and unstudied aspects of Colette's biography and reception, and using a variety of modes of analysis to interpret this research.

This dissertation shows, in its first two chapters, how the myth of Colette as the incarnation of a particularly French brand of femininity, a spontaneous, natural writer, in no way literarily self-conscious, neither contributing to nor influenced by literary innovations, whose writing expresses her instinctive femininity, was constituted, from the earliest reviews of Colette's first novel, Claudine à l'école (1900), through feminist interpretations of Colette from the 1970s to present. Because Colette was understood to be a feminine writer of women by both misogynist conservatives of 1900 and radical feminists of the 1970's, their understanding of this writer remained remarkably homogenous and durable. The third chapter relies on contemporary celebrity theory in order to investigate Colette's own agency in the creation and policing of this durable public image, tracing both ways that Colette maintained her image, and ways that she profited from it, focusing in particular on her eponymous literary collection, the Collection Colette, and her "produits de beauté" cosmetics line and a beauty salon. This understanding of Colette's agential role in her public image inspires a new reading of the 1910 novel La Vagabonde and the relationship Colette depicts between the protagonist, Renée Néré's stage persona and her life when she is not in front of an audience.

The next two chapters suggest new ways of approaching Colette, beyond the durable myth of the spontaneous feminine writer that she worked so hard to maintain: as a consummate professional and as a literary innovator. The fourth chapter focuses on Colette's professionalism: using a Bourdieusian-inspired analysis of Colette's correspondence to uncover her role in the literary field, tracing the full extent of her social, artistic, and professional networks with other writers, journalists, and artists. This chapter then explores concrete examples of her manipulation of these networks, studying in particular her collaboration with Maurice Ravel in L'Enfant et les sortilèges and her management of the literary department at the newspaper Le Matin. The final chapter of this dissertation reads Colette in terms of discourses of modernism, from which she has long been excluded due to her imagined marginality to the literary field, focusing in particular on French conceptions of the harmonious reconciliation of classicism and literary innovation which reached their height in the 1920's, and which I have termed the "classique moderne." This dissertation makes a contribution to trends in French literature, literary history, the sociology of literature, women's studies, women's history, feminist literary criticism, and celebrity theory.

This dissertation explores the modernist novel's response to the Bildungsroman. Through extensive close readings of the three modern versions of the genre -- In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, and Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz -- it shows that the tensions buried deep in the unconscious of this great narrative of organic development finally erupt as formal problems in modernism, when the classical Bildungsroman meets its demise through a relentless dehumanization of form. If the classical Bildungsroman presents us with "the image of man in the process of becoming" as Bakhtin has suggested, it argues that the modernist Bildungsroman enacts the dissolution of that process in its very form.

In this project, I define existential vulnerability as the idea that the meaning and value of our actions depends on other people’s responses to us. We depend upon others to make our lives meaningful. Others do this by taking our actions as points of departure for their own projects and goals. I argue that existential vulnerability is a foundational concept for understanding Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy. I show that Beauvoir discovers the idea in Pyrrhus and Cineas, her first philosophical essay, further uses and refines it in her short book, The Ethics of Ambiguity, and finally puts it to work in her most famous text, The Second Sex.

Across her oeuvre, Simone de Beauvoir develops an ethics that integrates freedom and vulnerability. In Pyrrhus and Cineas, Beauvoir teaches us that our existential vulnerability originates not in our own freedom, but in the freedom of others. This vulnerability is painful for us and we desperately try to avoid it, often by minimizing or denying the freedom of others. It is also the basis of a responsibility we have towards others. Our actions create their situations—the background against which they exercise their freedom. In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir shows us how we are all both free and vulnerable. Her concept of subject/object ambiguity defines our relationship with others; each of us is both a transcendently free subject and an object of judgment to others. Her ethics demand that we face up to and accept both our own and others’ ambiguity. To value the other’s freedom requires us to accept and choose our own vulnerability. Finally, in The Second Sex, Beauvoir shows us that under patriarchy, woman is the Absolute Other to man. This famous analysis depends on her existential ethics of vulnerability. Women are existentially vulnerable to men because men’s judgments create their situation; but men are also still existentially vulnerable to women, a fact they try to avoid. Beauvoir’s philosophy criticizes those who try to avoid their vulnerability. These critiques are directed at the people in power—at the people who seem at first glance to be the least vulnerable.

This dissertation inquires into the meaning and value of the concept of influence – namely, how one author’s work may shape or be shaped by the work of others – for literary studies today. Once a common critical topic, the concept has in recent decades had a lowly professional reputation; derided as narrow and uninteresting, it is considered an old-fashioned, even pernicious, subject for inquiry. I argue, however, that the study of influence is highly valuable: rather than simply a vehicle for hoary arguments over genius or reports on attribution, such study may serve as a means of investigating the relations between literary texts and their readers, and thus illuminate questions of meaning and critical method that are widely debated today. To make this case, I both trace the disciplinary history of influence study, revealing its previous intellectual richness and appeal, and demonstrate – using selected relations of influence as case studies – its contemporary insight and relevance. In doing so, I establish both the validity and purchase of inquiry into influence, challenging its long-standing disfavour and mapping its possible uses in future critical work.

"What Can Philosophical Literature Do? The Contribution of Simone de Beauvoir" examines Simone de Beauvoir's existentialist aesthetic theory of the philosophical novel alongside two fictional works, L'invitée (1943) and Le sang des autres (1945), which constitute Beauvoir's first experiments in writing works of this hybrid genre. Throughout this dissertation, I mobilize Beauvoir's theoretical and literary writing to challenge implied notions that literature somehow acts as a supplement to philosophy and that philosophical literature does not offer distinct advantages to the philosophical system.

In her theoretical writings on philosophical literature - including "Littérature et métaphysique" (1945), her auto-analysis of her novels in La Force de l'âge (1960), her contribution to the forum, Que peut la littérature? (1965), and her lecture, "Mon expérience d'écrivain" (1966) - Beauvoir confronts a potential impasse in the conception of the philosophical novel, which risks devolving into being either a roman à thèse or a concrete example of a pre-existing philosophical system. This aesthetic impasse becomes particularly acute when Beauvoir begins to write ethical fiction after WWII. This dissertation catalogs Beauvoir's unique philosophical solutions to this aesthetic problem, and in turning to L'invitée and Le sang des autres, demonstrates that Beauvoir's aesthetic innovations open up readings of her novels to new insights about her contributions to twentieth-century literary and philosophical thought, including her thought on separation from the other - solipsism and skepticism - and on connection to the other - love, Mitsein, and reciprocal recognition.

In chapter one, I point to Beauvoir's formulation of the philosophical-literary impasse in "Littérature et métaphysique" and enumerate how this impasse has worked its way into the critical reception of L'invitée. Beauvoir resolves this aesthetic problem through her concept of the philosophical-literary work as a particularly strong appeal to the reader's freedom. In chapter two, I read L'invitée with Beauvoir's aesthetic insights in mind, which has the effect of freeing Beauvoir's novel from the philosophical binds of Sartre's theory of the Look in L'être et le néant. In L'invitée, Beauvoir accounts for and also goes beyond conflict and domination by building a multiplicity of looks through her theme of spectacle in her novel (dance, theater). In chapter three, I show how Beauvoir's turn to ethics and engaged literature after WWII once again raises the specter of the roman à thèse. I thus delineate the differences between engaged literature and the roman à thèse, differences which rely upon the existentialist notion of engaged literature as a dévoilement or unveiling of ethical issues. Finally, in chapter four I show the ways in which Le sang des autres both falls into the traps of the roman à thèse on the one hand and on the other resists that trap through its unveiling of her characters' world as Mitsein and the ambiguous ethical problem of empathy within Mitsein.

Few philosophers have been more critical of the Western philosophical tradition than Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Nietzsche and Wittgenstein did not just reject the conclusions of their philosophical predecessors; they rejected their most basic assumptions. They rejected the very idea of philosophy as the attempt to rationally develop objective theories of the world. And yet Wittgenstein and Nietzsche have now been absorbed into the discipline they wanted to abolish. This dissertation attempts to recapture the force and extent of their respective criticisms of philosophy, and evaluate their conceptions of what philosophy should be.

I begin by examining Wittgenstein's claim that philosophical problems rest on a misunderstanding of language. I show that this claim does not entail a quietist refusal to engage in philosophical problems, as many have argued. Rather, it offers new insights into these problems, and I demonstrate these insights by considering Wittgenstein's analysis of G.E. Moore's attempt to refute external world skepticism. In the case of Nietzsche, I argue that his criticism of philosophy extends beyond the metaphysics of Plato, Descartes, and Kant to include even those anti-metaphysical philosophical movements with which he is now associated: post-structuralism and naturalism. In this way, his criticism of philosophy is more extensive than has been recognized. I conclude by describing his alternative conception of philosophy as the creation of new concepts, and compare it with Wittgenstein's conception of assembling reminders of what we ordinarily say.

This project examines dance scenes in nineteenth-century French novels written by women to consider how grace—beauty in motion—defines women as social, moral, and artistic actors. Creating a constellation of dance scenes, I develop a concept called graceful inclinations, meaning experiences that move observers to contemplate space, time, or bodies differently. I use this concept to study representations of women’s sexuality and subjectivity in dances scenes written by Sophie Cottin, Germaine de Staël, Barbara von Krüdener, Claire de Duras, George Sand, and Marie d’Agoult. Because previous studies of dance in nineteenth-century French literature focus predominately on texts by canonical male authors, scholarship on literary descriptions of dance is limited to a masculine perspective. Moreover, studies of the philosophical and esthetic meanings of grace rarely cite primary sources written by women, although, since the eighteenth century, grace has been closely associated with Western understandings of femininity.This project focuses on four genres of dance: contradances, the waltz, presentational dances (the shawl dance, quadrille, and bolero), and the tarantella. Whereas descriptions of contradances propose ideal social relations or contest the idealization of disembodied femininity, waltz scenes create dystopian depictions of upper-class debauchery and masculine authority. Characters performing presentational dances become archetypal representations of their gender or race. The tarantella in Staël’s novel Corinne, ou l’Italie presents the ultimate dancer who is graceful and sensual. Analyzing representations of exoticism throughout this corpus, I use Srinivas Aravamudan’s theory of Enlightenment Orientalism to consider how exoticized bodies became a testing ground for thinking about female sexuality. I draw upon the theories of Adriana Cavarero, Michel Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Genviève Fraisse, and Judith Lynne Hanna to study the sexual politics of dance scenes. In my study of the aesthetic and philosophical concept of grace, dance emerges as an art capable of moving its viewers but not yet capable of instigating social change. Creating both utopian or dystopian moments, dance scenes offer insight into the different worlds that writers wished to create or to avoid.