ABSTRACT

New Perspectives on Community and the Modernist Subject: Finite, Singular, Exposed offers new approaches to the modernist subject and its relation to community. With a non-exclusive focus on narrative, the essays included provide innovative and theoretically informed readings of canonical modernist authors, including: James, Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Mansfield, Stein, Barnes and Faulkner (instead of Eliot), as well as of non-canonical and late modernists Stapledon, Rhys, Beckett, Isherwood, and Baldwin (instead of Marsden). This volume examines the context of new dialectico-metaphysical approaches to subjectivity and individuality and of recent philosophical debate on community encouraged by critics such as Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito and Jacques Derrida, among others, of which a fresh re-definition of the modernist subject and community remains to be made, one that is likely to enrich the field of "new Modernist studies". This volume will fill this gap, presenting a re-definition of the subject by complementing community-oriented approaches to modernist fiction through a dialectical counterweight that underlines a conception of the modernist subject as finite, singular and exposed, and its relation to inorganic and inoperative communities.

chapter |20 pages

Introduction

Who’s Afraid of the Modernist Community?

chapter 1|22 pages

“Being Out, Out”

Ontological Exposure in Modernist Fiction

chapter 2|16 pages

Unwelcome Visitations

Hospitality, Individual and Community in Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes

chapter 3|15 pages

Dwelling in the Body

Neuter Ontology in Gertrude Stein and James Joyce

chapter 4|16 pages

The Search for “The Common Voice”

The Storyteller, Community and (Pre)Medieval Echoes in the Work of Virginia Woolf

chapter 5|18 pages

“You, Too?”

Katherine Mansfield’s Community of Women Artists

chapter 6|20 pages

Elitism, Classism and Cosmopolitanism

The Configuration of Community in D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Women in Love

chapter 8|18 pages

Galactic Modernism

Distributed Individuality in Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men and Star Maker

chapter 9|17 pages

“Speaking No Language Which the Other Understood”

The Search for Acknowledgment in Faulkner’s South

chapter 10|18 pages

The Seductions of Capitalism

Singularity versus Community in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood

chapter 11|14 pages

“Today I Have Left My Armor at Home”

Revisiting Jean Rhys’s Interwar Novels after the Ethical Turn

chapter 12|18 pages

James Baldwin’s Joy

Finitude, Carnality and Queer Community

chapter 13|16 pages

“To Have That on the Imagination!”

Beckett and the Subjectivities of Literary Fiction