The difficult character trope in literary Modernism, 1881–1932

John Charles King, Purdue University

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the aesthetic rupture surrounding the trope of the literary character in Modernist literature. From Aristotle to the Eighteenth Century, the presupposition reigned that authors were more or less firmly in control of their stories, their fictional worlds, and their characters. With the ascent of psychology in the late Nineteenth Century, however, writers began to doubt the efficacy of presuming to know other people. For such authors, characters can never be fully comprehended, nor can their stories or their worlds. And if that is so, then how can they, or the narratives in which they exist, be controlled? In the effort to control the uncontrollable—for art cannot communicate without some sense of order—we find the chief conundrum of the Modern writer and the difficult character. Often in discourse about Modernism the subject of the self comes into play, but seldom is the subject of the epistemological problem of the selves of others explored in its own right. Nevertheless, this epistemological—and by extension aesthetic—problem proved significant for writers such as Henry James, Wyndham Lewis, Luigi Pirandello, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett. As these writers experimented in their fictions (and drama) in order to find useful forms for unknowable characters, they also demonstrate the political ramifications of how we, as readers, treat other people.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Lamb, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Literature|British and Irish literature|Romance literature|American literature

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