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" “Struck Down by Grace: "
Napier, Ryan
Litvak, Joseph
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1106317
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| Doc. No
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TLpq2385249643
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| Main Entry
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Litvak, Joseph
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Napier, Ryan
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| Title & Author
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“Struck Down by Grace:\ Napier, RyanLitvak, Joseph
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| College
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Tufts University
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| Date
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2020
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| student score
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2020
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Page No
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171
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| Abstract
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Building on the work on Mikhail Bakhtin and Alain Badiou, “Struck Down by Grace:” Liberal and Religious Subjects in the Realist Novel intervenes in debates about the novel and secularization by arguing that the realist novel is formed out of a struggle to establish the liberal subject. Under the name of the “individual” or the “person,” theorists have long identified the novel with a form of liberal subjectivity. My dissertation complicates this picture, showing how another form of subjectivity haunts the realist novel. This other way of being is structured like a religious subject, abandoning its own self-interest for a higher truth (a model that Badiou calls “the subject of a truth”). If the realist novel establishes the individual, it does so only by incorporating and repressing this other religious-structured subject. The first chapter takes Jane Eyre as an exemplar, showing how Charlotte Brontë’s heroine establishes her own liberal subjectivity. The novel stages a series of dialectical encounters between Jane Eyre and the various religious characters; her development consists of incorporating and conquering them, since they represent a form of subjectivity that would limit her own individual power. And yet, these figures continue to appear, revealing how the novel is haunted by the possibility of an alternative to liberal subjectivity. The second chapter, “With the Grain,” applies this model to À rebours. Usually thought of as an atypical, Huysmans’s novel is actually, I argue, entirely typical. And like Jane Eyre, Huysmans’s novel also depicts the liberal subject struggle with another way of being, emblematized by the book’s famous depiction of Salome. The third chapter considers the treatment of Islam in Thomas Carlyle and Michel Houellebecq. For both of these reactionary writers, Islam serves a dual function: their Islamophobia is also a kind of Islamophilia. The Muslim Other that they fear and despise also becomes their image of an alternative to liberal subjectivity. The final chapter turns to George Eliot, examining her attempts to imagine “the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self”—that is, an alternative to liberal subjectivity. Middlemarch’s pessimism about such an alternative, I argue, leads to Daniel Deronda’s focus on race, which serves as what Badiou calls a “simulacrum” for another way of being.
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British Irish literature
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Literature
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Religion
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