Breakdown: Modernity's Metafictions

Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

English Language and Literature

First Advisor

Figlerowicz, Marta

Abstract

Breakdown: Modernity’s Metafictions takes up the strange case of “breakdown” and its double meaning: physical decomposition and mental undoing. Throughout the long 19th- and 20th- centuries, Western thinkers saw the connection between collapses of mind and the decay of matter as something more than metaphorical. Breakdown functioned, perhaps paradoxically, as a conceptual nexus for philosophy, politics, science, theology, and aesthetics. Accordingly, this project brings 19th-century literature and aesthetic theory into conversation with unexpected interlocuters: 20th-century Confessional poets, anthropologists of religion, and Netflix documentaries about fungi. It is because of their shared fixation on decay and undoing that these objects of study are connected by a unique set of commitments—thematic preoccupations with despondency, an overwhelming sense of themselves as harbingers of transformation, and a fixation on how, to quote Henri Bergson, a “theory of knowledge and theory of life” produce each other. For the philosophers and artists of Western modernity, breakdown-as-junction became a reparative method for thinking inside of crisis. In this way, my project offers a new intellectual history of what literary studies calls the post-critical turn, a movement away from a “hermeneutics of suspicion” and towards what Eve Sedgwick has dubbed “reparative reading.” But while recent celebrations (and critiques) of post-critical methodologies operate in the language of affect, identifying repair as a kind of feel-good lens for interpretation, I argue instead that the work of repair is a question not of feeling but of form. Repair and breakdown, my project insists, are two ways of describing the same relationship between representation and reality: metafiction. Breakdown asks why this kind of reflexivity continues to offer itself as an answer to the crises of secular, Western modernity. Chapter One, “The Secular is a Semiotics,” reads Talal Asad and Charles Long to argue that secularism operates by explicating its own operation. I name metafiction as the defining epistemology of secular, Western modernity—a restructuring of the relationship between representation and embodiment. The middle chapters of my project trace a trajectory of “meta-” concerns through three aesthetic movements with complex relationships to secularization. Chapter Two, “A Great and Sudden Change,” grounds my case for metafiction as the epistemological harbinger of modernity by reading Frankenstein to establish Romanticism as a site where major semiotic change coincided with a new conception of the ‘human.’ Chapter Three, “The Decadent Secular” defines secularization in nineteenth-century Europe as a uniquely semiotic crisis by way of Oscar Wilde and Algernon Swinburne. A preliminary version of “The Decadent Secular” won the Yale English departmental prize for “Best Coursework Essay,” and a revised version is currently under review at Poetics Today. In Chapter Four, “A Formal Feeling,” I read the confessional poetry of Anne Sexton alongside Kierkegaard to ask why metapoetics seem to be the despairer’s final recourse to intimacy. The final sections of my current project engage with ongoing discourses in the History of Science. Chapter Five, “Morel Ideals,” reads the recent proliferation of books about mushrooms in order to critique scholars who, like Anna Tsing and Merlin Sheldrake, posit method itself as an antidote for anthropomorphism: knowing the mushrooms the way that mushrooms themselves know.

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