Modernist Representations of Consciousness

Ira, this afternoon I read the introduction to Jed Esty's A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England and came across a passage that struck me as relevant to your research. Esty takes a position on modernist representations of consciousness similar, I think, to the one you make in your dialectical reading of Ulysses. Like you, Esty is interested in the relationship between modernist nativism and what he sees as a 'cultural turn', that is, a literary move away from aesthetic to cultural investments. Esty's book focuses on late modernism, from roughly 1930 to 1960, but even though he reads literature from more of a historical than a philosophical lens, I think you'll find his approach to be informative, particularly as you consider how your project on Joyce links up more generally with recent modernist studies.

Anyway, I should be working with materials directly related to my research, not yours, so I'm putting aside the Esty until you return. For now, here's the quote:

Although I have suggested that the personal/impersonal antinomy of English high modernism reaches a new resolution via the supervening doctrine of anthropological holism, I do not read (as Lukacs does) modernist representations of consciousness as a cosmopolitan indulgence subsequently correctly when the return to national concerns enforces a properly sociohistorical aesthetic. Modernist representations of the subject were always, as Adorno insisted, shaped by (not detached from) specific and objective social conditions. Indeed, a genuinely critical or negative art required (more than ever) the language of subjectivity in order to avoid simply reproducing the real world in a naive attempt at mimetic objectivity or social realism. This Adornean model of 'objective subjectivity' as the key to modernist technique seems to have come under pressure in the midcentury, at least in practice, for English writers like Eliot and Woolf.

Coincidentally, the copy of Adorno's Negative Dialectics you ordered arrived today.