Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 64-03, Section: A, page: 0893.

Directors: Shoshana Felman; Paul H. Fry.

This dissertation explores how the writings of Keats and Flaubert are centrally structured by a thematics of impersonality. Both English Romantic poet and French realist novelist lay claim to their vocations by disclaiming personal authority and insisting on a disjunction between the "historical person" and the "literary artist." I interpret such reflections as marking the site of a crisis of saying "I," of the discontinuity that besets the singularity of personal experience in its passage to a linguistic frame of reference. I trace in their texts how a metaphorics of muteness emerges to allegorize what the discourse of the "I" threatens to efface. By investigating their poetic and narrative strategies, I show how Beats and Flaubert participate in a tradition in which this problem is not forgotten or overcome but, rather, registered and inscribed.

The introduction situates these writers as forerunners of a legacy in modern literature, criticism, and theory that includes, among others, Mallarme, T. S. Eliot, Barthes, and Foucault. Through close reading of selected letters and poems, I establish how Keats's poetic voice is apostrophaically constructed in relation to mute addressees whose condition is ideally desired by his lyric speakers but which betokens rather a silence within these speakers themselves. With reference to the Object Relations psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, I analyze the autobiographical implications that underlie this figurative pattern. I discuss Flaubert's letters and focus on his late story, Un Coeur simple , which I interpret in relation to the interruption of Bouvard et Pecuchet and as a response to George Sand's critique of his impersonal narrative practice for suspending the structure of address that conventionally obtains between author and reader. Examining how the story of Felicite's life elicits contradictory responses of irony and pity, I displace this opposition by uncovering an insistence within the text on the literality of "un coeur" ultimately irreducible to any form of significant thematization. This literality, I argue, functions as the basis of a genuine address that exceeds a discourse of lieux communs.