| dc.description.abstract | Our ways of thinking modernism and its legacy are imprinted with the pattern of an
opposition, a struggle between two sets of extremes: objective and subjective; form
and feeling; mechanistic and organic; mind and body; knowing and being; self and
world; aesthetic and historical. The three writers whose work I explore in this thesis
challenge prevailing notions of this oppositional discourse. Entering the scene of
modernism late in its history, Elizabeth Bowen, Eudora Welty and Maurice Merleau-
Ponty develop a new kind of vision that makes us rethink the relationships between
perceiver and perceived, between mind, body and world. All three writers undertake a
fundamental reorganisation of the relationships between internal consciousness and
external things through the narration of a perception that is outside the limits of
discrete sensations or causal relationships. Physical things are neither pure objecthood
nor merely external triggers for the ramblings of a solipsistic consciousness, rather
they infringe on a consciousness whose own edges are indistinct. This writing
establishes an interdependent and interlocutory relationship between subject and
world, which become not opposite ends of a perceptual scale, but aspects of a common
flesh. The intimate connection to the world is both comforting and threatening, both
reinforcing subjectivity and de-centring it.
The re-ordering of the connections between self and world leads to a reassessment of
collective identity and historical agency, as well as impacting upon approaches to
modes of representation. In trying to express the pre-linguistic experience of embodied
consciousness, this writing looks to models of mute expression found in visual images.
Exploring how the invisible aspects of experience emerge within the visible realm, the
writing takes on an often hallucinatory or uncanny character. Charting the passage
from being to doing, from perception to creation, from the style of the flesh to the style
of fiction, Merleau-Ponty, Welty and Bowen dissolve received boundaries and
distinctions at every level. | en_US |
