2025 Theses Doctoral

Forms of Phenomenology in 20th-Century Prose: A Dialectical Examination

Lawton, Max Daniel

This dissertation begins as an attempt to conceive of a throughline for 20th-century prose without reference to modernism and postmodernism. This is taken to be especially necessary given the ways in which the modernism/postmodernism framework has failed to account for various trends, but, for the purposes of this dissertation, most especially autofiction. The dissertation does not commence at the beginning of the 20th century, but at its end, also extending into the 21st. In my attempt to understand how Handke and Knausgaard come to write as they do in genealogical terms, the dissertation goes back to the beginning of the 20th century and offers a narrative of how, throughout 20th-century prose, phenomenology has been present in a variety of forms –or has at the very least been a tenable mode of critical analysis for that literature, as many critics assent.

What is perhaps of special note in this dissertation is the way in which I allow the typological paradigm of each chapter to deconstruct itself. It begins with a comparative study of Peter Handke and Karl Ove Knausgaard and their autofiction in the first chapter. In the context of the analysis of Handke’s bibliography in the first chapter, I show how the properly Heideggerian phenomenological quality of his middle period of work soon gives way to the prolix and the self-referential in his late novels. In the second chapter, a substantial engagement with scholars’ attempts to frame Marcel Proust and Louis-Ferdinand Céline as Merleau-Pontian phenomenologists instead becomes an analysis of the ways in which they fail to fall in line with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body. In the third chapter, I attempt to account for how the depiction of an excess of worldly phenomena in “chaotic” novels by Joseph McElroy, Alexander Goldshtein, Thomas Pynchon, and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz malfunctions the text of these novels. This analysis proceeding with reference most especially to Martin Heidegger and Fredric Jameson.

The final chapter of the dissertation shows what happens when the ostensibly phenomenological writers I am treating attempt to order the phenomena of the world as it is (rather than as it ought to be) into a Hegelian Geist. Even before this chapter, the ways in which Hegel’s dialectical phenomenology interrupts and interferes with phenomenology as such, are a leitmotif of the dissertation. In the fourth chapter, I find that Hegelian idealism becomes a radically negative doctrine when its method is applied to the horrors of the 20th century. Writers like Vladimir Sorokin, Andrei Platonov, J.G. Ballard, Samuel Delany, and Michael Lentz are brought to bear in this portion of the text.

Finally, the attempt to erect phenomena up into a new Geist that ends up being so Abject (in the sense of Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror) is shown to necessitate the return to autofiction performed by Handke and Knausgaard in the first chapter. Proust and Céline’s retreat from the grand narratives of the 19th century giving way to an even more reduced retreat at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st.. This dissertation does not finally insist on phenomenology as a vital form of criticism.