Literature and film, dispositioned: Thought, location and world - Alice Gavin

Phần Không Tên 2

Acknowledgements

This book was begun in London at the London Consortium which was then directed by Steven Connor. It was completed in Berlin, while I was a fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. Both cities and both institutions were vital to the book's development, and I wish to thank each guiding voice and source of encouragement I encountered within them. My time spent at the ICI was invaluable to the project's advancement; I am hugely grateful for the resources and opportunities my fellowship there afforded. The middle sections of Chapter 2 revisit and reformulate elements of a previously published article, 'Thinking Room and Thought Streams in Henry and William James' Textual Practice 26:5 (2012): 871–889, and I thank the journal for permission to reuse that material here. I also want to thank by name and niche the following: Christien for love and longing; Adam for piano songs; Richard for five years and then some; Sophie for tremendous friendship at tremendous distances; Greg for guitars and whiskey; Laura for brill Brum cos stuff; the Cowley pack for Cowley magic; Alex for Pusha T; Daniel for glam literality; Nahal for calm and chocolate; Hadi for blue Farsi; Robert for notes that don't exist; Bobby for death on the dance floor; Netta for life on the dance floor; and David for ping pong. But if my admiration and adoration is for these dear friends and many unmentioned others, then this book is for my brothers Ben Harlow and Kieran Gavin, and my sister Lucy Sutton. Here's 'a little something', the least I could do.

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Preface: Stimmung

This book is about the encounter between twentieth-century litera- ture and silent film, and how this encounter thwarts the 'optimistic assumption' that what we call modernism can be defined by a subjec- tivist, 'inward turn.' 'Optimistic assumption', and 'inward turn' are phrases I borrow from Fredric Jameson's The Antinomies of Realism. Similar to the present book, The Antinomies of Realism thinks about literature partly by giving attention to a form of unspeakable sentence whose emergence, in association with the phenomenon of free indi- rect style, Jameson considers 'a fundamental event in the history of language.' Unspeakable sentences are for Jameson connected with the nameless reality, and realism, of affect, the literary representa- tion of which he places in tension with so-called objective sentences of novelistic narration. In Jameson's view, the 'namelessness' of this 'new' affective 'reality' is what eventually forces the dissolution of literary realism.1 His focus, for the most part, is the nineteenth- century novel. By contrast, my interest is in tracing the density of unspeakable sentences in the prose of Henry James, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and, in a peculiar way, Samuel Beckett too. If Henry James is often considered an intermediary between realism and modernism – a consideration with which this book in many ways concurs – then Beckett's The Unnamable (1953) may after all be a name for where namelessness goes when realism is dissolute.