Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern: The (Hi)Story of a Difficult Relationship from Romanticism to Postmodernism

225 Pages·2005·6.81 MB·English

by  Will Slocombe

Literary C riticism and
C ultural T heory
Edited by
William E. Cain
Professor of English
Wellesley College
A Routledge Series
Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
W illiam E. Cain, General Editor
The End of the Mind The Imperial Quest and Modern
The Edge of the Intelligible in Hardy, Stevens, Memory from Conrad to Greene
Larkin, Plath, and Glück J. M. Rawa
DeSales Harrison
The Ethics of Exile
Colonialism in the Fictions of Charles
Authoring the Self
Brockden Brown and J. M. Coetzee
Self-Representation, Authorship, and the Print
Timothy Francis Strode
Market in British Poetry from Pope through
Wordsworth The Romantic Sublime and Middle-
Scott Hess Class Subjectivity in the Victorian
Novel
Narrative Mutations Stephen Hancock
Discourses of Heredity and Caribbean Literature
Rudyard J. Alcocer Vital Contact
Downclassing Journeys in American Literature
Between Profits and Primitivism from Herman Melville to Richard Wright
Shaping White Middle-Class Masculinity in Patrick Chura
the United States 1880—1917
Cosmopolitan Fictions
Athena Devlin Ethics, Politics, and Global Change in the
Works of Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje,
Poetry and Repetition
Jamaica Kincaid, and J. M. Coetzee
Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery
Katherine Stanton
Krystyna Mazur
Outsider Citizens
The Fiction of Nationality in an Era of The Remaking of Postwar Identity in Wright,
TRANSNATIONALISM Beauvoir, and Baldwin
NylaAli Khan Sarah Relyea
Gendered Pathologies An Ethics of Becoming
The Female Body and Biomedical Discourse in Configurations of Feminine Subjectivity in
the Nineteenth-Century English Novel Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and George
Eliot
Sondra M. Archimedes
Sonjeong Cho
“Twentieth-Century Americanism”
Narrative Desire and Historical
Identity and Ideology in Depression-Era Leftist
Reparations
Fiction
A. S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie
Andrew C. Yerkes
Tim S. Gauthier
Wilderness City Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern
The Post World War II American Urban Novel The (Hi)Story of a Difficult Relationship from
from Algren to Wideman Romanticism to Postmodernism
Ted L. Clontz Will Slocombe
N ihilism and the Sublime Postmodern
The (Hi)Story of a Difficult Relationship from
Romanticism to Postmodernism
Will Slocombe
Routledge
New York & London
Published in 2006 by Published in Great Britain by
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Taylor & Francis Group Taylor & Francis Group
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New York, NY 10016 Milton Park, Abingdon
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© 2006 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
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International Standard Book Number-10: 0-415-97529-8 (Hardcover)
International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-415-97529-2 (Hardcover)
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Contents
List of Tables and Diagrams vii
Acknowledgments ix
“The Preface” xi
HISTORY
Chapter One 1
Ex Nihilo: Constructing Nihilism
Chapter Two 25
Stylising the Sublime
THEORY
Chapter Three 51
Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern
Chapter Four 77
Postmodern Nihilism
PRAXIS
Chapter Five 105
Postmodern Nihilism and Postmodern Aesthetics
Chapter Six 139
Postmodern Nihilism and Postmodern Ethics
vi Contents
“The Preface Again” 171
Afterword, or, Why I Am (Not) a Nihilist 175
Notes 179
Bibliography 193
Index 205
List of Tables and Diagrams
TABLES
3.1 Nihilistic and Sublime Moments within Ideologies 56
4.1 Forms of Nihilism Before Postmodernism 98
FIGURES
4.2 Modernist Nihilism / Postmodern Nihilism 99
5.1 Variations on the ‘Both/And’ 121
5.2 Nihilism and Narrative Proliferation 130
vii

Acknowledgments
A number of people have helped bring this project from its murky origins in
my subconscious to the book that you read here and there is not sufficient
space to thank all of them personally The first among many who should
nevertheless be named is Tim Woods, who supervised the project upon
which this book is based and who rather adroitly pointed out a number of
connections that I am embarrassed not to have seen myself. Over the years,
both his praise and criticisms have helped no end and, whilst his attempts to
instil some form of academic respectability in me have not been entirely suc­
cessful, most of my ability is due to his patient tutoring. Aside from him
(Him?), thanks must also go to Damian Walford Davies for his sublime sum­
mation of the sublime—a not-so-ironic je ne sais quoi—and to Malte Urban
and John “the words tell themselves empty” Wrighton for their invaluable
discussions over numerous coffees. Further thanks must go to Peter Barry
and Mark Currie, who offered invaluable advice in turning the manuscript
into a vaguely respectable treatise, and to Bill Cain and Max Novick for their
assistance in getting this book into print. Aside from these, thanks go to the
department of English at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which has
provided support in all manner of ways, and to the University itself, who
provided the funding for the initial project. Without these, this product of
teenage angst would have remained just that, and I am grateful for the
opportunity to prove myself more than merely another ageing teen-nihilist.
My final thanks go to Jennie Hill, who has pointed out that no matter how
many theses I complete, I will still always be a teen-nihilist at heart. It is with
considerable shame that I must therefore admit that this thesis is dedicated
to none of these. It is, and can only ever be, “to no-one in particular.”
ix