Henry James and the Language of Experience

by Collin Meissner

Overview

Collin Meissner examines the political dimension to the representation of experience as it unfolds throughout James' work. For James, experience was a dialectical process that registered and expressed his consciousness of the external world. Meissner shows how James' understanding of the process of consciousness is not simply an aspect of literary form but inherently political, requiring an active engagment with the full complexity of social reality. The civic value of art resided in an interactive process in which the reader becomes aware of the aesthetic experience as immediate and engaged.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521122627
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	11/05/2009
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)
Lexile:	1580L (what's this?)

Table of Contents

1. The experience of Jamesian hermeneutics; 2. The experience of divestiture: toward an understanding of the self in The American; 3. Bondage and boundaries: Isabel Archer's failed experience; 4. Lambert Strether and the negativity of experience; 5. Recovery and revelation: the experience of self-exposure in James's autobiography.

Editorial Reviews

"...an exquisitely rendered and lucid response to postmodern skepticism about the creatuve construction of human identity in Henry James's fiction." Henry James Review

"Meissner's study fruitfully applies the insights of hermeneutics and phenomenology...to reexamine the crises of interpretation that form the central dramas in James's fiction...The value of Meissner's focus on this drama of hermeneutic crisis and "epiphany" is evidenced by his cogent readings of the novels. He offers particularly valuable insights into how and why their conclusions deliberately resist conventional expectations of narrative closure." American Literature

"...Meissner navigates adeptly through the ficton,autobiographical works, and theoretical writings to posit that James's textual mission extends experience's self-liberating potential beyond fictional limits to the writer himself and to the reader." Modern Fiction Studies

From the Publisher