Mindless Modernism

Abstract

What would modernist fiction look like if it were mindless and had no access to mental states? While modernism is often understood as a psychological turn inward, this article shows how introspective psychology competed against other psychological discourses—and how writers such as Samuel Beckett theorized a modernism without introspection. In his essays “Dante … Bruno … Vico … Joyce” (1929) and Proust (1930), Beckett argued that the psychological interiority of high modernist fiction could be attributed to nonmental and behavioristic causes. And in his novel Murphy (1936), he suggested that novelistic form belied the unknowability of mental states. To Beckett, the novel's ability to know other minds was itself fictional; the representation of character minds, he contended, should be subjected to the same psychological laws as real people. Beckett's early writings, then, ask us to reconsider how we understand literature's historical and logical relationship to psychology. Following Beckett's lead, this article concludes by asking us to imagine what the modernist novel—as well as contemporary criticism—would look like if we stopped taking the introspective mind for granted.

Towards a computational history of modernism in European literary history: Mapping the Inner Lives of Characters in the European Novel (1840–1920)

“…In its critical reconsideration of the common narrative of the “inward turn” as a key aspect of modernist literature, Conroy’s article can be seen in the context of other recent publications ( Gang, 2013 ; Herman, 2011 ; Miguel-Alfonso, 2020 ) which similarly highlight the complexity of issues surrounding periodisation based on formal, aesthetic, and thematic features and the need for a nuanced engagement with them. Both the insights from these recent approaches and the lack of an unequivocal trend in our data suggest that there are good reasons to conduct further research into the manifold connections between literary modernism and the inner life of characters, which eschew simple and univocal narratives.…”

The Theme of the Five Biscuits: Murphy, Foucault, and Beckett’s Critique of Neoliberalism

“…… When the force of the impact is spent, he comes to rest, a self-contained globule of desire as before. Critics have noted Beckett's fascination with behaviourism and the mechanics of equilibrium in the 1930s (Gang 2013;Nixon, Diaries 37). Veblen draws on both discourses to present a "hedonistic conception of man" that is virtually identical to Beckett's philosophical pessimism in Murphy and elsewhere, particularly his monograph on Proust (1930) (Beckett,Murphy 38).…”