The patterns of persons: Ideas of agency in twentieth-century American literature (Gertrude Stein, Don DeLillo, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison)

This dissertation examines how various aesthetic styles and narrative forms in twentieth-century American literature exhibit competing conceptions of agency, and thus can be regarded as thought experiments illuminating questions of mind, meaning, and personhood. It explores the particular pictures of agency and intentionality manifested in the work of four authors: Gertrude Stein, Don DeLillo, Saul Bellow, and Ralph Ellison. The first half of the dissertation suggests ways in which twentieth-century avant-garde texts display not—as many critics, theorists, and writers themselves have encouraged us to think—the “loss” of persons (authorship, selfhood, animation, etc.), but rather the reconfiguration of personhood into new and varied entities. The convolutions of Stein's early-century portraits, I claim, compel the reader to posit what could be called “sub-personal” systems, where meaning allegedly emerges from the pattern of “inner experiences” recognizable outside our shared linguistic norms. By contrast, DeLillo's late-century fiction suggests a “supra-personal” conception of action, where meaning arises in the pattern of an overarching intentional system such as History or Language, of which persons are functional parts. Both of these models, however, presuppose a third, which I explore in the second half of the dissertation, and which, following Sellars, I refer to as the “manifest image” of a person. In identifying behavior as meaningful, we do not begin by positing invisible micro- or macro-entities, but rather—as Sellars, Wittgenstein, Davidson, and other post-war thinkers argue—by ascribing a narrative of intentional attitudes to particular bodies within a particular environment. It is an interest in this personal level of description that motivates the work of Bellow and Ellison, two mid-century literary figures whose work vividly dramatizes both the temptations and failures of extra-personal ideas of agency. Bellow and Ellison, however, challenge not only Stein and DeLillo, but also the philosophers to whom they bear such a close family resemblance. In attending to the personal level, their work raises a moral dilemma: if we are able to define and describe the patterns of a purposive action, and thus distinguish persons from nonpersons, we moderns are largely without the means to assess the patterns of a purposive life as a whole.