Refusals of mastery: Ethical encounters in Henry James and Maurice Blanchot

This dissertation offers the first full-length engagement of the works of Henry James and Maurice Blanchot together. In considering Blanchot's commentary on James in The Book to Come, as well as through the juxtaposition of several of their works, I explore this pairing for its novel transatlantic implications. My attention to ethical concerns in their writing offers the possibility of providing new insight into each of their critical and conceptual projects, while emphasizing a methodological paradigm that provides meaningful new responses to literature in general.;The works that I have selected for this dissertation deal particularly with the ethics of facing (or turning away from) others and with responsibility (either active or deferred) toward the past. Blanchot's critical encounter with James's writing as the possibility of a response to personal and collective trauma, which I discuss in my opening chapter, especially highlights these issues and their relation to the literary. Such readings also require us to think through the complicated politics and national affiliations of both James and Blanchot. My considerations of James's early Civil War tales, Roderick Hudson, and "The Jolly Corner," as well as of Blanchot's The Instant of My Death and "The Beast of Lascaux" explore figurations of mastery and refusal in order to ask what it means to respond to alterity, and what, ultimately, it may mean to encounter the ethical in writing.