The varieties of aesthetic experience in American Modernist literature

My dissertation focuses on three American Modernists---Henry James, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens---whose major works portray the sacralization of art as a problematic aspiration. All three are known for essays, journals, or letters which argue that literature can be seen either as a secular replacement for religion (James, Stevens), or a secular conduit for rumination on divine grace (Moore). However, the dominant tendency in their literary writing is to depict these projects as unaccomplished and perhaps unaccomplishable. In their fiction and poetry, James, Moore, and Stevens suggest that when aesthetic experience is spiritualized, the writing that results will be solipsistic, imprecise, and ontologically implausible. I examine these writers' descriptions of the limitations and inconsistencies of imagining literature as a source of spiritual experience, and I demonstrate that the sacralization of art in American Modernism was not a dead metaphor but an ongoing problem.James, Moore, and Stevens conceived the parameters of this problem with language drawn from contemporary debates about religious experience. My methodology therefore seeks to contextualize these writers by examining their responses to particular aesthetic and theological issues---James on the afterlife, Moore on Neo-Orthodox doctrines of original sin, Stevens on mystic conceptions of "pure poetry." I suggest a more general context in my introductory chapter, where I argue that all three of these writers define the spiritual dimensions of art in ways that are closely tied to the intellectual legacy of American Protestantism. Unlike Matthew Arnold, who envisioned a civic religion of art with a redemptive, public mission, the writers I examine imagine that the spiritual work of literature is conducted in isolation, and does not allow the writer to heal the world but to escape it. James, Moore, and Stevens follow writers like Emerson, William James, and Reinhold Niebuhr in imagining individualism to be essential to spirituality, but they also criticize this individualist model, as can be seen when they worry that devotion to art leads to loneliness, greed, and withdrawal from life. This uneasy continuity between Protestantism and Modernism exemplifies the complex and incomplete ways that secularization occurred in American intellectual culture.