| This dissertation argues that Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and Samuel Beckett use experiments with time to investigate the modern subject's ethical obligations to others. By revisiting familiar understandings of time in modernism---psychoanalytic, materialist, phenomenological, narratological---in terms of ethics, I analyze how these writers' temporalities enable relations among subjects that acknowledge the radical difference, or alterity, of others from the self, and that involve these others with the self in terms of justice. This ethical imperative makes time a problem for the isolated subject, challenging the forms of time that organize individuated, interpellated subjectivity: narratives of private memory and national history; economic and scientific rationalizations of time; linear, causal sequence; and the clear separation of past, present, and future. This dissertation's readings of Woolf's Jacob's Room, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves; Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!; and Beckett's Three Novels make concepts of time, ethical obligation, and alterity work closely together, showing how understandings of time and ethical obligation, as unrepresentable preconditions to subjectivity, are hindered by traditional concepts of the subject. Using Levinas's meta-ethical thought, Benjamin's philosophy of history, and Wittgenstein's analysis of the language of subjectivity, in particular, it describes the "post-subjective" temporalities that emerge in these novels, that is, forms of time that reconstruct the subject in terms of an alterity that exceeds individual identity, private experience, and subject-object relations. Ultimately, my dissertation argues that modernist explorations of the subject in time inform concepts of "the Other" in post-structuralist philosophy and theory. |
