Modernism and coherence: Four chapters of a negative aesthetics (Ireland, James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost)

The following dissertation is an attempt to articulate a theory of aesthetic negativity. The main difference it exhibits in relation to other writings on the subject, particularly Christoph Menke's The Sovereignty of Art, is to be found in two related procedures. In the first place, the text situates aesthetic negativity in a theoretical constellation that connects it to the Marxian principle of exchange (Tauschprinzip), thus recuperating T. W. Adorno's dialectical notion of negativity. Aesthetic negativity can only become relevant (and interesting), when discussed in the context of today's total commodification of language, when messages, irrespective of their content, acquire that kind of positivity and fungibility typical of “material” commodities. In contrast to Adorno, however, the dissertation incorporates a more linguistically oriented terminology, without abandoning an underlying dialectical impulse.; The second feature that differentiates the text below from other incursions in the field is its problematization of fields. A typically philosophical way that shies away from the direct and immediate confrontation with aesthetic objects. These become, at most, examples of the theory exposed. Contrary to this, the dissertation's ideal was to have theoretical points emerging , not before and above, but mixed and in tension with concrete readings.; The dissertation presents four kinds of negativity. First, in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, negativity opposes arguments. The text's circularity, which expresses a never-thematized, absent center, manages to refute analytical readings by offering a contradictory term to whatever is explained or commented. The second chapter interprets Wallace Stevens' poetry in the context of his general theory of experience and the imagination known as the supreme fiction. Negativity here appears in the experience of denial that poems exhibit in relation their role of imaginative social unification. The third part investigates how Robert Frost's poetry allows for a negation of space that contradicts its apparently illimitable potential to circulate in all social spaces; the last chapter, finally, considers the relationship of James Joyce's Ulysses with time, in its capacity to contain in itself the temporality to which it was subjected.