DEAD FATHERS: THE DISCOURSES OF MODERNIST AUTHORITY (CONRAD, JAMES, HEMINGWAY, WOOLF)

This essay analyzes narratives by Conrad, James, Hemingway, and Woolf to suggest that their critical representations have often been provoked by the same conflicting impulses that prompt modernist writing. I begin with a discussion of several normalizing trends in traditional 20th century criticism: the canonization of modernism that equates it with formalist aestheticism or with existentialism; and the Marxist attack on modernism as a reactionary, bourgeois celebration of ahistorical alienation. The critical and philosophical practices that underlie these views suggest the tendency of both Marxist and non-Marxist accounts of modernism to repress what I define as its constitutive element: a fundamental ambivalence toward the ideology of humanism.; Though the modernist writer certainly shares his or her culture's faith in humanist values, that faith is increasingly challenged by the materialist representations of language, culture, history, and the human subject effected by the work of Marx, Saussure, and Freud. These writers displace natural or theological genealogies of man with their theories of social and linguistic determinism and thus provide the basis for the modernists' subversion of the limits of propositional discourse, and the limits of the ideology that such discourse produces and reflects.; In the context of recent developments in semiotic and psychoanalytic theory, I argue that modernist writing represents social authority to be a function of discursive conventions rather than of transcendental orders. By demonstrating the provisional nature of these discursive orders, modernism provides a radical if ambivalent critique of the conventional laws that constitute social existence.