The Literary Self: Toward a Theory of Agency and Voice

Dissertation, University of Virginia (1994)
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Abstract

The title of my dissertation refers to a paradox in the creation of identity or self. On the one hand, the self is a construct of language, a poem written, as the philosopher Richard Rorty says, by specific historical "vocabularies." It deals in linguistic and historical forms of being rather than in transcendent essences. On the other hand, the self is a projection of the individual body, deriving from what a body is and does as an immanent primal subject. The self is body and poem. ;This duality makes our quests for individual autonomy problematic because autonomy often ignores the needs of the community and can lead to arrogance and cruelty. Rorty wishes to curb autonomous quests in the public sphere and in the literatures that spawn them. I argue that these quests are necessary because they provide the means by which the self establishes its power inside language. ;In literature, that struggle for power can be seen as a quest to transcend the self's condition as language, to defy the vocabularies that make the self into a historical text. The instrument of this defiance is voice, which represents the body's prelinguistic impulses toward autonomy or agency. Harold Bloom calls this voice the agon beneath language and sees in it the primal impulse we have to revise and transcend the language defining us. Garrett Stewart calls this voice beneath the text the "phonemic" imagination . Language thus contains and implies the disruptive voice of autonomy. But voice cannot transcend language except as brute sound, which leaves the self behind and voice socially powerless. How can the self be brought into transcendence? Thematically, such a question raises ethical concerns about where to situate private/egoistic quests within the community. Walt Whitman and George Eliot study these concerns. The question also raises ontological concerns about how to reconcile language to the primal will. Wallace Stevens studies this concern. ;My readings of all three writers illustrate how contemporary theory, in its muting and abstracting of the self, disempowers the self by disembodying and assimilating it to a world of language that it can never own, and how literatures of self-creation aim to re-embody and restore that power

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