Machinic Modernism: The Deleuzian Literary Machines of Woolf, Lawrence and Joyce

by Beatrice Monaco

Overview

This book reveals the rich 'metaphysics' of modernist literature through a Deleuzian and Guattarian lens, using their radical philosophical concepts to revisit key texts, including Woolf's To the Lighthouse and The Waves, Lawrence's The Rainbow, and Joyce's Ulysses. The philosophy allows Monaco to draw an immanent map of the modernist literature that reviews the charged and complex political and aesthetic territory of modernism and its confrontation with the machine age in terms of the dazzling array of pragmatic effects or 'machines' in the texts. This is a lively, cutting-edge intersection of philosophy and literature that suggests that the critical text must itself become a 'machine': a pragmatic, and not merely interpretive, agent.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780230262225
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date:	10/23/2008
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	335 KB

About the Author

BEA MONACO has lived and researched in three different continents, and gained her PhD from the University of London, UK, where she now teaches.

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations vii

Acknowledgements viii

1 Towards a Literary Critical Machine 1

Modernism, the organic-mechanical and Deleuze 4

Deleuze-Guattarian multiplicity, univocity, and the machinic 9

The machinic and modernism 13

2 The Spatiotemporality of To the Lighthouse 18

The transcendence and immanence of Ramsay domesticity 24

Becoming 38

'Time Passes': the autonomous narrative 43

'The Lighthouse': aesthetic autonomy 49

3 The Visceral-Materiality of The Rainbow 54

The primitive metaphysic of The Rainbow 63

Sexual and temporal rhythms 69

The inhuman-corporeal 73

Gender and the decline of civilisation 75

The rise of abstraction 77

4 Ulysses: The Hyperconscious Machinic Text 88

The aesthetic shift as double-action 93

'Telemachus': the microcosmic machine 98

The cinematic textual machine 100

'Primitive' writing 104

Bloom as capitalist subject: the cynical machine 108

Nonsense, paradox and the imaginary 113

'Oxen of the Sun': the despotic machine 114

'Circe': the decoded imaginary 117

'Ithaca': the paradox of the imaginary 120

5 Ideas and Life in Conflict: Lawrence's Later Works 127

Women in Love: ideas versus matter 131

Voices of freedom and of mechanism in the later works 142

Lady Chatterley's Lover: the deified narrative machine 147

6 Orlando and The Waves: Machinic Triumph of Form 154

Orlando: haeccities and creative facts 155

Deleuze and Guattari's cosmic aesthetic 160

The Waves: the pure machinic of form 161

The body of life 167

The rhythm of space 175

The rhythm of time 179

The rhythm of art 183

Conclusion 189

Notes 191

Bibliography 206

Index211