Splitting the Difference: Aesthetic Relations in Henry James and Leo Bersani

As an alternative to psychoanalysis’s aggressive subject/object relation, Leo Bersani proposes a more modulated, aesthetic subjectivity. This essay explores Bersani’s concept of aesthetic relations through impressionism’s and realism’s competing demands on the artistic object in Henry James’s “Flickerbridge.” I suggest this 1902 short story can be productively read as a theory of the perspectival shift James was exploring in his experiments with literary impressionism in that period.