The Madness of the Master: Henry James and Maurice Blanchot at the Limit

“The Madness of the Master” examines the overlap between Henry James and Maurice Blanchot. Reading “The Middle Years,” the Notebooks, and The American Scene in conjunction with Blanchot’s concept of the limit-experience and the space of literature, the author argues that understanding language as an experience of otherness ironically provides an agonistic and revisionary ground for the humanities. To this end, the essay briefly puts Blanchot in dialogue with James’s modernist heirs, Matthiessen, Blackmur, and Trilling, to offer an alternative vision of the myth of mastery more suitable for our current moment.