After Ontology: Literary Theory and Modernist Poetics (review)

Melaney’s line of thought places the modern, modernism, and post-modernism in complex relation. A postmodern critique of the modern in philosophy prepares the way for both an interpretation of modernism as a general cultural phenomenon and a way of reading specific modernist texts.

Modern philosophy began when Descartes founded knowing and being on the certainty of the subject’s self-reflection. Kant’s “Copernican revolution” confirmed while reversing Descartes, making subjectivity not the foundation but the limit of possible experience. Kant’s critical philosophy made meaningless the Cartesian opposition of subject vs. object, thinking substance vs. extended substance. But it generates a fresh split between theoretical and ethical, pure and practical reason, knowledge and ethics. When he discovered a third form of a priori in the reflective judgment of beauty in art and teleology in nature, he thought he had found a bridge between pure and practical reason. But this also required restricting the experience of the beautiful to a harmony among the subject’s interior faculties, so that the artwork’s autonomy deprived it of its cognitive claim to truth.

To recover the artwork’s claim to truth, Hans-Georg Gadamer argued, the artwork must be reconnected to being through its subject matter, its Sache. But this reconnection could not be effected through the old concept of mimesis. Instead, it is effected by the infinite mediation of language. The self that experiences the artwork is not a subject, whether understood as foundation or as limit. It exists in time and belongs to a world that exists in time, that is, the world borne to us as tradition. This line of thought explicitly follows Heidegger to replace subjectivity with a responsive and therefore dialogical self and to recover the truth claim of the work of art inherent in its temporality. Truth and Method concludes with an analysis of the radiance of beauty. Melaney notes Gianni Vattimo’s claim that Gadamer thus reverts to a unified ontology, abandoning Heidegger’s rift between earth and world—an objection I find unconvincing.

Jacques Derrida deconstructs Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment but also Heidegger’s “Origin of the Work of Art,” on which Gadamer relies. Focusing on the concept of frame, Derrida argues in “Parerga” that Kant cannot resolve the opposition of inner and outer, the autonomy of the aesthetic and the demands of practical reason. In Derrida’s analysis, Kant cannot establish the unity of subjectivity through aesthetics even by recourse to the sublime or the symbol. Discursivity and temporality—différance—intervene. Confronting Meyer Scha-piro’s response to Heidegger’s “Origin of the Work of Art,” Derrida dissolves the unity of art and world under the concept of truth. Into this gap steps the figure of the artist, not as a unified subject nor as a source of truth, but as a site where temporality and the trace of the other weave a text rather than establish a work. This is the territory of the ethical, as Derrida understands it. Melaney absorbs not only these results but also the double reading through which Derrida reaches them. He pursues the ethical and connects it with language and the discourse of legitimacy through Nietzsche, Lacan, Lyotard, and Foucault. Returning to Derrida, Melaney uses the concepts of undecidability, trace, and différance to disclose both a modern and a postmodern moment in the (inherently aporetic) modernist text. The modernist artist thus opens a rupture between the modern and the postmodern, but the modernist text must also be recontextualized in a general quest for justice.

Melaney understands this to require analyzing the response of a group of modernist texts to a common intertext. He therefore proceeds to examine Eliot’s and Pound’s differing uses of Hamlet, Dante, and Ulysses, concluding with Yeats’ recovery of history and community, but in a way that asks us to “remain at home in the unanswerable” (167). In Eliot, the intertext disrupts the relation of author to work by...