Antihumanism, Modernism, & Narrative

ELT 47 : 1 2004 Challenging Modernism brings together important new voices in modern scholarship. Its aim is ambitious, and for the most part the individual essays open new venues of inquiry by highlighting the dialogue between literature and culture. This collection demonstrates that theoretical frameworks such as feminism and cultural criticism illuminate the social changes, political engagement, and artistic innovations of the period. Ongoing scholarly efforts to expand our understanding of modernity such as Challenging Modernism ensure that reductive definitions of modernism will soon belong to a quaint critical past. Geneviève Brassard ---------------------- University of Connecticut Antihumanism, Modernism, & Narrative Paul Sheehan. Modernism, Narrative and Humanism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xii + 234 pp. $60.00 BASED ON THE TITLE of Paul Sheehan's book, one might expect it to be about modernism, narrative, and humanism. It is not. It is about antihumanism, modernism, and narrative, in that order. In Sheehan's hands these subjects become wonderfully complex and fascinating, but readers who are not well versed in philosophy may feel bewildered by his contribution to "the philosophy of literature." For example, he describes the more than century-long process of dissociating the concept of the human from humanism in the following way: On the one hand, "humanism without the human" is evident in the work of Schopenhauer. For him, the absence of a given being identifiable as "human" is no obstacle to his prescribing doctrines for appropriate ethical and political behaviour, or what might be summed up as ethics without metaphysics. On the other hand, "the human without humanism" (or "the human without the 'human'"), takes apart the metaphysical and axiological assumptions that have accreted around the term (category, concept) "human." Its chief exponents are Nietzsche and Heidegger, who both evinced either a frustrating vagueness or a wily reticence in establishing a blueprint for appropriate human conduct, (xi) This prose is lively and original, the research it represents thorough and broad. But I found it difficult to remember distinctions between the two strands of thought that Sheehan is attempting to distinguish with the phrases "humanism without the human" and "human without the 'human.'" Others, those with nimbler minds perhaps, will delight in Sheehan's intellectual dexterity, his bent for neologisms, his passion for theory. 86 book Reviews Both skeptical and sympathetic readers should find intriguing the core questions that motivate Sheehan's inquiry: "What are the ways in which the modernist novel imagines the human? How do these ways relate to the radical formal innovations traditionally associated with literary modernism? And what connections do both (the 'modernist' human and narrative breakdown) have with European philosophical discourse?" (17). These questions tempt Sheehan to treat the major prose works of four novelists, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett, with philosophical seriousness, "explor[ing] their reflections on human beings within the constellation of their narrative poetics" (xii). He also explores the reflections on or attitudes towards narrative of the major contributors to post-Kantian continental philosophy. He is at his best when pursuing this second goal. But neither goal leads Sheehan to say anything meaningful about humanism. I encountered in Sheehan's chapters only vague, hostile characterizations of humanism typical of much poststructuralist criticism produced during the last two decades: humanism appears as a sinister orthodoxy, almost totalitarian in its structures and effects. Sheehan, an adept posthumanist, poststructuralist thinker, must know on some level that it is silly to represent humanism in this way. Yet his acknowledgement of the diversity of thought that contributed to the growth of humanism is unconvincing because he never defines this diversity or contemplates a detailed humanist genealogy. Characteristic of this problem is the conclusion's epigraph by Emmanuel Levinas (one of the figures to whom Sheehan owes his greatest intellectual debts, two others being Paul Ricoeur and Michel Foucault): [T]he meaning of humanity is not exhausted by the humanists, nor immune to a slippage that is at first imperceptible but can ultimately prove fatal. Is there a fragility to humanity in this humanism? Yes ... in spite of all its generosity , Western humanism has never managed to doubt triumph or understand failure or conceive of history in which the vanquished and the...