Abstract

The recent abandonment by "textualists" of requirements separating literature from philosophy suggests that the very existence of the literary work may be in jeopardy. Because of this flippant undermining of generic stability, critics who have explained "issues" or "ideas" in literature by drawing upon philosophy or other non-literary sources have been made uneasy as to the validity of orthodox methodology. Indeed, since there may be in fact no intrinsic resistance to the interchangeability of all discourses, and since the essence of the text cannot be assumed, how will we establish the generic limits crucial to a discussion of how ideas are modified by their contexts? We may preserve the integrity of both literary and philosophical discourses by setting texts, with similar ideas, against each other and allowing them to break along lines of modal difference. In my view, "breaking" exposes those inherent qualities of literature that empower it to do what philosophy cannot do, or to say what philosophy cannot say by virtue of its form. This method requires that even as we judge the universality of Proust's description of love we also enter into this experience of love as a distinctively literary "felt" essence. The dissertation pairs Marcel Proust with Edmund Husserl, Joseph Conrad with Immanuel Kant and Emmanuel Levinas, Samuel Becket with Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida