Abstract
The purpose of this dissertation, in the broadest sense, is to produce a theory of literary characters, one of the components of narrative that has not been adequately studied. The dissertation starts with an observation of the peculiar ontological condition of literary characters as entities that exist in-between the idea of the human and purely textual existence. Pointing out the liminal status of literary characters, suspended in the passage from text to human, the dissertation reveals how literary characterization is closely tied to the idea of anthropogenesis—the emergence of, or the production of, the human—, which in turn, illuminates the fundamentally linguistic condition of the “real” humans.
I identify British modernism as an event in which the ontological hybridity of characters as textual human beings stands out as a central concern of the writer. In the modernist novel, characters are illuminated as liminal figures that exist in-between the human and the text, never fully transcended into the former nor entirely confined within the latter. The loosening of the natural link between a literary character and a human person in the modernist novel reveals the concept of the human as a linguistic construction. Such a revelation illuminates the creative, as well as reflexive, power of language in shaping how we, as human beings, think and live. The modernist character thus becomes a site where the idea of the human undergoes constant transformations.
The experimental form of the modernist novel foregrounds the capacity of literary character in reconfiguring the concept of the human and imagining alternative forms of community that do not rest on the anthropocentric, and Eurocentric, assumptions. Modernist writers such as Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Rhys, through their innovative methods of characterization, forge alternative accounts of being human that do not rely on a Western, liberal humanist understanding of the human as a unique, ingrained quality. The breakdown of the traditional form of the novel character in modernist novels indicates traces of encounters, conflicts, and negotiations between articulations of different modes of being, precipitated specifically by the global pressures of modernity. The flat, opaque, fragmentary, and uncanny qualities of modernist characters denote the impossibility of incorporating an experience of being-in-the-world into a coherent character. Modernist characterization thereby conveys the ethical imperative—and responsibility—of acknowledging the continuity of one’s being with others, heading towards conceptualizations of new forms of community, grounded on the idea of a shared existence in the world.