Henry James and the Language of Experience

This book explores Henry James's attitude to the everyday fact of experience, and its relevance for his aesthetic.

Collin Meissner (Author)

9780521122627, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 5 November 2009

248 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.37 kg

"...Meissner navigates adeptly through the ficton,autobiographical works, and theoretical writings to posit that James's textual mission extends experience's self-liberating potential beyond fictional limits to the writer himself and to the reader." Modern Fiction Studies

In Henry James and the Language of Experience, Collin Meissner examines the political dimension to the representation of experience as it unfolds throughout James's work. Meissner argues that, for James, experience was a private and public event, a dialectical process that registered and expressed his consciousness of the external world. Adapting recent work in hermeneutics and phenomenology, Meissner shows how James's understanding of the process of consciousness is not simply an aspect of literary form; it is in fact inherently political, as it requires an active engagement with the full complexity of social reality. For James, the civic value of art resided in this interactive process, one in which the reader becomes aware of the aesthetic experience as immediate and engaged. This wide-ranging study combines literary theory and close readings of James's work to argue for a redefinition of the aesthetic as it operates in James's work.

1. The experience of Jamesian hermeneutics
2. The experience of divestiture: toward an understanding of the self in The American
3. Bondage and boundaries: Isabel Archer's failed experience
4. Lambert Strether and the negativity of experience
5. Recovery and revelation: the experience of self-exposure in James's autobiography.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]