Reckoning with disinterest: Kant and the Victorian novel.

摘要

This dissertation challenges the view that the Victorian novel uses the notion of disinterest to separate art from economic experience. Recent criticism on literature and economics has tended to identify disinterest with the "aesthetic ideology" that writers from Pierre Bourdieu to John Guillory have traced to Kant. This view overlooks the way in which disinterest in Kantian and post-Kantian aesthetics serves to critique the teleological premises of eighteenth-century moral and economic theory. The introductory chapter argues that Kant's Critique of Judgment undermines the stable standpoint of Adam Smith's "impartial spectator," reading Kant's critique of perspective in light of Walter Benjamin's writings on the problem of a "distanced" stance from his early essays on Kant to his late work on material culture. Chapter two situates Matthew Arnold's canonical formulation of disinterest as proper distancing in the Franco-British philosophical context of the early nineteenth century, arguing that Arnold's insistence on a stable subjective standpoint in relation to an inherently valuable object produces a notion of disinterest that is the mirror image of the Utilitarian marketplace and bears little relation to Kant's. The subsequent chapters analyze alternative modes of disinterest in the works of George Eliot, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde. Chapter three argues that Eliot's theory of sympathy in her novels and essays critiques both Smith and Arnold by emphasizing moments of subjective disorientation that make moral and economic calculation impossible. Chapter four studies the fate of disinterest in the modern novel through a reading of the decline of the collection, and of culture understood as collection, in James's writings on Balzac and in The Spoils of Poynton. Chapter five situates Wilde's essays, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and An Ideal Husband between the substance-based understanding of aesthetic value of Ruskin and Hegel and the subjectivist aesthetics of Walter Pater, arguing that Wilde's theory of art as lie exposes the stable standpoint presumed in both these economies and offers an alternative notion of "virtual" value that echoes the aesthetics of Stephane Mallarme.