Modernism has been understood as a decadently aesthetic discourse of dominance (Lukacs), one focused on apolitical transcendence (Eagleton) and meta-narrative (Lyotard). However, British Modernist literature's rhetorical experimentation and psychic investigations of its characters powerfully theorize the modern, symptomatic subject and its political potentialities, creating a discourse of dissolution corresponding to and sometimes anticipating the developments of postmodern, poststructuralist theories. Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway anticipates Lacanian thought by theorizing a subjectivity driven by metonymic desire while deploring the consequences for subjects not "properly" mterpellated into the Symbolic. Lewis's Tarr reveals the repetitious aggression of the Freudian death drive which Tarr's theory of a primordial art-instinct connects to signification, prefiguring the Lacanian rewriting of Freud. Ultimately, however, neither novel fulfills the implications of its insights, since both erect fantasy figures of coherent subjectivity while abjecting the fractured subjectivities they anatomize.; Eliot's poetry manifests a particularly misogynistic reaction-formation to the symptomatic dissolution that Modernism uncovers within modern subjectivity---aligning women with the mutability of (hysterical) speech, while preserving the written word as the domain of masculine security. This gendered anxiety induces a similar position in his criticism, a dominating, super-egoic persona controlling the reader's enjoyment. Finally, the attention to rhetorical forms that De Man uncovers in Yeats's poetry compels Yeats to challenge the idea of coherent subjectivity and to question it as a basis for meaningful action. Yeats's poetry suggests that political acts, like the failed nationalist Rising of "Easter, 1916," usually remain at the level of desire (enunciated in Mrs. Dalloway) without addressing the force of the aggressive, signifying drives (evident in Tarr), the reactionary anxiety motivating them (as seen in Eliot's work), or the determinative power that Yeats discovers in symbolism. While Yeats's work does not propose an extra-linguistic/ideological position, it suggests that re-writing the foundational myths of social structures (ideologies) and of human subjects (fantasies) constitutes a critique of, and perhaps alternative to, unconscious accession to them. Yeats clears a place for (re)writing as a political act, revealing how Modernism anticipates both postmodern questions of identity and difference and post-strucruralist criticism of supposedly modern meta-narratives.
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