| This dissertation investigates the discourse of "suggestion" in the fields of literary practice and experimental psychology at the French fin-de-siecle. Both fields, I argue, used language in a highly rhetorical manner to produce specific and intended effects in the body. I show how ideas about language and subjectivity popularized by the field of experimental psychology enabled writers to think about readers' bodies in formal aesthetic terms. This study thus re-examines the proliferating literary movements of the French fin-de-siecle, often considered heterogeneous and reactionary by scholars, as progressive attempts to re-imagine the relationship between text and reader. I trace the development of this relationship from the decadents' address of the reader's body as a source of poetic inspiration, to the more central role of the body as a site of aesthetic experimentation in works by writers and critics associated with symbolism, free verse, and scientific aesthetics. Studies that have explored the link between psychology and literature of this period tend to focus primarily on literary representations of hysteria and other pathologies. In contrast, my study shows that writers' preoccupations with the suggestive dimensions of language were shaped by the techniques and findings of normal psychology. Psychologists deployed suggestive language in their experiments to produce the embodied states of "cerebral exaltation," "hyperesthesia," and "hyper-receptivity," and they published relevant work in literary journals alongside poems and reviews. I show how this discourse on the workings of the normal, functioning mind inspired writers such as Stephane Mallarme, Rene Ghil, and Remy de Gourmont to re-imagine the implications of their practice by experimenting with and writing about the suggestive properties of language. The discursive intersection of literary practice and experimental psychology, I argue, allows us to see that literary practitioners embraced a horizontal model of "communicability" that differed radically from the vertical model of geniuscritic- public that mediated literary reception throughout the Romantic era. This shift essentially changed what it meant to read literature, for this new premium on literary communicability inspired writers and critics to shun the task of interpretation and to privilege instead the experience of reading as a dynamic encounter between author, text, and reader. |
