Embodying experience: Romanticism and social life in the twentieth century

In Embodying Experience, I argue that a wide range of mid-century writers redefined the relationship between art and social life through a sustained re-engagement with the Romantic tradition. Reading across different genres, forms and literary modes, I find in the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and Ezra Pound, the novels of Ralph Ellison and Philip Roth and the cultural theory of Raymond Williams, an understanding of writing as a physical, embodied response to the living world: in Bishop's exemplary phrase, "a way of life...of experiencing...the very process of sensing." I argue that this reconnection of artistic production with lived experience, and in particular the intimate, provisional social forms of everyday life, marks a return to the tradition of Romantic aesthetics forfeited at an earlier, foundational moment of modernist innovation. Troubled by the tendencies towards detachment and abstraction underlying modernism's social vision, these writers don't renounce the modernist desire for social cohesion but re-conceive it. No longer in service of schematic, totalizing theories of society---from Pound's economics to Eliot's nativist organicism---mid-century neo-Romantic writing seeks instead the dynamism, uncertainty and heterogeneity of social experience as it is lived. Challenging familiar characterizations of the mid-century as a period of cultural stagnation, marked by the loss of the socially transformative hopes of an earlier modernist avant-garde, I argue that Romanticism offers these writers rhetorical forms (such as conversation, laughter and interrogative address), narrative modes (from encounter to confessional self-presentation and ironic play) and foundational philosophical emphases (the primacy of sensual experience) through which to cultivate the sociality that saturates our daily experience.;Engaging with poetry, philosophy, novels, literary and cultural criticism, and political theory, my chapters work from the ground up---literally from the perceiving human body to the individual agent to the social whole---in order to show how mid-century writers used aesthetic forms to establish a more open and inclusive basis for social life. The introductory chapter revisits modernism's foundational encounter with Romantic thought. I argue that modernism's privileging of formal innovation came at the expense of art's connection to lived experience---a transaction that ultimately leads to the failure of the Modernists' social vision. Part One identifies, in the early poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and the late Cantos Ezra Pound, a reconnection of the aesthetic (from the Greek meaning "sense perception") with embodied experiences like perception and memory. This does not result in a relativistic solipsism but rather in the re-constitution of the individual in and through the social world. Part Two moves from these specific embodied experiences to the wider construction of social life by grounding the claims put forward in Part One in the specific context of Cold War America. I read Ralph Ellison and Philip Roth as minority novelists who push against dominant identitarian structures of community, and the accompanying ideology of individual and artistic autonomy that underwrites them. Instead, each turns to comedy in order to highlight the uncertain, miscegenated nature of social life. My coda unites these claims through a discussion of the British critic Raymond Williams's Romantic idea of culture as an active, embodied process: the "tending of natural growth." With Williams's work, Embodying Experience concludes by suggesting that the vital, heterogeneous forms of belonging that constitute our everyday experience can form the basis for a renewal of community.