| This dissertation argues that modernism's subject is constituted by addictive desires implanted by aesthetic experience. Addiction robs him or her of agency and turns that subject into an object that is permeable. Permeability produces an alternative subject ontologically hostile to the subject presupposed by mainstream realism and Freud. This subject is empty rather than full, awaiting the stimulation of drugs, vice, theft, fraud, violence, and gambling. I call such experiences of fullness the criminal aesthetic, an aesthetic that offers the subject a transgressive thrill that temporarily makes modern life seem exciting, new, and pleasurable. Theoretical models of addiction by Sedgwick, Derrida, Seltzer, Ronell, and Margolis allow me to argue that addiction is a positive phenomenon that structures, rather than limits, self-formation.;The introduction offers a prehistory that reads Thomas De Quincey's "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts," Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and J. K. Huysmans's A Rebours for this subject formation. The first chapter, "Impressionist Deduction," examines how aesthetic permeability is figured in literary impressionism and the deductive sciences of psychoanalysis and criminal detection in the Sherlock Holmes stories, in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams , and in G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories. Chapter three, "The Criminal Aesthetic and Fin-de-Siecle Modernism," examines literature, criminology, and degeneration theory (including E. W. Hornung's Raffles stories, Max Nordau's Degeneration, and Havelock Ellis's The Criminal) to argue that Dorian Gray's addiction marks him as queer, not gay. The third chapter, "Speculative Capital and the Romance of Value," argues that the romance of stock market speculation behaves like another addiction and that the millionaire is like an addict in H. G. Wells's Tono-Bungay. "Aesthetic Terror: British Letters Defeat Anarchism," argues that the ubiquitous dismissal of anarchism's political efficacy is based in its denial of aesthetic power to the political movement in The Princess Casamassima by Henry James, and in Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent. The final chapter, "Modernist Habits: Irving Babbitt, Virginia Woolf, and the Objects of Modernism," argues that modernists posit habit as a beneficial addiction that will prevent the introduction of the aesthetic other into the subject. |
