THE IMPRESSIONISM OF CRANE AND CONRAD: AUTHOR AND AUTHORITY (JOHN FOWLES, HART CRANE, JOSEPH CONRAD, ARGENTINA)

The issues of power inherent in literary impressionism have been virtually overlooked by critics who focus on stylistic innovations. In this study, I discuss the kinds of freedom with which the impressionist writers were preoccupied. Not the least of these freedoms involved the question of authorial power over the text, a consideration which, like the dialectic between subjectivity and objectivity, provides a strong link between the impressionist writers and the French impressionist painters.;Chapter Two, "'Viewed From a Balcony': Stephen Crane as Impressionist," argues that Crane's literary creed was more impressionistic than naturalistic. I conclude that the key to identifying impressionist philosophy and the logic it imposes upon Crane's fictional works lies in an examination of point of view, language, and syntactical structures. I cover all of Crane's major works.;Chapter Three, "'Nobody Can Tell': Joseph Conrad and the Deconstructing Narrator," discusses impressionist epistemology and politics inherent in Conrad's preoccupation with point of view and fidelity to "actual" experience, and his creation of freedom within the fictional context. Conrad's narrator tells because he cannot tell, breaking down the text--and the authority of telling--even as he is creating it. I focus on Almayer's Folly, Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, and Under Western Eyes.;My conclusion is entitled "From Impressionism to Self-Reflexivity: The Subject as Fiction." Inheriting from impressionism the fissure between the self-conscious subject and the independent object, self-reflexive fiction examines the subject as object: the creating imagination recognizes itself as part of what is created. Thus the fissure is bridged and traversed with each text, as the distinctions between subject and object become blurred, even vestigial. In tracing this development, I call upon several post-modernist writers: Fowles, Borges, Stevens, and Cortazar.;In my introductory chapter, I demonstrate what the impressionist writers inherited from the French impressionists. I also examine the philosophical currents of the late nineteenth century that made way for writers such as Crane and Conrad, and that set in motion an evolutionary process leading to the writings of Fowles, Borges, and Cortazar.