Unearthing the subject of the novel (with a vengeance)

New Brontë-related scholar thesis and articles:

The Subject of the Novel: Aphra Behn, Charlotte Brontë, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Samuel Beckett
Jin Chang, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
February 2019

Aesthetic theory arose as a response to the fragmentation of areas of life in early modernity. As the discourse that could recuperate the senses for the larger project of knowing the world, aesthetics also provided a grammar of the subject, a way of conceiving the troubled relationship between subject and object. In Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, aesthetic discourse found its strongest and most totalizing form as that which supplanted the object of aesthetic theory – the work of art. Thus Hegel’s infamous statement that “art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past” (Aesthetics 1: 11). The consignment of art to the past is simultaneously a theory of the modern subject as he remakes the world into a home.
There is, however, a strange absence that troubles Hegel’s Aesthetics: the novel. The novel’s self-conscious self-appointment as the form capable of subsuming older genres and providing the historical, ethical, and social narratives by which peoples could understand themselves coincides with Hegel’s lectures; yet even as Hegel lays out his vision of the place of art in the development of Spirit he bypasses the hybrid form that could be seen as the key to his contemporary moment. What Hegel saw as the dissolution of art as the primary mode of Spirit’s expression culminating in his contemporaneous moment can be seen as no less than the emergence of the novel as the dominant Western art form of the long 19th century. What I suggest is that the rise of the novel and the rise of philosophical aesthetics are two responses to the collapse of the sensus communis and as such cannot be properly understood without regarding the ways in which they intersect, ignore, and vie with each other.
The following study examines Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and Samuel Beckett’s How It Is to articulate the outlines of a subject that opposes the dominating subject of philosophical aesthetics and, more generally, philosophical modernity. I retrace the Hegelian dialectic of subjectivity from the viewpoint of the disruptions of the novel to witness what is excluded: the vulnerability of female flesh to sexual inscription, the weakness of subjectivity to subdue the externality that confronts it, the non-identity that cannot be sublated by self-consciousness into the coherence of self-reflection, the exhaustion of flesh. This is not to present an analysis of novelistic subject as the failure of the Hegelian subject but to recover the novel’s bodiedness of weak subjectivity in the outlines of an identity that is otherwise than the Hegelian apogee.

Unearthing The Dominant: Bertha Mason Vs Jane Eyre
R. Sindhu and P. Moby Samuel
International Journal of English Language, Literature and Humanities,  Vol 7 No 2 (2019)

Post colonialism is a major aspect in subaltern studies through which the silenced victims are given voice. The paper attempts to establish recognition for the doubly colonised subaltern. The instinct of a human, who claim to be in a power structure, demands natural indifference towards the subaltern in terms of their race, gender, social class and political inferiority. This dominance questions the fundamental, cultural, psychological and ethnic awareness of a society. The study elucidates the hegemony, ambivalence and ideologies of the suppresser and the suppressed subaltern with special limelight to Bertha Mason, in both texts namely Jane Eyre by Brontë and Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. These texts disclose the personal augmentation in human that paves way to the social condemnation of the subaltern. Bertha Mason is silenced because of the imperial mindset in the nineteenth century England. This imperial dominance is one of the roots of subaltern studies. Metanarratives used in the Wide Sargasso Sea explain this appropriate hybridity, a new trans-cultural or cross cultural form that arises in terms of the oppressed.

The Theme of Revenge in “Wuthering Heights”
Priyom Roy
International Journal of English Language, Literature and Humanities,  Vol 7 No 2 (2019)

Considered the age for the growth of novels, the Victorian Era saw the emergence of new themes in literary writing, while novelists wrote more about the “condition of England” during the time caused by the predominance of Industrialisation and utilitarianism, focus was more on the characterization and later on intellectualism. The theme which got the least attention during this period was revenge. Being one of the oldest topics in English Literature, revenge in Victorian novels ceased to be the driving force. In this plethora of novels been written during the time, Emily Brontë created her only work “Wuthering Heights” that explored the theme of revenge. This paper aims to analyse the theme of revenge asportrayed in the novel and how the impulse of revenge drove Heathcliff to manipulate the lives of practically all the characters in the novel, but especially the second generation.