The aristocracy of consciousness: Connoisseurship in modern literature.

摘要

My dissertation examines the significance of connoisseurship in American modernist literature, illuminating a strain of literary modernism that has been neglected. Focusing on four novels that depict the connoisseur as a complex and sometimes unreliable authorial figure, I argue that modernism rehabilitates connoisseurship from its Victorian figuration, which was based on a treatment of knowledge acquisition as sinister and rarefied tastes as sexually reprobate. The "new paradigm" of connoisseurship developed by Giovanni Morelli at the end of the nineteenth century posits art appreciation as a pervasive form of regard, and peripheral details as the most significant for determining authenticity. Incorporating tropes of inarticulacy, cosmopolitanism, and ways of knowing, these writers thematize the practice as a mode that encourages reciprocity between author and reader according to shared modes of perception and appreciations. I appropriate Wittgenstein's term to suggest that modernism's pivotal narrative moments derive from the connoisseur's "aspect-shift": the focus reality assumes with the recognition of style.; My first chapter focuses on Henry James's use of connoisseurship as a metaphor for concealment in The Portrait of a Lady. My reading challenges the novel's critique of connoisseurship by uncovering its relationship to and the ambivalence underlying narrative forms of secrecy. Chapter two examines Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, about her modern art collecting during the first decades of the twentieth century. Here the connoisseur's inarticulate ways of knowing, which in Stein's case include terse speech and laughter, facilitate a means of preserving one's autonomy that simultaneously enables one to connect with others. In my third chapter I read Ernest Hemingway's connoisseurship of Spanish bullfighting---both in his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, and in his nonfiction work, Death in the Afternoon---as an effort to distinguish "aesthetic empathy" from "sentimentality" that ultimately leads to paranoia about drawing fine distinctions. My final chapter explores Vladimir Nabokov's "distancing" narratives in his memoir, Speak, Memory, and his other nonfiction essays as analogues to the perspective Humbert Humbert adopts as a connoisseur of nymphets in Lolita. Lolita encodes its readers' inability to comprehend Humbert in its portrayal of American anti-connoisseurship.