This dissertation examines D.H. Lawrence’s and Wyndham Lewis’s exploration of the
evental subject, and asks how their work might help us understand agency in a way that does not
discount powerful forms of socio-historical determinism. Examining a variety of their critical
and fictional writing from the first three decades of the twentieth century, I argue that Lawrence
and Lewis explore ways of thinking about the subject’s relationship to radical novelty without
occluding the constraining forces of mass culture. Challenging conventional modernist forms of
novelty which seek to except themselves from forces of historical and social determination, they
pursue a form of novelty that emerges from these forces, yet radically reconfigures the world that
history has produced. Similarly, even though the “evental subject” is conditioned by the forms of
relation encoded by society, its agency lies in the power to transfigure the modes of being that
have been normalized. The evental subject is not an autonomous source of agency that is
exempted from the social order, but derives its agency from reconceptualizing the nature of
social embeddedness—understanding social relations as unpredictably generative rather than
narrowly limiting. In this regard, the forms of subjectivity articulated by Lawrence and Lewis
substantially anticipate, and are illuminated by, Alain Badiou’s theory of the event. Chapter 1
argues that Lawrence’s Study of Thomas Hardy and Studies in Classic American Literature
approach the problem of the evental subject largely in terms of affect, understanding the subject
not as the preexistent and stable bearer of affective experience, but as the processual product of
mutually-constituting affective relationships. Chapter 2 examines Women in Love to find
Lawrence negotiating love as an affective site of radical subjective possibility that reconfigures
the cultural norms through which intimate relationships are coded and constrained. Chapter 3
turns to Lewis’s The Enemy to ask how his version of the evental subject largely inhabits the
tension between personality and selfhood, where the former suggests social performance and the
latter denotes an autonomous, ontological category. Contra the conventional turn to the
autonomous self as the source of agency, he seeks to understand the subject, and its agency, as
the product of social performance. Finally, Chapter 4 argues that Tarr articulates the possibilities
of a radically exteriorized understanding of personality; through Lewis’s ironic portrayal of the
ineluctable ways in which even the perception of choice is coded by the situation, he presents
fiction and authorship as the spaces in which to imagine an evental subject.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/41962 |
| Date | 01 April 2021 |
| Creators | Duerr, Stefanie Elizabeth |
| Contributors | Rampton, David |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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