Abstract

My dissertation examines the problem of what James called "the passion for form" in works by Balzac, James and Zola that explicitly consider the artist and the work of art, stories that depict painters, musicians and writers engaged in the labor of aesthetic production. Reading these tales as allegories of the aesthetic, I propose a dynamic account of nineteenth-century literary mimesis that turns on the problem of affect. It is my contention by paying close attention to the thematic and practical centrality of affect in the fictions of Balzac, James and Zola, one can better understand the complex relation of pleasure and pedagogy in nineteenth-century literature, for what is at stake in this literature is the construction of a reading subject capable of switching between various modes of affective investment. Whereas in the twentieth century the passion for form, which many would take to be a central feature of modernism, will most often be greeted either with a wincing nostalgia for "the real" ostensibly behind or beyond literary artifice, or with the jaded boredom of the aesthete, in the nineteenth century, this passion is most often anxiogenic, producing works of great melodrama. In the tales and novels I consider, the work of art is paradoxically presented as a sublime object whose affect overwhelms the creative artist and brings about his dissolution or subjective destitution. At the same time, the form of these tales works to contain the sublime aesthetic affect they present. In the plots of Balzac, James and Zola, the work of art take on the position formerly held by the villain in melodrama, for its affect must be somehow contained or cathartically purged, a fact that is wholly paradoxical given that it is literature which becomes the vehicle for its own impossible cathartic evacuation. In order to make these arguments, I rely on the close reading of selected tales and novels by Balzac, James and Zola buttressed by analytic categories taken from Romantic aesthetic philosophy and from psychoanalysis . At its most ambitious, my dissertation seeks to propose a dynamic phenomenological theory of the aesthetic in nineteenth-century literature