Abstract

The dissertation reassesses the impact of "habit" as a philosophical and rhetorical force on American early modernism. In 1888, the British critic Walter Pater called for habits overthrow. European artists responded eagerly; they were ready to shake off a dull Victorianism and mental impassiveness that habit signified. Critics presume that American modernists concurred. Yet when as influential and creative a modern thinker as William James could declare habit "the great thing," clearly the critical viewpoint needs revision. Based on a study of James and three other major American modernists, the dissertation reveals that they found in habit an energy for new modes of being. The project chiefly traces patterns of habit in their literary formulation of selfhood. But it also points to how pragmatic thinking joins their narratives to the larger American experiment with unfinished uses of knowledge. All four shaped experience to their own vision, and thus eased their habituation to an uncanny, modern world. By suggesting that habit can provide the animating, expressive basis for a processive selfhood, articulated by his notion that we have "reproductive power" stored in it, William James found the means to endure ontological uncertainty---and introduced a transforming concept into the provinces of self-shaping narrative and mass culture. In fight of these aspects, my study reconsiders Henry James's peculiar romance with consciousness in his essay "Is There a Life after Death?" and unfinished novel The Sense of the Past, showing how his late idiom for narrating identity is linked profoundly to habit through his commingling of memory with ongoing sensory perception. As a self-styled "self-made man," Wharton responded to habit's procreative force ambivalently; a reading of her autobiographical writings and two late novels--- Hudson River Bracketed and The Gods Arrive---examines how habit's dynamics tempered her sundering of intellectual spiritedness from female identity. Finally, my study reveals how Du Bois, with a sensibility forged in William James's classroom, looked to habit in The Souls of Black Folk and other essays for a narrative force that sustained his idea of uncompromising selfhood for the "Negro" American and provided an invigorated means to battle race prejudice