The "Phantasmodesty" of Henry Adams
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3850112 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Matthew A Taylor (0000-0003-3009-4928, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2009 |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 373-394 |
| Publication date | 2009-08-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Common Knowledge (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0961-754X • E-ISSN: 1538-4578 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/0961754x-2009-019 |
| OpenAlex | W2128997782 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 24 |
Written exclusively in the third-person by a narrator who repeatedly refers to "Henry Adams" as "passive," "submissive," and "a helpless victim" in relation to the "forces" in the world that form him, The Education of Henry Adams attenuates both author and subject by valuing environment over eponym. The critical literature on the text has focused primarily on the formal or psychological bases of such practice in order to argue that Adams is behind, and thus exempt from, the book's paradoxical self-effacements. But for Adams the rationale for the impersonal, evacuated form of The Education is more ontological than personal, the necessary consequence of his quietistic belief in a materialist determinism so absolute as to reduce persons and history alike to "sum[s].... of the forces" of "nature." This belief, one shared by many of his contemporaries and most fully evolved in Adams's "dynamic theory of history," entails, in the context of The Education, making the distinction between auto-biography and autobiography, between a text generated by an "automaton" and one written by a person. Routed through a discussion of de Man's and Kierkegaard's conceptions of irony, this essay explores the relevance of such a distinction to both the humanism of Adams's age and the posthumanism of our own
Biography · Determinism · Epistemology · Eponym · Humanism · Irony · Linguistics · Literature · Psychoanalysis · Sympathy · Computer Science · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · History · Law · Philosophy · Poetry Analysis and Criticism · Psychology · Social Psychology
Columbia Literary History of the United States
A Formula of His Own
Henry Adams and the Tendency of History
"Our Power Is Always Running ahead of Our Mind"
Critical Essays on Henry Adams
"Stable Equilibrium Is Death"
The French Education of Henry Adams
The Letters of Henry Adams
Henry Adams
Henry Adams
The Dynamo and the Angelic Doctor
Symbol and Idea in Henry Adams
Seeing and Being
Henry Adams and the History of Postmodernism
The Manikin and the Memorial Bronze
The Uses of Metaphor
Henry Adams, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and the Course of History
Blindness and Insight
Abandoning Knowledge
The Education Of Henry Adams
The Limits of Social Science
Henry Adams
The American Jeremiad
Giving Thought to America
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |