POSTDOCTORAL Fellow 2000-01
Collin Meissner (Assistant Provost)
University of Notre Dame
Reading and the Public Sphere
“Reading and the Public Sphere” gives a broad and
historical background for the novel by examining a selection of
literary, philosophical, and theological texts which I argue play
a particularly important role in the development of literary understanding
and contribute in a significant way to the power of the novel. The
project attempts to place certain aspects of narrative engagement
in an historical perspective, primarily the manner in which narrative
captures an audience’s attention and then brings about an
experience of divestment. The context of this argument unfolds in
a discussion of texts such as Homer’s Iliad, Saint
Augustine’s Confessions, Cervantes’s Don
Quixote, Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, and visual
artists such as Rubens and Johannes Vermeer. From within this context
I examine novelists such Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, and Henry
James in order to show how these authors carry on and exploit specific
narrative practices which have at their root the process of self-reflective
understanding developed by religious writers like Augustine and
Loyola. “Reading and the Public Sphere” is broad in
range, but firmly rooted in a closer examination of several authors
whose work exerted a dramatic influence on both the novel’s
history and the way the public came to conceive of and understand
the self within a broader cultural domain. Throughout, I argue that
one of reading’s consequences is a loss of self. Not a loss
that lasts merely for the duration of the reading event, but one
that extends beyond the boundaries of the text and encompasses the
known and unknown components of one’s subjectivity. I suggest
narrative exists precisely to provoke the experience of divestiture
in a reading subject and that it is in this experience of estrangement
that the self is suddenly freed of the constraints which generally
hold one captive and confuse the issue of subjectivity.
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