Seventeenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

The assumption that James’s project was a realistic (or romantic) representation of reality as understood by a culture that was (is) also invested in a fiction of time as linear and as existing somewhere “out there” has consistently masked the radically non-psychologized notion of both self and time James’s fiction offers to us. We can begin to trace it in his dense and often difficult deployment of verb tenses, narrative shifts, and indeterminable boundaries between character and narration, and our careful textual attention to James’s prose can be amplified and enriched by a similarly careful reading of the work of a writer he can never have read, Eihei Dogen, against a theoretical backdrop of the work of such theorists as Andreas Weber and David Abram.