UC Berkeley

This dissertation puts philosophies of existence in dialogue with general and historical grammar to describe the moments in which a style comes into being. Cultivating a poetics of prose hinged between nineteenth-century realism and an emergent aesthetics yet to be called modernism, the dissertation identifies in the Bildungsroman of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce the “weak” -- non-narrative and non-explicative -- means of circumscribing structures of reflection into linguistic forms. The formal undercurrent found in proto-modernist novels, in which grammatical functions exploit the modes of the “subject” or “agency” operating in the narrative, persists throughout the long twentieth century. I turn to Doris Lessing and a generation of mid-century critics whose writings are hinged between the modernist avant-garde and a formal exhaustion yet to be called postmodernism. The existential grammar of modern narratives presented in the dissertation show that the dynamics of historic accumulation inverts the dynamics of language to the point of its utmost evacuation.