The Enchantment of Embodied Living: Aesthetic Engagement and Modernity in Contemporary British Fiction

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes a set of contemporary British novels that challenge a pervasive trend in Western philosophy, namely Cartesian dualistic thinking. Cartesian philosophy gives supreme importance to the human mind because of its association with reason and rationality and denigrates the human body. The analysis in the dissertation builds on recent work by literary scholars such as Elizabeth S. Anker, who maintains that the phenomenological understanding of the human body can restore faith in corporeality and correct certain shortcomings of instrumental reason. She adds that literature, because of its corporeal and embodied nature, has the potential to envision a different conception of being human. However, there is no scholarship in contemporary British fiction that examines how embodiment or corporeality works as an antidote to instrumental reason. The dissertation argues that the selected novels create an alternative imaginary of modernity exemplified by embodied living. The select group of novels in this dissertation are Home Fire (2017), Exit West (2017), Happiness (2018), and Spring (2019). This dissertation shows that these works of contemporary British fiction rehabilitate aspects of liberal modernity and rationality that they represent as redeemable. These novels link a rational understanding of political reality to embodied experience. For example, Home Fire (2017) and Exit West (2017) develop both in their aesthetic forms and character development a more expansive and liberating notion of autonomy, progress, and freedom by reorienting the idea of agency and personhood around embodied and corporeal experience. Happiness (2018) articulates its vision of an intertwined existence by challenging the anthropocentric worldview and competitive market economy. Spring (2019) advances its aesthetic theory of embodied art to counteract the onslaught of neoliberal commodity art