Anxious Seas: Reading Affect in Dazai and Murdoch

Joseph Lubitz, Oberlin College

Location

Science Center, K209

Document Type

Presentation

Start Date

4-25-2014 2:45 PM

End Date

4-25-2014 3:45 PM

Abstract

Martin Heidegger advanced a concept of anxiety as a constitutive way of being-in-the-world, one that stands in stark contrast to psychoanalytic theory and the stable bourgeois subjectivity of modern literature. Looking at two 20th-century literary works—The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch and Ningen Shikkaku by Osamu Dazai—my research investigates how these two texts configure the sea as a space for reflecting on and subverting a stable modern subjectivity and its moods. In doing so I call for the necessity of rereading the “Age of Anxiety” and a reevaluation of affect as it is represented in these anxious self-portraits.

Notes

Session II, Panel 10 - Affect / Representation / Engagement: Studies of Being, Zines, and the Aesthetics of Resistance
Moderator: Meredith Raimondo, Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences and Associate Professor of Comparative American Studies

Full text thesis available here.

Major

Comparative Literature

Advisor(s)

William Patrick Day, Cinema Studies; English

Project Mentor(s)

William Patrick Day, Cinema Studies; English

April 2014

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Apr 25th, 2:45 PM Apr 25th, 3:45 PM

Anxious Seas: Reading Affect in Dazai and Murdoch

Science Center, K209

Martin Heidegger advanced a concept of anxiety as a constitutive way of being-in-the-world, one that stands in stark contrast to psychoanalytic theory and the stable bourgeois subjectivity of modern literature. Looking at two 20th-century literary works—The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch and Ningen Shikkaku by Osamu Dazai—my research investigates how these two texts configure the sea as a space for reflecting on and subverting a stable modern subjectivity and its moods. In doing so I call for the necessity of rereading the “Age of Anxiety” and a reevaluation of affect as it is represented in these anxious self-portraits.