Kant with Melville: Freedom, Enthusiasm, and the Novel by Hiroki Yoshikuni September 2010 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT BUFFALO IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENT FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
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ii© Copyright 2010 by Hiroki Yoshikuni All Rights Reserved
iiiTABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSiv ABSTRACTvi INTRODUCTION1 CHAPTER 1 Critique of Novelistic Reason, or Kant’s Theory of the Novel19 CHAPTER 2 An Enthusiast of Duty: Petrifaction and Ambiguities inPierre58 CHAPTER 3 Kant with Melville, or Bartleby’s Freedom90 CHAPTER 4 After “Bartleby,” orThe Confidence-Man125 WORKS CITED150
ivACKNOWLEDGEMENTS As a reader of Kant, I have tried to be conscious of the limitation of my power, beyond which support is always necessary. Without such support, this dissertation would have been impossible and evaporated into my “fantastic way of thinking.” At the University at Buffalo, I have been fortunate to conduct my research under the guidance of Ken Dauber, whose critique of the myth of alienated authors in the American Renaissance altered my reading of these authors completely and decided the direction of this dissertation. I still remember vividly the first time we met and argued over Benjamin Franklin and D. H. Lawrence. I thought Ken was a big-time cynic with a postmodern twist, and I am sure he took me as some fanatic out of an uncivilized part of the world who hadn’t been informed yet that God was dead. Since then, we have corrected our opinions about each other and even reached agreements on many points, although the “Hawthorne or Melville?” question has never been settled between us. I had once quit philosophy while an undergraduate and come to Buffalo with no intention of its resumption until I happened to take Rodolphe Gasché’s seminar. Traces of his reading of Kant are everywhere in this dissertation—hopefully with minimum distortions—and his writings on post-Hegelian philosophies made me realize what is at stake in the problem of the relationship between the philosophical and the literary. Steven Miller taught me how to read Lacan’s “Kant with Sade,” which was transformed into the title of my dissertation. He also introduced me to Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’sTheLiterary Absolute, by reading of which I thought I could
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