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Anxious Seas: Reading Affect In Dazai And Murdoch, Joseph B. Lubitz

Honors Papers

This paper advances a re-reading of psychoanalytic “anxiety” as it is constructed through the modern novel, invoking contemporary affect theory, and finding an origin in the Heideggerian notions of Stimmung, Unheimlich and Angst. Looking at two works at the margins of the period and genre of the 20th Century modern novel that both share a fascination with introspective male protagonists--a Japanese “I-novel” called No Longer Human (Ningen Shikkaku) by Dazai Osamu, and The Sea, The Sea, by British writer Iris Murdoch--reveals a peculiar aesthetic questioning of subject and object specific to these works’ varied usages of ekphrasis and fascination with …