The Modernist Impulse and a Contemporary Opus

This volume represents a study in the formation of a personal literary opus, and in some of the theoretical reflections involved in understanding how parts of that opus are constructed. The opus in question is the author's own, and he is the analyst of it, attempting in this role to work as an everyman stand-in, a representative of the I in each of us which can choose to live the situation of replacing itself by writing. The opus is addressed by pieces of individual text—a chapter each from a couple of novels and a long poem—and by a close pursuit of the kinds of ways in which the author is transformed into those pieces of text. This textbook in democratic self-transformation is at the same time a fussy tractatus on the intricacies imposed on itself by art, in its quest to become a zone of moral enhancement.