Towards a Phenomenology of Literary Language: Wyndham Lewis and the Expressions of Being

The central aim of this study is to transcend the academic orthodoxies of literary scholarship to restore the reader to their rightful place as the subject of Wyndham Lewis’s writing. As a case study for a phenomenological approach to literary theory rooted in an exploration of the phenomenological potentialities of literary language, this thesis contemplates Lewis as an incarnated speaking subject committed to the coherent deformation of linguistic structures as a method to formulate a phenomenology of ourselves. Lewis’s literary practice, in fact, developed as a phenomenological method to neutralise humanity’s gatekeepers and gatekeeping mechanisms and express the human encounter with the world. The chapters each deal with one of five key works (BLAST (1914), The Wild Body (1927), The Apes of God (1930), Snooty Baronet (1932) and The Childermass (1928)), witnessing through close reading the development of Lewis’s style in his lifelong search for the most appropriate form with which to craft the gesture that could be most effective at addressing fundamental ontological questions. What is it like to be human? What is the relation between consciousness and reality?Where, when, and most importantly, how can we perceive the coming into being of human consciousness? Is Being accessible to us? Lewis shares these philosophical concerns with Maurice Merleau-Ponty as both thinkers contemplate human expression as the pragmatic solution to the ontological crisis brought forward by modernity. A great awareness of the dialectical analogies between the structures of language, perception and consciousness prompted both Lewis and Merleau-Ponty to explore the coherently deformed linguistic structures of literary language as the blueprint for comprehending the human experience of reality.