The Human Is the Limit. Modernity and the Ideology of the Human in Late American Modernism: Kenneth Burke, Nathanael West, and Richard Wright

This dissertation addresses modernity, its paradoxes and the aesthetics of Modernism by analyzing the works of three writers active in a late stage of American Modernism: Kenneth Burke, Nathanael West and Richard Wright. It takes as its starting point the understanding of modernity from the breaking down of transcendental philosophy into formal, distinctive, and irreducible domains of specialized knowledge. By positing “man” as its point of origin and its final destination, the Enlightenment binds modernity as a philosophical condition to humanism as an ideological matrix. But, as has been pointed out, the Enlightenment also inaugurated the contemporary critique of modernity that originates from within modernity itself, and that has been defined as a philosophical ethos entailing a permanent critique of the possibilities and the limits of modernity itself. This dissertation argues that the critical disarticulation of modernity from humanism is crucial today in advancing an epistemologically compelling, critical project focused on meaning making processes as the primary mode of connectivity among domains of unequal complexity. It charts lines of intersection between modernity and the Enlightenment both as a humanist project and as the germ of modernity’s critical tradition. It does so by engaging in the critical reading of significant arguments in the genealogy of Modernism and Postmodernism and of three late American Modernists texts: Kenneth Burke’s Permanence and Change, Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, and Richard Wright’s Native Son.