Worldly Acts and Sentient Things: The Persistence of Agency from Stein to DeLillo

Intervening in debates about agency in modern thought, Robert Chodat argues that accounts of agency's dissolution in 20th-century literature and theory overlook agency's proliferation, its 'gradual displacement... onto new and varied forms.' Attuned to how language posits 'forms of life,' Chodat traces patterns of family resemblances in works by Gertrude Stein, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, and Don DeLillo that ascribe sentience, even intention, to various entities, thereby expanding the sense of affective agency.... His unpolemical scholarship is primarily descriptive, not prescriptive. He favors ordinary-language accounts of agency but cogently describes complex systems-theoretical accounts confirming the relevance of autopoietics, the study of self-organizing systems, for 21st-century literary studies. Highly recommended.

I love the way Robert Chodat carves his own critical path, eschewing guidance from the now dominant critical paradigms. He begins with the desire to see works of fiction as extended thought experiments that test and elaborate concrete intuitions. Then he mines modern philosophy in the analytic tradition to flesh out just what those experiments might involve. His lucid and eloquent readings of these philosophers bring out concerns about agency, intention, presence, and value that provide an indispensable background for appreciating the significant issues grappled with intuitively by modern writers. And he ultimately shows how Stein, Ellison, Bellow, and DeLillo try to reconcile literary and scientific modes of inquiry into the analysis of human agency.

Robert Chodat uncovers how, for certain central twentieth-century writers, indecipherable presences inform and haunt the lives of embodied persons. The complications of our pictures of agency that are elicited are of the first importance philosophically, and the idea that literary works have distinctive powers to track-but not resolve-complexities and complications is compellingly urged.

Robert Chodat's brilliant readings collectively present a compelling argument for returning a range of thorny and at times controversial issues, such as intentionality, to the forefront of literary criticism. Through an exploration of literary and philosophical representations of both disembodied 'presences' and embodied 'persons,' Chodat convincingly demonstrates the often unexpected locations of agency in the twentieth century, along the way unpacking our relationships to the beings both animate and inanimate, both material and immaterial, by which we are surrounded.

This is a wonderfully spirited investigation into human agency, or volitional action, as perceived in others, as enacted within ourselves, and as imagined in nonsentient but nevertheless expressive things. But by the end of this absorbing and highly readable book, we find ourselves in the perhaps surprising position of seriously doubting the sharpness of the metaphysical lines separating those three categories. That surprise is Robert Chodat's success. It is the result of some embedded intuitions and presumptions concerning personhood being carefully unearthed and subjected to a special kind of deeply interesting bifocal scrutiny: Stein, Bellow, Ellison, and DeLillo through one lens, Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Quine through the other. This stimulating book, written with both flair and precision, is a bracing and edifying demonstration of how much light literature and philosophy still have to cast on each other.