Thinking in Literature: Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov

Book excerpt: Thinking in Literature examines how the Modernist novel might be understood as a machine for thinking, and how it offers means of coming to terms with what it means to think. It begins with a theoretical analysis, via Deleuze, Spinoza and Leibniz, of the concept of thinking in literature, and sets out three principle elements which continually announce themselves as crucial to the process of developing an aesthetic expression: relation; sensation; and composition. Uhlmann then examines the aesthetic practice of three major Modernist writers: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Vladimir Nabokov. Each can be understood as working with relation, sensation and composition, yet each emphasize the interrelations between them in differing ways in expressing the potentials for thinking in literature.