Characterizations of modernism have been changing dramatically over the past decades, but it is only recently that critics have started diagnosing how modernist writers themselves can change our contemporary understanding of what character is—or can potentially become. In a brilliant book that sails against the critical current with the speed and vitality of a Deleuzian line of flight, Omri Moses's Out of Character: Modernism, Vitalism, Psychic life urges readers to “rethink what it means to have a character, or, in the literary case, what it means to be one” (4). He convincingly argues that there is a psychological and ethical potential at the heart of modernism that has so far been untapped yet is readily available in the vitalist philosophies that directly inform early modernist writers such as Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and T. S. Eliot. In the process, Moses offers an original and groundbreaking diagnostic of the psychic life...
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
