((( # 5 +$ 0 + E(F " ? 4 G * $ G , $ * 2 ,% # 3 L #% - : $ ". 9J " % L 5 0 - , *% Timo Müller’s The Self as Object focuses on the modernist period as an era in which human everyday life and its cultural representation changed drastically: an age of socio-cultural revolution, ideological struggle and unresolved crises which culminated in the unspeakable horrors of the two world wars. It is owing to this background that modernity not only shattered the essentialist world picture inherent in Christianity, Newtonian science, humanist and idealist philosophy, etc.; it also revolutionized the equally essentialist notion of the human subject as an unchanging and unified individual known as the Cartesian self. In The Self as Object in Modernist Fiction, Müller reconstructs how these cultural shifts to epistemological doubt and uncertainty are reflected in modernist fiction, which features characters that are “bereft of the mediation of a benevolent narrator figure” (14): rather than fashioning these characters as Cartesian subjects fully explained and authorized by the principle of authorial omniscience and epistemological control, modernist fiction presents them as objects, objects whose ‘subjectivity’ is no longer explained by “transcendent reference points but solely by their relations to other individuals” (9). Functioning as the only key to the figural selves freed from authorial control, these relations to others have to be studied by the reader. In other words, modernist fiction becomes a testing ground for the recipient to train her or his cultural competence to cope with a world in which human interaction and its perception of character have changed significantly: In retracting their own, authorial voice from the text in favor of detailed, unmediated renderings of their characters’ thoughts and behavior, the modernists created a widely noted paradox: their texts are more subjective than before, in the sense that the characters’ views are no longer embedded in an overarching explanatory pattern; but at the same time this very constellation makes the reading process as a whole more objective as readers are discouraged or even prevented from comfortably settling into one overall perspective. Instead, they need to analyse closely whose perspective they are following, how reliable it is, and how it fits with other perspectives. (15) This aspect, however, is only the starting point of Müller’s fascinating study. Rather than only functioning as a laboratory for the readers’ cultural competence, modernist fiction also provides a figural testing ground for its authors in terms of self-objectification, or life-writing. By projecting some of the writer’s characteristics into an authorial persona whose social interaction is reflected and tested within the figural constellation of the novel, the literary text becomes a means of self-analysis: the self is tested and positioned in relation to other selves. As such a relational focus on social interaction acknowledges the fact that every human or figural agent involved in cultural exchange per- forms social roles or postures, the strategy of self-objectification does not only function as a means to observe one’s fictional persona from the intellectual detachment of a self-distanced point of view as an object; it first of all offers the writer the opportunity to reflect ways and strategies of how to position oneself among one’s professional peer group, which Bourdieu’s sociological approach to culture calls the literary field. Müller’s study thus combines text-based literary analysis with Bourdieu’s context-based approach to the literary field to reflect the social rules, conventions and success strategies of the high modernist life-writers’ authorial self-positioning among their peers as a self-objectifying process. Müller’s study, however, does not only convince the reader as far as its carefully researched and critically self-conscious discussion of the theoretical framework is concerned. It is equally convincing in its exemplary focus on three stages of modern self-writing: on Henry James, who paved the way for modernist fiction as far as the narratological design of his texts is concerned: the unfiltered and epistemologically contingent presentation of figural thought and perception; on James Joyce as “the most consistent self-objectifier” (18); and on Ernest Hemingway, whose iceberg-like fiction hides its selfanalytical dimension in terms of what remains unsaid although the apparently ‘simple’ and minimalistic diction cunningly implies full textual transparency. Joyce - whose work bridges the gap between the subject-centred protagonist of the traditional nineteenth century Bildungsroman (the unfinished Stephen Hero) and the depersonalized, fragmented and dislocated postmodern self (Finnegans Wake) - functions as the main axis of Müller’s book. In this respect, the study not only shows how Joyce gradually distances himself from his youthful persona Stephen D(a)edalus as a self-finding process; it also shows how Joyce, as a self-reflective artist, fragments, confronts and integrates conflicting aspects of his self within various authorial personae in Dubliners and Ulysses, only to overcome the very notion of selfhood in Finnegans Wake. Of course it is far from coincidental that Müller’s book on The Self as Object reflects Pound’s high modernist ideal of artistic objectivity and T.S. Eliot’s equally important concept of the ‘objective correlative’ - an aspect, which is discussed both as a topic in its own right and as a concept at work in the texts of Joyce and Hemingway. By contrasting Eliot’s contribution to the objectified relational self of modernity with Joyce’s (post)modernist deconstruction of the self as a concept in Finnegans Wake, the study is fully aware of the paradigm-shift performed in Joyce’s final book, which transgresses the modernist representational mode. By way of conclusion one might say that Müller has written a very thought-inspiring book indeed; a substantial monograph that will provide him with the opportunity firmly to establish himself in the academic field of Anglophone Literary and Cultural Studies. If we want to find shortcomings, we might say that some of the lengthy passages and certain over-scrupulous bits of circumstantial documentation have the occasional smack of a doctoral dissertation rather than the brevity and pointedness of a doctoral thesis turned into a book. And one might add that Montaigne might have been men- ((( tioned among the discussion of the founding fathers of life-writing and textual self-exploration. But such minor queries must not discredit the merit of Müller’s monograph, which discusses a corpus of texts that may be reckoned among the most ‘writerly’ and least ‘readerly’ samples of experimental world literature - and yet the reader of The Self as Object gets the impression that Müller accomplishes this task of extremely challenging textual analysis in a concentrated but quite relaxed state of authorial serenity. A case study of the works of one of the three authors presented by Müller would have constituted the topic for a dissertation of potentially very high quality - the way in which Henry James, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway are integrated into the much wider scope of the present book, however, deserves to be greeted with admiration. , *% ) 5 / " % 7 ' B ! E 5" > "0 7 ( % * (5 6 * - ". : 0 - + *% % *% Its blurb claims for this monograph what Thomas Carlyle would have called "grand combinations" (History of Frederick the Great [1858-65], IV, 3). To translate the blurb’s florid language into more sober English: in a first step Old English saints’ lives will be reduced to a single structural model, a model that will emerge from meticulous analyses, combining text linguistics, traditional rhetoric and pragmatics. In a second step the new and important results from these analyses will be related to the historical and cultural setting of late tenth-century England. Such a combination of texts and history will reveal, most importantly, that the texts’ raison d’être was the strengthening of English national identity and the legitimation of Anglo-Saxon kings (cf. also 285). The book’s grand title is reduced on the blurb to a selection from Ælfric’s Lives of Saints (which, however, is not - as maintained throughout - a homiliary, and its uitae were not used for preaching during Mass; cf. 31-2, 48 and passim). Unfortunately, the corpus of texts under scrutiny here is nowhere clearly defined; the information given on the non-Ælfrician pieces in London, BL, Cotton Julius E. vii (the principal manuscript of the Lives of Saints collection) is negligible (33); and vernacular verse hagiography, of which there is a substantial amount, for example, is entirely neglected by the author.