Aesthetic Consciousness and Literary Logic in the Jamesian Transatlantic Perspective: Towards a Dialectic of “a big Anglo Saxon total”

Abstract

The aesthetic attitude, in general or in particular, represented in matters of taste through aesthetic ideas and value judgments postulates a certain literary logic. And this literary logic reveals itself a sense of morality,philosophy, or moral aesthetic consciousness through the moments of act and thought demonstrated in the characters invented in literary works. Henry James, among many others, offers a very special cultural paradigm for transnational argument because of his diverse ways of shaping transatlantic relations in terms of aesthetic consciousness. And this international paradigm produced varied expressions referring to Henry James as “an American expatriate,” “an Anglicized American artist,” “a Europeanized aesthete,” “a cosmopolitan intelligence,” “a bohemian cosmopolitan”to designate his literary career and its characteristics shaped in Europe. Such expressions resonate with Transatlantic Sketches, James’s first collection on travel and cultures in 1875 which heralded his long “expatriation”in terms of self-distantiation. James’s temperament of mind, far from being always identified with shared values within an ideological framework, never avoided friction with fixed ideas but rather absorbed it fully for another friction which intervenes in his house of fiction. My question arises here regarding his cultural belonging or dislocation:where is the place of his mind or what could be his ultimate destination?In this essay, I’d like to define a place or rather the place of James’s literary mind by proving a certain “sympathetic justice” for his literary logic. For this purpose, I’ll try to examine: how James used transatlantic perspective, a spatio-temporal assessment to formulate his moral aesthetic consciousness; and how the aesthetic framework functions in assessing his literary logic of aesthetic consciousness. To start with the first argument, I’ll analyze some essential aspects of aesthetic attitude of his characters to postulate a persona capable of theorizing James’s aestheticism conditioned by the transatlantic context. And for the second argument, I’ll examine how the persona functions in formulating a proper cultural stance of James’s aesthetic consciousness in transatlantic perspective to illuminate the way of how Jamesian individuality reflects the American mind. This process of theorizing a place of James’s own will lead, I hope, to our discovering James’s ultimate destination on the assumption that it’ll prove or create a certain “sympathetic justice” for his humanist aestheticism,a Jamesian absolute morality.