Sorel’s Social Myth, Aesthetico-Religious Experience, and Economic Materialism

Abstract

In the previous chapters I used Georges Sorel’s theory of social myth to discuss the ways in which, to different extents and on different levels, the literary texts investigated in this study both reflect and subvert the capitalist ethos of serial reproduction. This perspective implies that narratives are amenable to analysis as capitalist technologies of reproduction to an extent. In their mimetic and reproductive character, art texts bring together in the same flow two contradictory modes of relating to the world: one in which readers as well as creative artists replicate received patterns of self-expression and so of identities, and one in which they creatively transform those in ways that lead to social-material changes. These two drives share an uneasy coexistence within modern aesthetic experience. This chapter explores this contradiction mainly in relation to James Joyce’s works and poetics, with references to W. B. Yeats’s oeuvre, and using a cross-referenced methodology derived from Sorel’s and Alain Badiou’s philosophies.