earticle

영어

This study intends to analyze the influence of William James’s psychology in Henry James’s theory of consciousness and to elucidate its phenomenological meanings. Ultimately, the modern novel evolved when writers like Henry James started focusing on the internal (psychological) action rather than the external action, thereby enlarging the realm of experience dealt with in fiction and bringing the novel closer to the pulse of real life. In the context of the history of thoughts, Henry James’s phenomenological aspects are affected by William James’s psychology. Likewise, William James’s concept of primary experience rejects the traditional dualism, and respects the situational context of life as a basis of cognition. In this sense, his concept of primary experience co-relates to the phenomenology. As William James had vividly shown how truth really works and develops in our lives, Henry James showed vividly how our minds or selves really work and develop as we try to live in human society. In the same way, William James’s ‘pure experience’ and Merleau-Ponty’s ‘primacy of perception’ commonly involve phenomenological perception. Based on these, this analysis refers to Merleau-Ponty’s theory in so far as all phenomenological concepts start from it. The structure of “The Beast in the Jungle” is grounded in a similar vision of human consciousness insofar as Marcher begins his respective adventures by evading the limits that bind him. In Henry James’s later psychological novels, after being exposed to different people, characters arrive at a transcendental apprehension with the phenomenological reduction to the thing itself. It suggests that his later works begin to pay attention to object itself. Or, more precisely, we can see Henry James’s interest shift from on the human-centered to on the object-centered.