| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
|
|
authenticate place-identity, which inscribes the relation of self to other by assuring status and location within society. Chapter 4 examines Eliot's novel Felix Holt, which presents society as an organism acted upon by historical forces that shape its contours and excite its evolution. Eliot maps out a world in which seemingly unrelated choices have an interconnectedness that renders each member of society a contributor to macroscopic consequences. The character of Felix Holt echoes the disposition of society and embodies the social and moral concerns of his time while searching for his place-identity in terms of the natural, cultural, and psychological landscapes that inform it.
Although this study references texts that fall under the rubric of both “social problem novels”5 (Shirley and Felix Holt) and “industrial novels” (Hard Times), it analyzes and evaluates the ways in which these novels reflect how critical language has been lost to the process of technical replication. I also suggest the ways in which these novels might anticipate the loss of language as a symptom of industrialization and trace the absence of the critical voice through the performative act of speech. Each of the selected novels offers readers radical characters whose thinking eschews technical rationality in favor of communicative rationality. This work examines and evaluates the ways in which social antagonists suffer a loss of critical language and inevitably succumb to the technical principles advocated by more conservative characters. Felix Holt and Shirley Keeldar, for example, both struggle to trace the absence of speech as a lost techné of communicative rationality, while more conservative characters like Josiah Bounderby and Robert Moore signify how technical rationality overcame communicative rationality by limiting the potential for critique within the emergent technical sphere.
I use Jürgen Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action to analyze and evaluate how technical rationality was adopted