Henry James and the Language of Experience

Collin Meissner examines the political dimension to the representation of experience as it unfolds throughout James' work. For James, experience was a dialectical process that registered and expressed his consciousness of the external world. Meissner shows how James' understanding of the process of consciousness is not simply an aspect of literary form but inherently political, requiring an active engagment with the full complexity of social reality. The civic value of art resided in an interactive process in which the reader becomes aware of the aesthetic experience as immediate and engaged.