Peter Huhne The Aphoristic Moment: Modernist Literature and the Quotable Self Abstract I want in my thesis to consider the work of four writers working in or alongside canonical Anglo-American modernism, whose writing can better be appreciated if situated within the rubric of the aphoristic. Not seeking to advance a new theory of the aphorism, and not seeking either to suggest a vision for it that complicates an established view of a conservative form, my thesis starts by claiming just such a conservatism as the basis of its appeal to Oscar Wilde, who saw in it both an encapsulation of his theory of secluded artistic autarky and an instrument for this very autarky’s furtherance. Wishing to see Wilde as breaking away from the truly decadent model for writing advanced and practiced by Walter Pater, my thesis proposes the aphorism as a central tool in this rupture, asserting a hardening of selfhood’s integrity in the face of such social and environmental claims as might be made on it. My thesis foregrounds the way in which aphorisms, in promising a vision of sentences assured of their own frontiers – and functioning, within whatever textual body houses them, as discrete plots of their own – provided for Wilde a space wherein his artistic persona could most forcefully be developed and reproduced. The advantage of framing this tendency as a ‘moment’ will be made plain, since I want in my second chapter to figure Henry James’s decidedly non-aphoristic late fiction, particularly The Wings of the Dove, as a response to the idea that standalone sentences could or should be used to contain selfhood. I make the case for James as asserting a pragmatist contingency about stable boundaries that organises around the idea and practice of the parenthesis – with its momentary hardenings, framed as realisations, that are then folded back into the wider text – as a response to the aphorism’s prefigured sense of closure: and how, in The Wings of the Dove, such distinctions are dispersed, character to character, such as to assume a moral valency in those who live by them. The following chapter, on Wallace Stevens, showcases a poet with many of the sympathies of James, yet one nonetheless captivated by that very aphoristic boundedness disparaged in James’s writing. Too often understood – even by those emphasising Stevens’s pragmatist affinities – as a valve for energies not accommodated in his wider procedures, the aphorism emerges from this chapter as the site of that temporary and oblique assertion of poetic presence that is literary pragmatism’s hallmark, and a hallmark of Stevens’s poetry more widely. Finally, my thesis devotes a chapter to considering Ronald Firbank as a writer whose sentences are best understood not as truncated versions of larger texts – for such claims for Firbank’s fragmentariness are made by commentators who would figure him a neglected high modernist – but genuine reversals of the aphorism’s terms of trade. Looking, not as Wilde does, to make the unfamiliar familiar, but to make the familiar newly strange, Firbank’s innovations are thus seen as the real legacy of Wilde’s preferred stylistic vehicle.