SOURCE: “‘Prufrock’ and the Problem of Literary Narcissism,” in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 27, Fall, 1986, pp. 356-77.

In the following essay, McNamara attempts to place “Prufrock” outside the ideology of literary narcissism of the modernist movement.

The central failure of modernist literature, according to George Lukács's vehement critique in “The Ideology of Modernism,” is that it denies the historically situated character of human thought and action and in so doing denies the power of human actions to effect social change. Modernist literature, says Lukács, is rooted in a bourgeois ideology, at the center of which a self-made and self-contained individual confronts history, but history given a static, and as such fundamentally a historical, form. Like the bourgeois ideology in which it is rooted, modernist literature denies that history is a changing ensemble of human activities, and therefore subject to change by human action. Modernism rejects the tradition of...