Modernist Literature in the Sleeve of Phenomenology

Classifications within the field of phenomenology are usually limited to the twentieth century and to the Husserl (transcendental phenomenology), Heidegger (hermeneutical phenomenology), and Merleau-Ponty (narrative phenomenology) trinity. Sartre (existential phenomenology) is sometimes pigeon-holed in a picture of phenomenological schools of different persuasions. By working with standardized versions and catalogues of authoritative figures intellectual history leaves out the actual process of mutual influences, follow-ups or parallel developments that precipitate in time into synthetic statements and theories. In her book on Phenomenology and Cultural Difference in High Modernism (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023), Maria-Ana Tupan traces the roots of this discipline back into the mid-nineteenth century, providing persuasive arguments in support of her research hypothesis that by the end of the nineteenth century this branch of philosophy had already been constituted in its methods, and basic terminology (constitution, reduction, appearance, empathy). The relationship between mind and world is shown to have put in relation psychology, philosophy and art which fed into the poetics of modernism from its fin-de-si?cle emergence to its bloom in the 1920s.