Michelle Weinroth in Kant, Sendak, and the Limits of Modern Subjectivity in the Canadian Aesthetics Journal gives an account of modernist subjectivity:

Like the aesthetic category of the sublime, the modern subject is a bold conqueror of the infinite reaches of virgin territories; but swathed in the subjectivities of isolation, he sublimates the warm hearth of past organic communities in the form of an imaginary world order designed to slavishly endorse his every desire. Such is his indomitable need to restore some semblance of community within the recesses of his imagination. An accruing self-consciousness cleaves the modern subject into the fragments of self and otherness; society proves mediocre and ill-suited to the growing pangs of individual subjectivity. Unable to contemplate the outer world coherently, the modern subject lapses into maudlin nostalgia for the restoration of some prelapsarian unity.