The bungled one: Failure and the fictional impetus
Item
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Title
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The bungled one: Failure and the fictional impetus
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:d8006d3ee9f8:10672
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identifier
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10739
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Creator
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Scheindlin, Noam,
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Contributor
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Vincent Crapanzano
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Date
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2010
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Comparative literature | Modern literature | Hermeneutics | Melville | Narrative | Perec | Phenomenology | Proust
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Abstract
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This basis for this dissertation is that the act of writing is incompatible with the content of the written, and that fiction is founded on this incompatibility. I argue that this incompatibility results in an ontological category of fiction that exists before any generic category is implemented that tells the reader how to read, how to engage with the referent. The corollary to this hypothesis is that what applies to fiction necessarily applies to language as a whole: that human consciousness is constituted in an engagement with fiction. My method is an interrogation of fictional accounts of the act of creation and of writing, because, if fiction is to be understood as a general, ontological category, it is in the genre "fiction" that this problematic can best be explored. More importantly, I argue, it is the genre of fiction that is the site of coming to terms with this aspect of human consciousness, and that it must do so in the form of a coming to terms with a failure in self-representation.;This failure is understood in this dissertation in two senses: (1) the failure of the author to represent the act of writing in fiction; (2) the failure of the ability of fiction to represent human violence and atrocity without it being preempted by being understood as suffering in its existential sense, to which all humans are subject. Applying narratological analysis to phenomenological theory, I show how these two notions of failure are implicated in each other. I arrive at an overarching theory of failure as a necessary constituent of all fiction. Beginning with the Biblical book of Genesis, I proceed to an analysis of Herman Melville's Pierre or the Ambiguities ; Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu; and Georges Perec's W ou le souvenir d'enfance, all texts that, in different ways, thematize the act of writing, and address the relation between writing and lived experience.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Comparative Literature
