Fraudulent obsessions: Lying in the modern novel
Item
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Title
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Fraudulent obsessions: Lying in the modern novel
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:52d2323262a2:10961
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identifier
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11372
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Creator
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Dicuonzo, Angelo Raffaele,
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Contributor
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Hermann W. Haller
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Date
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2011
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Language
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Italian
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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 | Romance literature | Modern literature | Latin American literature
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Abstract
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The subject of the dissertation is the art of lying in literature, specifically in the modern novel and its Italian variant in particular. First, it examines authorial condemnation of the dishonesty of power, its fraudulent ends, means and mechanisms, and second, analyses the language and style employed in such a denouncement, in which the rejection of the artificial quality of literature is itself embedded.;In this way, the analysis approaches the age-old question of the relationship of literature to society, underscoring the antagonistic quality of this relationship. Put differently, the investigation keeps history under close scrutiny, while rejecting its fraudulent use, namely its purposeful gaps, forms of accommodation, and rhetoric of progress. The authors and works studied foreground, through their representations of society, the novel's function as a force of opposition, a function that is intent on revealing its own fraudulent structures. From this perspective, I point out the ideological characteristics of the texts under examination, with care, however, no to become entrapped in petty sociology. Instead, my interests are in the ideology of the text, and therefore in those elements constituting textual form, namely, language and style. As a result, the literary text acts on reality with the purpose of offering a fictional solution to the conflict, while truly deepening it. In other words, the novel as a cultural product does not derive directly from the conditions of its production. Between the novel and society is the mediating force of authorial intervention, whereby the rough materials of history are transformed by fictional synthesis into "visions" that reveal the collective cultural anxieties that have summoned the author's response.;The denouncement by literature of its own nature as artifice represents the opposite side of the coin. In a century devoted to the novel as the preferred medium of literary expression, authors commit the radical act of denouncing narrative fiction as fraudulent. They thus herald an entire process of self-reflection, designated to exhibit the lies of literature and, in so doing, reveal the compositional principles of deceit.
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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
