Varieties of Ecstatic Autobiography: James Joyce to Jean Genet
Item
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Title
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Varieties of Ecstatic Autobiography: James Joyce to Jean Genet
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:0ec7373cc487:11039
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identifier
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11424
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Creator
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Keane, Tim,
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Contributor
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Andre Aciman
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Date
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2011
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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 | Romance literature | English literature | Aesthetics | Autobiography | Colette | James Joyce | Jean Genet | Phenomenology
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Abstract
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This dissertation examines how Modernist autobiographical prose texts centralize ecstasy, the paradoxical experience of being beyond the normal awareness of self and time. Even seminal autobiographers such as Augustine and Rousseau confront problems in self-representation that are themselves rooted in both the limitations of linear time for articulating certain moments in a life and narrative reliance on absolute distinctions between the sentient subject and the world's objects. Alternative modern models on literary subjectivity and perspectives on discontinuous time are distilled from essays by Walter Pater, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, and Walter Benjamin. I integrate these literary interventions with phenomenological theories of subject-object collaboration in sensation and perception and Leo Bersani's theory of reciprocity between the self as an 'aesthetic subject,' and the world. The project then turns to a reexamination of autobiographical projects by James Joyce, Colette, and Jean Genet. Even it in its earliest draft forms, Joyce's novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914) equates the spontaneous linguistic inventions in childhood with a foundational, sense-based form of body-world association that is severely undermined by the civilizing maturation of Stephen Dedalus, a predicament informed by Joyce's interest in cyclical theories about human history. Turning to the work of Colette, I evaluate how her novel about music-hall pantomime and dance, La Vagabonde (1910) and her pictorial and poetic memoir La Naissance du jour (1928) depict ecstatic experience in figurations of silence and solitude, breaking with the representational style around dialogue and sociability most associated with her literary self-portraits. Jean Genet's first and final memoirs Journal du voleur (1947) and Un Captif amoureux (1986), as well as his hybrid fragment essays on perception and the visual and plastic arts exemplify how lived experiences achieve significance only when their latent ecstatic properties are articulated in a nonlinear lyrical form. The dissertation concludes by suggesting how the force of authorial presence and the ecstatic dimensions of experiences are reconciled in the materiality of a highly personalized language, a perspective made paradigmatic by the idiosyncratic style of autobiographer Michel Leiris.
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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
