Double-dealings and double meanings: Doubting and knowing in European 'analytical' fiction
Item
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Title
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Double-dealings and double meanings: Doubting and knowing in European 'analytical' fiction
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:8898b3c08c54:11326
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identifier
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11759
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Creator
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Kudish, Adele,
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Contributor
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Andre Aciman
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Date
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2012
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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 | Classical literature | Romance literature | English literature
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Abstract
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This dissertation is a survey of what I call "analytical fiction" in nine representative texts: Ovid's Metamorphoses, Boccaccio's Elegy of Madonna Fiammetta, Lyly's Euphues, Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron, Lafayette's Princess of Cleves , Richardson's Clarissa and The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Austen's Persuasion, and Stendhal's Armance. My thesis examines the underlying motifs and narrative temperament of a sub-genre that depicts how narrators and characters dissect, anatomize, and interpret their own thoughts, motivations, and actions in literature written well before the formalization of psychoanalytic theory. Analytical fiction is ultimately about reading; it is concerned with the relationship between knowledge and feeling in characters, and the networks of understanding between authors and readers, between narrators and characters, and between one character and another. The plots of analytical fiction comprise narrators and characters who are constantly faced with false, incomplete, or withheld information, misprision, doubt, and confusion, leading to self-deception, jealousy, and crises of love. Above all, what these works share is a tendency on the part of the narration to keep characters apart, to trap them in a closed, confusing society, and to defer, for as long as possible, any chance of intimacy, finality, or resolution.
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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
