The poetical life of insects: A meditation on the miniature and modernity.
Item
-
Title
-
The poetical life of insects: A meditation on the miniature and modernity.
-
Identifier
-
AAI3187370
-
identifier
-
3187370
-
Creator
-
Niemczyk, Michael.
-
Contributor
-
Advisers: Angus Fletcher | Joan Richardson
-
Date
-
2005
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Literature, Comparative | Literature, English
-
Abstract
-
Readers might be surprised to learn that the bug in Kafka's Metamorphosis, however strange and peculiarly of its time, partakes of a long tradition. Research uncovers, unexpectedly, an enduring artistic fascination with the possibilities of expressing the human condition in terms of the lives of these tiny, cut-into, and exoskeletal creatures. My dissertation identifies this tradition, tracing its arc from antiquity and mapping its premonitions of the hero's reduction in modern literature. Although this study is partly a survey of exemplary literary cases from different historical eras---the alienated Modern, pictorial Victorian, taxonomic Augustan, and miniaturizing Renaissance---it does not adopt an overtly historical approach or attempt to trace the insect's 'flight' through all periods. My approach is analytic, poetic and philosophical, in order to get at the special properties of the insect miniature.;The question, 'What is a miniature?' has been explored by phenomenological critics Gaston Bachelard in Poetics of Space (1964) and Susan Stewart in On Longing. Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (1993), and by the historical critic Patricia Fumerton in Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (1991). Social scientists like Yi-Fu Tuan, in Segmented Worlds and Self: Group Life and Individual Consciousness (1982), describe the relation of spatial segmentation to developing consciousness, ideas of self, and communal ideals. Miniaturization, segmentation, and exornation of surfaces, are key topics in my own project, which probes a related critical question: 'What is an insect?' My book is a study of aesthetics, written to help the reader understand the whole problem of the 'in-sect' in literature. It asks such questions as: What does the miniature mean? What is segmentation? In what sense are some narratives exoskeletal? In answering these questions, my study refers to fundamentals of expression such as the figures of speech, the nature of wit, and the invention of fables. My dissertation assumes that the literary critic shares the scientist's desire to clarify the figural, to examine how things are made.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
