The body as text.
Item
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Title
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The body as text.
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Identifier
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AAI9207095
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identifier
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9207095
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Creator
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Lintz, Rita.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Fred J. Nichols
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Date
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1991
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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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Literature, Comparative | Literature, Romance | Literature, American
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Abstract
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This dissertation deals with three texts: Dante's The Divine Comedy, Melville's Moby-Dick or, the Whale, and Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In the represented reality, Dante, Ishmael, and Huckleberry Finn must fulfill an act of writing enjoined on each by God (and in the case of Ishmael, also by the Three Fates). The religious act of making the soul in the act of writing is parallel to the literary act of Dante, Ishmael, and Huckleberry Finn since each, as a first-person narrator, must make the self a textual character. Is the "I," or the soul that is realized in the act of writing, which is the fulfillment of a search for truth and identity, the same "I" of the first-person narrator? We observe the crisis faced by Dante, Ishmael, and Huckleberry Finn as each attempts to constitute the self that is represented by language. Whereas Dante and Melville employ the image of text written on the body to mediate the "I" of reality and the "I" of the representation, Twain devises the image of a textual character who must write, as a first-person narrator, if the character is to exist. Twain, who interjects his authorial presence in the text, shows there is an ontologic difference between a represented real person and the first-person narrator. Can "I" be "me" as "I" talks about "me"? A fusion of "I" and "me" would obliterate any difference between "inside" and "outside." Were such fusion realized, the reader should not know whether the literary work were imitating reality or whether reality were imitating the literary work; or, indeed, if the body were a text, or the text a body.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
