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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Addictive Potential: Regimes, Transformations, Circulations, Kayleigh E. Shield
Addictive Potential: Regimes, Transformations, Circulations, Kayleigh E. Shield
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
This thesis employs a poststructuralist framework to consider the possibilities for agency and resistance in consumer capitalism. The argument begins with an examination of figures who emerged in nineteenth century psychiatric discourses, and the roles that those figures play in poststructural and postmodern critiques of psychoanalysis and psychiatry, specifically in the work of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I then argue that David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest presents us with a new figure—the addict. My reading of Wallace is informed by poststructuralist critiques of psychiatric power and by Wallace’s own affinity for the fiction of Franz Kafka. I …
Spaces Of Collapse: Psychological Deterioration, Subjectivity, And Spatiality In American Narratives, Andrew Papaspyrou
Spaces Of Collapse: Psychological Deterioration, Subjectivity, And Spatiality In American Narratives, Andrew Papaspyrou
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
This thesis studies the relationship between spatiality and subjectivity within the context of modern and contemporary American narrative. Combining a psychoanalytic approach with phenomenological considerations, I set out to analyze the ways in which spatial structures mediate madness, paranoia, the compulsion to repeat, and uncanny anxiety. Space serves a primary focus of my analysis, and I outline the different ways that language and consciousness construct space. Considering the work of William Faulkner, Francis Ford Coppola, Paul Auster, and Mark Z. Danielewski, I argue that particular spaces, such as houses and cities, represent or contribute to particular forms of psychological psychosis …