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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Once Upon A Time/There Was A Story That Began: Novelty, Endings, And Chronotope In John Barth’S The Tidewater Tales, Zachary K. Gibson
Once Upon A Time/There Was A Story That Began: Novelty, Endings, And Chronotope In John Barth’S The Tidewater Tales, Zachary K. Gibson
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis examines the use of frame tales, genre blending, multi-voiced narration, and circular structure in John Barth’s 1987 novel, The Tidewater Tales. It tracks the isomorphy of Barth’s general aesthetic project, set forth in his essays, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” “The Literature of Replenishment,” and “Very Like an Elephant: Reality Versus Realism,” onto the theoretical aesthetics of Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. Both Barth and Bakhtin praise the novel its omnivorous capability to accommodate, and juxtaposes conflicting genres against one another; they each see the novelist as an “arranger” or “orchestrator,” who reassembles pre-existing forms to make them …
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 …
"Becoming" David Foster Wallace: Media, Metafiction, And Miscommunication, Gordon Hugh Willis Iv
"Becoming" David Foster Wallace: Media, Metafiction, And Miscommunication, Gordon Hugh Willis Iv
Senior Projects Spring 2018
Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.
"Goo-Prone And Generally Pathetic": Empathy And Irony In David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Benjamin L. Peyton
"Goo-Prone And Generally Pathetic": Empathy And Irony In David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Benjamin L. Peyton
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Critical considerations of David Foster Wallace’s work have tended, on the whole, to use the framework that the author himself established in his essay “E Unibus Pluram” and in his interview with Larry McCaffery. Following his own lead, the critical consensus is that Wallace succeeds in overcoming the limits of postmodern irony. If we examine the formal trappings of his writing, however, we find that the critical assertion that Wallace manages to transcend the paralytic irony of his postmodern predecessors is made in the face of his frequent employment of postmodern techniques and devices. Thus, there arises a contradiction between …
The Anxious Shadow Of A Coldwar: Affect, Biopower & Resistance In Fiction & Culture In The Period Of Intra-Anxiety 1989-2001, Kate Adler
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel Underworld stands as the framing text for this study of fiction, cultural affect, and resistance in the later part of the 1980’s – the exhausted, waning years of the Cold War – and the 1990’s, the period immediately following its collapse. DeLillo’s book is situated in the 1990’s, a period of what I term “intra-anxiety” following the Cold War and prior to the attacks of September 11th and the ensuing “War on Terror.” The Cold War had provided an organizing myth for America and American culture, absorbing and structuring anxieties and governing affect. “The Cold …
Both Into And Out Of The Cage: New Media, Transgression, And The Remaking Of American Literary Connection, 1975-1999, Casey Henry
Both Into And Out Of The Cage: New Media, Transgression, And The Remaking Of American Literary Connection, 1975-1999, Casey Henry
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The dissertation addresses an absent history of late twentieth-century postmodern literature. Namely, I trace the shifts between 1980s postmodernism, described by Fredric Jameson as encapsulating a “wan[ed]”“affect,” and the emergence of 1990s post-postmodernism, marked by an exaggeration of affect. My dissertation posits that this reinvention of feeling was due to shifts in communication technologies and new media art during the 1970s and 1980s competing with, and eventually rendering obsolete, avant-garde literary techniques for “connection.” These latter strategies were encapsulated in the postmodern “encyclopedic” novel, a form miming the logic of new media, yet incapable of fully addressing new programmatic shifts, …
Novelistic Intimacies: Reading And Writing In The Late Age Of Print, Vincent Michael Haddad
Novelistic Intimacies: Reading And Writing In The Late Age Of Print, Vincent Michael Haddad
Wayne State University Dissertations
In Novelistic Intimacies, I consider the political and aesthetic structure of intimacy in a diverse set of narrative forms produced in the so-called digital age, or the late age of print—from encyclopedic and metafictional novels to graphic storytelling and Afrofuturist fantasy. As an organizing principle, intimacy forces us to consider, at once, how novelists have attempted to restore language and narrative with personal meaning after postmodernism—often termed New Sincerity or post-irony. At the same time, intimacy allows us to see how novelists have experimented on the materiality of the book and the eroticism of language to invent new, impersonal modes …
“Cowboy, Paladin, Hero?”: Being Boys And Men In David Foster Wallace’S The Pale King, David J. Guidry
“Cowboy, Paladin, Hero?”: Being Boys And Men In David Foster Wallace’S The Pale King, David J. Guidry
University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations
Often aligned with post-postmodernism, David Foster Wallace’s later work retreats from the ironic detachment and cynicism of postmodernism in favor of a more sincere approach to writing. This is especially evident in his posthumous novel, The Pale King, a work dealing with what it means to be human in the Information Age. After locating the novel’s setting within a recent history of American masculinity and work, this paper examines several of the novel’s male characters as they struggle to be fully realized boys and men, concluding that The Pale King is Wallace’s final statement that enduring the ennui of …
Alive And Human: Situating Wallace, Lethem, And Russell In Contemporary Fiction, Carissa Kampmeier
Alive And Human: Situating Wallace, Lethem, And Russell In Contemporary Fiction, Carissa Kampmeier
Theses and Dissertations
This project will attempt to provide an outline of some of the most salient constructions of present-day literary fiction, where those constructions might overlap or conflict, and how various contemporary authors and their works might usefully fit within those constructions. This project will argue that fiction-writers following postmodernism are presented with a unique problem of how to write fiction in a way that acknowledges the problems of using language as a primary meaning-making structure without falling down a linguistic rabbit hole where a text ceases to be about anything other than itself. Beginning with David Foster Wallace, this project will …
Not Peace But The Sword: Violence In Contemporary American Catholic Literature, Michael O'Connell
Not Peace But The Sword: Violence In Contemporary American Catholic Literature, Michael O'Connell
Dissertations
In this dissertation, I argue that violence is a consistent theme in contemporary (post-1945) fiction written by American Catholics, and that these authors employ violence as an aesthetic strategy that is best, and perhaps only, understood when approached through the philosophical and imaginative discourses of their Catholic faith. While the violence in contemporary fictions can be viewed as a product of the power dynamics at work in the modern age, I contend that these power dynamics are not a central concern for Catholic authors. Rather, in Catholic fiction, violence functions as a catalyst that leads characters toward a moment of …