Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Two Halves Into The Water, Michael Kuo

Masters Theses

In my introductory essay (“The Dying Star: Character in Contemporary Fiction”) I argue that the contemporary fiction writer views character in a new way, breaking with traditional fiction theory and its dependence on the Cartesian division of Self and Other. The contemporary writer “finds Descartes’ division of Self and Other impotent, turning instead to a vision of character in which there are no certainties; a character in contemporary fiction cannot necessarily come to ‘know herself’ or the world around her.” I trace the influence of Descartes in a wide variety of traditional fiction and theory, and then propose a new …