Browsing by Subject "Comparative Literature"
Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Cosmopolitan America: Affect, Attention, and the Nation in Post-Cold War Literature(2014-04-18) Yost, Brian ArmstrongMy dissertation makes two key interventions in the fields of cosmopolitanism and contemporary American literature. First, I define cosmopolitanism as a way of organizing sociality in terms of affect, through how individuals pay attention to the world. Interactions with people and texts evoke affects and socialization trains individuals how to respond to them through the formation of feelings for particular forms of community. Rather than a set of actually existing conditions or some common identity, cosmopolitanism, as a potential outcome for ongoing processes of socialization, is one means of politicizing affect within political institutions like the nation, which remain grounded in material conditions and particular identities. Cosmopolitanism is not some state of affairs that our actions or intentions bring into being; it remains abstract and outside the present in the form of appeals to a nostalgic past or utopian future. For example, nationalist literature deploys the idea of cosmopolitanism as a reality or possibility to reconsolidate the political effects of affect around the nation-state. Second, I argue that recent literature about America reconceptualizes the nation?s cultural and political value through appeals to cosmopolitanism as if it were a set of conditions or common identity that readers can use to construct a positive self-identity. This rhetorical move justifies a simultaneous vision of expanding cultural, political, and economic influence that accompanies American texts? visions of America as the center of cosmopolitan humanitarian or ethical interventions. Literary appeals to America as the center of cosmopolitan solidarity manage the formation of the nation within global space by encouraging readers to feel positively for their global presence. The dissertation presents detailed readings of texts concerned with the identity of America rather than those emerging from it as the object of its inquiry to show how global literature situates the affective experience of America within a cosmopolitan sociability stratified across a number of solidarities including race, class, gender, and nationality. Analyzing texts by David Foster Wallace, Hari Kunzru, Joe Sacco, Aleksandar Hemon, Jonathan Safran Foer, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Dave Eggers, I elaborate on critical and philosophical deployments of cosmopolitanism as justifications for the management of communication, human rights, and aesthetic production alongside literary analogs that situate critical struggles to realize cosmopolitanism within America.Item The Modernist Imagination: Education of the Senses in Woolf, Mann and Joyce(2012-07-16) Lee, SunJooThis dissertation examines literary modernism as foremost an endeavor that concerns the imagination. Gaston Bachelard, whose studies on material and dynamic imagination provide the theoretical underpinning for the dissertation, defined the imagination as "nothing other than the subject transported inside the things." Reformulation of subject-object relations, clearly suggested in that definition, is indeed an important element in the aesthetics of Bachelard and that of Adorno, another thinker whose thought informs the dissertation. As the principle behind modernist responses to the crisis of the modern world, the crisis Georg Luk?cs captured in the phrase "transcendental homelessness," reformulation of subject-object relations impels the mobilization of creative energies in the way that may very well be called "the modernist imagination." I first state the premise for the dissertation and situates it in the present landscape of modernist scholarship. Then I examine Adorno and Bachelard at the intersections of their thoughts, in preparation for a theory of the modernist imagination. Next I consider Mrs. Dalloway as a modernist probing of the sensual, in which familiar dualisms ? subject vs. object, the external vs. internal, life vs. death, mind vs. body ? collapse. Following this, I examine The Magic Mountain as an attempt at what Adorno calls materialist metaphysics. The novel's preoccupation with death in all its aspects, its problematizing of the human body and the imagination of cold are examined in light of Adorno's view on reviving metaphysics in modernity. Then I read in Ulysses water's lyricism, a lyricism learned from water, into which important modernist themes (not least the ones considered previously in the dissertation) converge. Lastly I look at a film ? Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris ? and a science fiction novel from the 1950s ? Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 ? in light of what may be called the "philosophy" of modernism. The spirit of modernism ? the primacy of the object as a modernist dictum, modernism?s resistance to identity thinking and its dismantling of dualisms ? is shown to continue in genres other than literature and in the period now called "post"-modern.