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The Ontology of Modernist Character: Deconstructing the Human in the British Novel, 1899-1934 ...
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Abstract:
The purpose of this dissertation, in the broadest sense, is to produce a theory of literary characters, one of the components of narrative that has not been adequately studied. The dissertation starts with an observation of the peculiar ontological condition of literary characters as entities that exist in-between the idea of the human and purely textual existence. Pointing out the liminal status of literary characters, suspended in the passage from text to human, the dissertation reveals how literary characterization is closely tied to the idea of anthropogenesis—the emergence of, or the production of, the human—, which in turn, illuminates the fundamentally linguistic condition of the “real” humans. ... : I identify British modernism as an event in which the ontological hybridity of characters as textual human beings stands out as a central concern of the writer. In the modernist novel, characters are illuminated as liminal figures that exist in-between the human and the text, never fully transcended into the former nor entirely confined within the latter. The loosening of the natural link between a literary character and a human person in the modernist novel reveals the concept of the human as a linguistic construction. Such a revelation illuminates the creative, as well as reflexive, power of language in shaping how we, as human beings, think and live. The modernist character thus becomes a site where the idea of the human undergoes constant transformations. ...
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Keyword:
British literature; character; Ethics; human; language; Modern Language or Literature; modernism; ontology
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URL: https://scholarworks.brandeis.edu/esploro/outputs/doctoral/9924022411301921
https://dx.doi.org/10.48617/etd.74
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Graduate Committee Minutes
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In: Graduate Committee Minutes (2010)
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