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- Björkblom, Inger, 1949-
(författare)
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The Plane of Uncreatedness : A Phenomenological Study of Anita Brookner's Late Fiction
- 2001
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The investigation maintains that the late fiction of Anita Brookner exhibits an autonomous region of auto-affective experience. This region shapes the materialization of subjectivity in the artifact. The study proposes that the autonomy of the region establishes the ontological nature of Brooknerian reality as a priority of the uncreated over the created. Using Michel Henry's Eckhartian phenomenology of auto-affection as a methodological and philosophic rationale, the study begins by exploring the experience of emptiness and boredom in the late Brookner novels: Lewis Percy, Visitors, Fraud, Falling Slowly, A Closed Eye, Altered States, Undue Influence, Incidents in the Rue Laugier, Brief Lives, A Family Romance, and A Private View. After excluding extrinsic considerations by means of phenomenological reduction, the study investigates the aesthetic and ontological implications furnished by the tension in the late Brookner novel s between autonomous and non-autonomous spheres of phenomenalization. Following the terminological usage set up in the 14th century by the controversial writings of Meister Eckhart, these two spheres are identified as those of the uncreated and the created. This non-dialectical model of phenomenalization, refined in the phenomenology of Michel Henry, is used in the study for the purpose of clarifying the nature of abstraction in the late Brookner novel: it is demonstrated, especially in close readings of Lewis Percy, Visitors and Falling Slowly, that the extreme experiential reduction accomplished in the Brookner novel through ruthless abstraction of subjectivity leaves an experiential remainder which, in so far as it is a plane of emptiness or a plane of uncreatedness, is analogous to the non-figurative frontality forwarded in the paintings and writings of Wassily Kandinsky as the abstract but material origin of a realm of pure worldlessness. The study shows that the latent excitement discovered in the hidden truth of this plane is descriptively graspable in terms of an understanding of a key factor in Brooknerian real ity: the absence of transcendence. Although subjectivity's reality is firmly situated on the hither side of the world, and although that worldless sphere is essentially one of non-difference, subjective life is nevertheless crucially attuned to a sense of the contrast between two modes of non-difference: the empty and the uncreated. However, these two modes are not experienced as transcendent to each other; they are not two different phenomena, and the passing from the one to the other is not a transcending of a phenomenon but a discovery of its depth.
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| 2. |
- Fawkner, Harald, 1946-
(författare)
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Grasses That Have No Fields : From Gerald Murnane's 'Inland' to a Phenomenology of Isogonic Constitution
- 2006
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Bok (populärvet., debatt m.m.)abstract
- By elucidating the isogonic structures of affectivity and landscaping in Gerald Murnane's novel 'Inland,' the study demonstrates the reductive nature of analytic models based on world-positioning. Since the constitution of a literary work does not involve the object-like units and displacements that are viewable in the realm of constituted worlds, literary theories based on the event of investigating worlds cannot clarify a literary text's self-actualization. Extrinsic procedures do not touch the core of the literary work of art. Nor do they touch the nuances of its surface texture that make it specific.
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- Helfer Wajngot, Marion, 1953-
(författare)
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The birthright and the blessing : narrative as exegesis in three of Thackeray's later novels
- 2000
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation argues that the many narrative repetitions and allusions in Thackeray's fiction can be read as comments on and interpretations of each other and of biblical texts. Especially Henry Esmond, The Virginians, and Philip make use of reiterative strategies that have a close affinity with both midrash, classical Jewish narrative exegesis, and Christian typology. These two hermeneutical systems are used as models for a reading that takes the religious education in Victorian England into consideration. The study of significant similarities and differences between the fictional narratives and the Bible stories they rewrite shows that these novels are polysemous in that, like midrashic exegesis, they allow authority to multiple interpretations. However, in these novels the concept of caritas functions as a hermeneutical constraint, in the sense that, like typological interpretations of the Bible, the fictional narratives point towards the overarching value of neighbourly love.The novels are seen as presupposing an ethical response from readers in a time and context where literature was naturally considered as a guide to moral conduct. The Genesis narrative of Jacob's appropriation of the birthright and the blessing of the firstborn, in Christian tradition a type for the appropriation of the Jewish spiritual heritage by the Church, generates two opposed paradigms within the novels. Codified moral injunctions and literal applications of the biblical text are set against an attitude marked by the spirit of caritas, in what is interpreted as an application of the dictum "the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life." In addition, biblical narratives like that of the sacrifice of Isaac, and parables such as that of the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan, generate commentary on as diverse topics as the rights to political power, parent-child relations, incompatible obligations, forgiveness and moral indignation. Furthermore, inserted non-narrative genres are combined with narratorial intrusion to form a meta-fictional commentary on the paradoxical relations between narrative and truth.
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- Ljung-Baruth, Annika, 1968-
(författare)
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A steady flameless light : the phenomenology of realness in Dorothy Canfield Fisher's The brimming cup, Her son's wife and Rough-hewn
- 2002
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study investigates the way in which experience comes to givenness in three novels by the early twentieth century American writer Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1879-1958). By utilizing a model of affectivity set up by the French phenomenologist Michel Henry, the investigation uncovers unthematized strata in The Brimming Cup (1921), Rough-Hewn (1922), and Her Son’s Wife (1926) in which subjectivity is phenomenalized as auto-affective and immanent. These strata are phenomenologically distinguished from those in which subjectivity comes to givenness as conditioned by transcendent, hyper-presentational presence. The investigation shows that in these novels, objectified presence is predominantly favored as real. Michel Henry’s distinction between affectivity and sensibility helps delineate the asymmetrical way in which affectivity as the primary, pre-self-conscious phenomenalization of subjectivity can be understood in relation to sensibility as the self-reflective, horizon-oriented phenomenalization of subjectivity. Methodologically, the study remains faithful to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological reduction which excludes transcendent considerations of the texts.Michel Henry’s model of affectivity refutes Martin Heidegger’s understanding of subjectivity as always already thrown into a transcendent world. Nevertheless, Heidegger’s distinction between zuhanden and vorhanden is utilized in the study to clarify the integrity of a presence that cannot be posited in front of a presentational gaze. Canfieldian subjectivity is troubled by an inability to disentangle itself from this objective gaze and by its disbelief in the possibility of nonobjectified, yet real, experience. Instead subjectivity comes to validate realness as presentational vitality. Paradoxically, however, relief from suffering occurs primarily in instants that are free from phenomenalizations of life as vitalism. In such moments, subjectivity is phenomenalized as presentationally empty, existing in a nonpresentational space untouched by presentational meaning.
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