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Reading Cruft: a Cognitive Approach to the Mega-Novel

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Reading Cruft: a Cognitive Approach to the Mega-Novel City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 6-2014 Reading Cruft: A Cognitive Approach to the Mega-Novel David J. Letzler Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/247 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] READING CRUFT A COGNITIVE APPROACH TO THE MEGA-NOVEL by DAVID LETZLER A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2014 © 2014 DAVID JOSEPH LETZLER All rights reserved ii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Gerhard Joseph _______________________ ___________________________________________ Date Chair of Examining Committee Mario DiGangi _______________________ ___________________________________________ Date Executive Officer Gerhard Joseph Nico Israel Mario DiGangi Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii Abstract READING CRUFT: A COGNITIVE APPROACH TO THE MEGA-NOVEL by David Letzler Adviser: Gerhard Joseph Reading Cruft offers a new critical model for examining a genre vital to modern literature, the mega-novel. Building on theoretical work in both cognitive narratology and cognitive poetics, it argues that the mega-novel is primarily characterized by its inclusion of a substantial amount of pointless text (“cruft”), which it uses to challenge its readers’ abilities to modulate their attention and rapidly shift their modes of text processing. Structured into five chapters respectively devoted to subgenres in which mega-novels have been grouped—the dictionary novel, the encyclopedic novel, the Menippean satire, the picaresque and frame-tale, and the epic and allegory—it demonstrates how these books make substantial use of their generic elements but also include text that fails to either fulfill or subvert their most crucial elements, rendering much of their text into excess that cannot be deeply processed. However, mega-novels also contain text that, though appearing to be cruft, is actually quite important, forcing readers to subtly distinguish between the text that does require deep attention and that which does not. This requires readers to develop more sophisticated procedures of attentional modulation in text processing. Reading Cruft argues that the education of attention this process prompts can aid readers in learning to manage the information overload that increasingly characterizes every aspect of contemporary life. iv Acknowledgements Many thanks to the following individuals— To Gerhard Joseph, Nico Israel, Frank L. Cioffi, and Mario DiGangi for their supervision of this project, To Jay Barksdale and New York Public Library for granting me access to the Wertheim Study while I researched, To Marc Dolan, Edmund L. Epstein, Reagan Lothes, Nikolina Nedeljkov, Josh Schneiderman, Judd Staley, and Alaya Swann for reading and providing feedback on drafts, To Russell Backman, Ben Barber, Martin Brick, George Derk, Abram Foley, Laura Hensch, Stephen Hock, Teffany Hunley, David B. Olson, Gavin Pate, and Kyle Smith for co- presenting with me on various conference panels where I introduced much of this material and for generating conversation helpful for developing it, To H. Porter Abbott, Stephen Burn, and William K. Wootters for graciously responding to my emails with important suggestions and references, To Robert Bell, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Stephen Fix, and David Greetham, in whose classes many of the ideas expressed in this dissertation took root, To Carrie Hintz and Gloria Fisk for their mentorship over the past several years, To Jim Shepard and Samuel R. Delany for shaping my academic prose style more than any literary scholar ever has, To everyone I’ve cited in the dissertation for being just right enough to prevent me from making some extremely silly mistakes and just wrong enough to allow this book to come into being, And to Katie, for everything else. v People think I’m crazy ‘cause I’m worried all the time If you paid attention, you’d be worried too. You better pay attention or this world we love so much Might Just Kill You… vi Table of Contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... v Table of Contents .......................................................................................................................... vii Introduction—Information and Attention in the Mega-Novel ........................................................ 1 The Agony and Ecstasy of Big Books ........................................................................................ 1 The Significance of Insignificance: The Cruft of Fiction ........................................................... 3 Attention, Overload, and Boredom ........................................................................................... 11 Reading in the Information Age ................................................................................................ 20 Cruft and Genre in Poststructuralism and Cognitive Theory .................................................... 25 What This Book Does and Does Not Do: Some Caveats on Cruft ........................................... 29 Chapter One—The Dictionary ...................................................................................................... 40 The Unreadable Dictionary ....................................................................................................... 40 Text Processing, Literary Convention, and Information Theory .............................................. 44 Error: Is J R Readable?.............................................................................................................. 52 Redundancy: Is The Making of Americans Worth Reading? .................................................... 64 Correction: How Does One Read Finnegans Wake? ................................................................ 74 Chapter 2—The Encyclopedia ...................................................................................................... 87 The Paradox of Encyclopedic Fiction ....................................................................................... 87 The Three Casaubons and Moby-Dick ...................................................................................... 94 The Unhappy Retirement of Bouvard and Pécuchet .............................................................. 100 The Deadly Endnote: House of Leaves and Europe Central .................................................. 110 “Handling Information in a Grown-Up Way”: Navigating Infinite Jest ................................. 118 Chapter 3—The Menippean Satire ............................................................................................. 130 “Dull, Difficult, Dreary, & Disgusting” .................................................................................. 130 The Fallacies of Exposure and Subversion ............................................................................. 135 The Menippean Grotesque ...................................................................................................... 139 Comic Overload: A Few Words on The Sot-Weed Factor...................................................... 142 The Public Burning and the Butts of Satire............................................................................. 152 The Fraudulent, the Satiric, and The Recognitions ................................................................. 163 Chapter Four—The Frame-Tale, the Picaresque, and the Circumfabulation ............................. 176 vii Too Much Plot ......................................................................................................................... 176 Plotting Space and Time in the Picaresque and Frame-Tale, and Introducing the Circumfabulation ..................................................................................................................... 182 The Line and the Tangle in Mason & Dixon ........................................................................... 187 The Useless Room: The Frame-Tale and Life A User’s Manual ............................................ 194 On the Picaresque Road to 2666 ............................................................................................. 205 Chapter 5—The Epic and the Allegory ...................................................................................... 222 The Problem of Contemporary Figural Narratives ................................................................. 222 Allegory, Epic, Metanarrative, and Paranoia .......................................................................... 225 How Is Everything Connected in Underworld? ...................................................................... 235 World War II as the Contemporary Allegorical-Epic Event ................................................... 244 Varieties
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