DOCSLIB.ORG

Tmi: the Data-Driven Literature of the American Renaissance

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Tmi: the Data-Driven Literature of the American Renaissance University of Miami Scholarly Repository Open Access Dissertations Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2017-05-23 TMI: The aD ta-Driven Literature of the American Renaissance Brad Rittenhouse University of Miami, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/oa_dissertations Recommended Citation Rittenhouse, Brad, "TMI: The aD ta-Driven Literature of the American Renaissance" (2017). Open Access Dissertations. 1879. https://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/oa_dissertations/1879 This Embargoed is brought to you for free and open access by the Electronic Theses and Dissertations at Scholarly Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholarly Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI TMI: THE DATA-DRIVEN LITERATURE OF THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE By Bradley Christopher Rittenhouse A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Faculty of the University of Miami in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Coral Gables, Florida May 2017 ©2017 Bradley Christopher Rittenhouse All Rights Reserved UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy TMI: THE DATA-DRIVEN LITERATURE OF THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE Bradley Christopher Rittenhouse Approved: ________________ _________________ John Paul Russo, Ph.D. Joseph Alkana, Ph.D. Professor of English and Classics Associate Professor of English ________________ _________________ Tim Watson, Ph.D. Lindsay Thomas, Ph.D. Associate Professor of English Assistant Professor of English ________________ ________________ Eric Hayot, Ph.D. Guillermo Prado, Ph.D. Professor of English Dean of the Graduate School Penn State University RITTENHOUSE, BRADLEY CHRISTOPHER (Ph.D., English) TMI: The Data-Driven Literature of the American (May 2017) Renaissance Abstract of a dissertation at the University of Miami. Dissertation supervised by Professor John Paul Russo. No. of pages in text. (212) This dissertation posits that much of the aesthetic innovation associated with the American Renaissance stemmed from a wide range of sociocultural and technological that transformed nineteenth-century America into an urban, consumerist society grappling with an ocean of print, products, and people. Reacting to these new modern landscapes, New York writers like Herman Melville and Walt Whitman produced highly anomalous texts that prioritized the aggregation, aestheticization, and transmission of unprecedented volumes of cultural data. Borrowing from and building upon the contemporary information management strategies of rationalist fields like descriptive biology, accounting, and library science, these writers in particular developed a “data- driven” writing style that took its shape not from traditional literary concerns like narrative and affect, but rather a preoccupation with the efficient and parseable rendering of literary information. Ultimately, argues that Melville and Whitman illustrate a shift in data-driven literary aesthetics in that the former often limited the success of his artistic vision by working primarily through already existing information management techniques, whereas the latter was able to portray his world more successfully by imagining structures and strategies that anticipate digital logics of data manipulation. The dissertation also devotes considerable attention to alternative imaginings of data-driven writings, both by Melville and Whitman’s contemporaries and their literary successors. Recognizing that the aesthetics of these two writers grew out of a relatively privileged position of information overload, much of the project is devoted to exploring the question of what data-driven writing looks like for women and minority writers who were often forcibly isolated from informational infrastructures like the education system and the free press. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page LIST OF FIGURES ..................................................................................................... iv Chapter INTRODUCTION: AN EMPIRE STATE OF MIND: AMERICAN SPACE AND DATA-DRIVEN LITERARY AESTHETICS .............................................. 1 1 BARE LISTS OF WORDS ............................................................................ 29 2 THE STRANGE SLIDINGS AND COLLIDINGS OF MATTER ............... 50 3 “WHAT GREAT BIRTHS YOU HAVE WITNESSED!”: WALT WHITMAN, DEMOCRACY, AND LITERARY DATA EFFICIENCY ........................... 103 4 TOWARD A MORE EXPANSIVE VISION OF DATA-DRIVEN LITERATURE ............................................................................................... 148 EPILOGUE .......................................................................................................... 199 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................. 201 iii LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1 Robert Fogel’s “Hockey Stick Graph” ............................................................ 19 2 Walden Survey Map ........................................................................................ 35 3 Melville’s Study at Arrowhead........................................................................ 50 4 Walt Whitman in his Camden Bedroom.......................................................... 103 iv Introduction: An Empire State of Mind: American Space and Data-Driven Literary Aesthetics The commotion of nineteenth-century urban space at first seems to stand in contrast to the common interpretation of the American Renaissance as a small town, rural phenomenon. Over the past several decades, however, scholars have done much to question this pastoral vision and have instead stressed the importance of rising American cities to the development of American literature.1 These urban literary studies have largely foregrounded the city as physical space, recognizing the structural similarities between the excessive, distracted writing of authors like Herman Melville and Walt Whitman and the increasing chaos of urban America. For example, in Melville: His World and Work, Andrew Delbanco observes that “moving clause by clause through Melville’s New York prose is like strolling, or browsing, on a city street:…sometimes we 1 In addition to the critics mentioned here, Scott Peeples offers a succinct account of this shift from pastoral to urban in his chapter “‘To Reproduce a City: New York Letters and the Urban American Renaissance,” Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture, eds. J. Gerald Kennedy and Jerome McGann (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012). See books by Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work Melville: His World and Work (New York: Vintage Books, 2006); Wyn Kelley, Melville’s City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-century New York (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Peter West, The Arbiters of Reality: Hawthorne, Melville, and the Rise of Mass Information Culture (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008); and Hans Bergmann, God in the Street: New York Writing from the Penny Press to Melville (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995). Recent articles by Paul Gilmore, “Romantic electricity, or the Materiality of Aesthetics,” American Literature 76.3 (2004): 467- 494; Naomi Reed, “The Specter of Wall Street: ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ and the Language of Commodities," American Literature 76.2 (2004): 247-273; and others also centralize the experience of modern urbanity within the artistic visions of Melville and Whitman. For earlier examples in this vein, see Richard Maurice Bucke, Walt Whitman (Philadelphia: D. McKay, 1883); Van Wyck Brooks, The Times of Melville and Whitman (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1947); F.O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941); Leon Howard, Herman Melville: A Biography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1961); Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (London: G Bell and Sons, 1946); and Alfred Kazin, An American Procession (New York: Knopf, 1984); David Weimer, The City as Metaphor (New York: Random House, 1966); Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). Eric Aronoff’s “Cultures, Canons, and Cetology: Modernist Anthropology and the Form of Culture in Lewis Mumford’s Herman Melville,” ESQ 38.2 (2012), 185-217 offers a succinct and compelling account of many of these earlier scholars. 1 2 are brought up short by a startling image requiring close inspections, sometimes a rush of images flickers by; but there is always the feeling of a quickened pulse, of some unpredictable excitement, in aftermath or anticipation.”2 Like Lewis Mumford’s architecturally-inspired, city-centric literary analyses before them, this generation of criticism has found aesthetic metaphors in real-world structures and locations. More recently, with our evolving understanding of the digital world, these same cities have been refigured as informational as well as physical spaces. Jonathan Freedman, for instance, suggests that the nineteenth-century city became “not only a Place…articulated by buildings and street signs, by vagrant scraps of newsprint and books or pamphlets, but an infoscape where encoded bits of data imprint themselves successively on the avid subject seeking to make sense of the world.” 34 This project argues
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The American Epic; a Divided Stream Donald E. Hubele a Dissertation
    The American Epic; A Divided Stream Donald E. Hubele A dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of Middle Tennessee State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Arts May, 1995 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UHI Number; 9536079 ÜMI Microform 9536079 Copyright 1995, by DMI Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, HI 48103 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The American Epic : A Divided Stream APPROVED : Graduate Committee: Major Professor /? // Reader CJ^— ' O-yoq c=^ ou-cru* ______ _ Head o f ^ n e Départirait of English Dean of the Graduate School Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Abstract The American Epic: A Divided Stream Donald E. Hubele Classical epic models remind the reader of the sadness, futility, and sterility of living in the past; chapter one of this study illustrates, however, that from Cotton Mather to Walt Whitman, American history is celebrated in epic as an anthropomorphism of the mind of God. Further, classi­ cal poets who knew the glories of Troy also knew that its fate is inexorable to all in the future; from Whitman to Steinbeck, however, there are American epics such as The Octopus and The Grapes of Wrath that fly in the face of that knowledge. Chapter two argues that Moby Dick provides an alter­ native epic polemic to that which follows in the wake of Whitman.
    [Show full text]
  • 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.
    [Show full text]
  • Modernism and the Encyclopedia by James Blackwell Phelan
    The Literature of Information Overload: Modernism and the Encyclopedia By James Blackwell Phelan Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English August 10, 2018 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Mark Wollaeger, Ph.D. Scott Juengel, Ph.D. Rachel Teukolsky, Ph.D. Paul K. Saint-Amour, Ph.D. For Mike il migliore fratello. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The debts of gratitude I have amassed on the way to completing this dissertation are immense, extravagant, unrepayable. I can only keep thanking and thanking everyone whose generosity has contributed to my incredible good fortune. (The word generosity may recur here. What quality matters more in this profession?) I am sure to leave out someone important, and if that’s you, please excuse my forgetfulness and know that I appreciate all you have done for me. From the time I assembled it, my dissertation committee has been surpassingly great to work with. I can be pretty smug about that, nodding along sympathetically to the hair-raising tales of committee discord and dysfunction that are shared wherever grad students are drinking at a conference. If it’s a modernism conference, I may not need to say more than “I work with Mark Wollaeger” to collect a round of looks that read: You lucky bastard. Mark lives up to his reputation. As the mentor, interlocutor, and editor at the center of my graduate career, he has made me a scholar and writer I would never have become without his generosity and the care he has shown my work.
    [Show full text]
  • UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    UC Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Beyond Completion: Towards a Genealogy of Unfinishable Novels Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7v27f68g Author Wallen, James Ramsey Publication Date 2014 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ BEYOND COMPLETION: TOWARDS A GENEALOGY OF UNFINISHABLE NOVELS A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in LITERATURE by James Ramsey Wallen March 2014 The Dissertation of James Ramsey Wallen is approved: ________________________________ Professor Wlad Godzich, chair _________________________________ Professor Carla Freccero _________________________________ Professor Jody Greene _____________________________ Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by James Ramsey Wallen 2014 Beyond Completion: Towards a Genealogy of Unfinishable Novels By James Ramsey Wallen Introduction: “On Unfinished Works and Unfinishable Novels” (2-32) I. From a Poetics of the Unfinished Work… II. Towards a Prosaics of Unfinishable Novels III. The Plan of the Book Part I: The Modern Novel (33-36) Chapter One: “Pantagruelism and the Perils of Prose” (37-129) 1.1 The Perils of Prose 1.2 “Out of all compass” 1.3 The Pantagruelist Text 1.4 A Brief Digression on Tristram Shandy 1.5 Hermes Trismegistus, God of Prose 1.6 The Tonneau Diogénic 1.7 The Ship and the Bottle 1.8 Continuation (The Quest for Closure) Chapter Two: “The Birth of the Novel from the Death of Don Quixote” (130-210) 2.1 El Quijote’s Roles in the History of the Novel 2.2 The Unity of El Quijote? 2.3 Roman and Novel 2.4 The Chivalric Mode of Incompletion 2.5 The Picaresque Mode of Incompletion 2.6 The Battle for El Quijote: Segundo Tomo vs.
    [Show full text]
  • Authority and Authenticity In
    AUTHORITY AND AUTHENTICITY IN GRAVITY’S RAINBOW AND MASON & DIXON by MICHAEL J. CROWLEY (Under the direction of Hugh Ruppersburg) ABSTRACT This dissertation analyzes Thomas Pynchon’s two major works in the context of postmodern encyclopedic novels and argues for a new understanding of how such novels are constructed. Examining Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon as paradigmatic examples reveals a pattern common to other major instances of the form as well. I begin by examining various conceptions of encyclopedic narrative. Pynchon’s novels, though consistently described as encyclopedic, necessitate a revision of the concept. Encyclopedism provides a means of establishing narrative authority. In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon’s narrator both cultivates authority through encyclopedism and subverts that authority through self-parody. In Mason & Dixon, Pynchon’s narrator claims an unwarranted authority for his encyclopedic tale. Both narrators, however, wield their authority with an eye toward guaranteeing the authenticity of their narratives. Lubomír Doležel’s concept of authentication authority provides a framework in which to analyze Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke in greater detail. After considering style and narration, I proceed to the plot structure of the two novels. In each case, the organization contributes to the overall representation of authenticity. Pynchon frames the central narratives of both works within events that combine elements of technological apocalypse with the possibility of the miraculous. Pynchon describes events of this nature as singular points, moments of radically undetermined potential. In doing so, he joins a long line of diverse thinkers who have similarly associated singular points with authenticity. Pynchon and other postmodern encyclopedic novelists have appropriated singular points as a means of resisting technological determinism.
    [Show full text]
  • The Contemporary Encyclopedic Novel
    University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 5-2014 The Contemporary Encyclopedic Novel Matthew Warren Raese University of Tennessee - Knoxville, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Raese, Matthew Warren, "The Contemporary Encyclopedic Novel. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2014. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/2723 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Matthew Warren Raese entitled "The Contemporary Encyclopedic Novel." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Amy J. Elias, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Allen R. Dunn, Tom Haddox, Stephen Blackwell Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) The Contemporary Encyclopedic Novel A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee Matthew Warren Raese May 2014 Dedicated to B.H. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank all of my friends for their encouragement and support while I worked on this dissertation.
    [Show full text]
  • New Realities of the Contemporary Novel
    Cultural Intertexts Year 2 Vol. 4 2015 New Realities of the Contemporary Novel Ofelia AL-GAREEB Abstract The aim of the present paper is to introduce some of the latest developments in the contemporary novel. In order to attain our goal, we shall proceed to firstly survey the cultural background, namely the (post)postmodernist period, then some tendencies concerning the literary genres, with an emphasis on three of the recent modes/genre – “hysterical realism”, “recherché postmodernism”, and the maximalist novel. In contemporary (literary) reality, the past is revisited, reconsidered, repeated, incorporated and modified, given a new meaning, and not necessarily imitated or copied, or negated; a reworking of the past to call for a new way of being in the future. The end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first are characterized by an effusion of many new versions of realism, sometimes hybridized; the multi-faceted realism is a reality. Keywords: post-postmodernism, “hysterical realism”, “recherché postmodernism”, the maximalist novel, the multi-faceted realism. According to theorists, critics, historians and artists, the actual state of affairs in art (literature included), be it postmodernism, or post-postmodernism, digimodernism or pseudomodernism (Kirby 2009: 1) [1], automodernism (Samuels 2008: 219) [2], post-millennialism [3], altermodernism (Bourriaud 2009: 12) [4], metamodernism (Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010) “oscillates between the modern and the postmodern, between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity”(Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010), swings between past and present, between hysteria and paranoia.
    [Show full text]
  • Verifiable Fictions: Didactic Narrative in the Antirealist American Novel
    Verifiable Fictions: Didactic Narrative in the Antirealist American Novel by Glen Paul Stosic A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto © Copyright by Glen Paul Stosic 2013 Verifiable Fictions: Didactic Narrative in the Antirealist American Novel Glen Paul Stosic Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto 2013 Abstract This study examines the revival of didactic narrative in exemplary antirealist American novels of the last forty years. In chapters on Don DeLillo, William H. Gass, William Gaddis, and Richard Powers, I trace the ways in which these writers deploy antirealist literary practices of ontological destabilization, metafictional digression, and deliberate textual difficulty as ways of revisiting the proposition, rejected by many among their cohort, that fiction may have pedagogical value. These novelists attempt to reconcile their commitment to formal innovation with the belief that fiction offers cognitive gains, beholden though it is to humanistic values of the sort that avant-garde principles ostensibly repudiate. As such, these novelists grapple with an ambivalent conception of the novel as both a self-enclosed aesthetic object and a culturally promiscuous text that samples from— and speaks back to—a range of nonfictional discourses. In reading these works, I consider the epistemological potency of literature within a tradition of antirealist experimentation that has typically disavowed any affiliations with the didactic, and in particular its pejorative connotations with rigid, authoritarian moralizing. Drawing upon Jacques Rancière’s model of the ignorant schoolmaster, I argue that these novelists reject the mantle of encyclopedic mastery, deploying instead a “pedagogy of ii failure” that encourages an autodidactic mode of verification among readers.
    [Show full text]
  • Durham E-Theses
    Durham E-Theses At the edges of perception: William Gaddis and the encyclopedic novel from Joyce to David foster Wallace Burn, Stephen J. How to cite: Burn, Stephen J. (2001) At the edges of perception: William Gaddis and the encyclopedic novel from Joyce to David foster Wallace, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/4235/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 "AT THE EDGES OF PERCEPTION": WILLIAM GADDIS AND THE ENCYCLOPEDIC NOVEL FROM JOYCE TO DAVID FOSTER WALLACE A thesis submitted in August 2001 for the degree of PhD to the University of Durham By Stephen J. Burn (Department of English Studies) The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published in any form, including Electronic and the Internet, without the author's prior written consent.
    [Show full text]
  • Metafiction and the Maximalist Tradition in Contemporary American Literary History
    BURNS, DANIEL WARREN, Ph.D. Exceptional Scale: Metafiction and the Maximalist Tradition in Contemporary American Literary History. (2015) Directed by Dr. Christian Moraru. 305 pp. This dissertation reexamines the narrative practice of self-reflexivity through the lens of aesthetic size to advance a new approach to reading long-form novels of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Whereas previous scholarship on the maximalist tradition relies on the totalizing rhetorics of endlessness, exhaustion, encyclopedism, and excess, I interpret the form’s reflexive awareness of its own enlarged scale as a uniquely narrative “knowledge work” that mediates the reader’s experience of information-rich texts. Thus, my narrative and network theory-informed approach effectively challenges the analytical modes of prominent genre theories such as the Mega-Novel, encyclopedic narrative, the systems novel, and modern epic to propose a critical reading method that recovers the extra-literary discourses through which scalarity is framed. Following this logic, each chapter historicizes prior theories of literary scale in postwar U.S. fiction toward redefining cross-national differences that vary across the boundaries of class, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexuality. Chapter two addresses the scholarly discourse of encyclopedism surrounding the Mega-Novels of Thomas Pynchon and Joseph McElroy. Posing an ethical challenge to popular critiques of metafictional aesthetics, both authors, I argue, contest one of the critical orthodoxies of
    [Show full text]
  • THE BEHEMOTH and the SLEUTH Metaphysics of the Contemporary Encyclopedic Novel
    THE BEHEMOTH AND THE SLEUTH Metaphysics of the Contemporary Encyclopedic Novel Vesa Kyllönen Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies University of Helsinki Academic dissertation to be publicly discussed, by due permission of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Helsinki in auditorium XIII, on the 11th of January, 2019, at 12 o’clock. © Vesa Kyllönen 2018 ISBN 978-951-51-4588-8 (paperback) ISBN 978-951-51-4589-5 (PDF) http://ethesis.helsinki.fi Unigrafia, Helsinki 2018 Abstract The Behemoth and the Sleuth: Metaphysics of the Contemporary Encyclopedic Novel explores the integration of the metaphysical detective story into the maximalist narrative forms of twenty-first century. More specifically, I study how the encyclopedic novel after Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) produces its unique, abundant mode of representation, that is, its encyclopedism. I have picked four contemporary narratives for closer scrutiny, namely Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (1988), Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations (1991), David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000). Through close reading of these works, I argue that the postmodern genre of the metaphysical detective story has become a dominant genre of fictional encyclopedias. Although the heyday of the genre has passed, it has found a new home in the literary environment where multiple plot lines and characters, unnecessary lists and digressions, centrifugal narrative structures, and the excess of narrative material are common. Thus, on the one hand I study the literary phenomenon of maximalist storytelling on the brink of the new millennium, but on the other, I aim at outlining a possible future for the metaphysical detective story.
    [Show full text]