Image and orality : vision, voice and modernism in the literature of new worlds
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This project takes a sensory approach to the question of literary voice in the Americas. Drawing from sensory philosophy, semiotics, theories of literacy and orality, psychoanalysis, and a touch of neuroscience, I argue that American literature exists in a state of dynamic tension between image, as the textual byproduct of vision, and orality, as the textual imprint of voice. Using Columbus's account of his first voyage as an origin story, I argue that modernity -- especially in the New World -- is based on and imposes a visual bias that has favored image at the expense of genuine orality (or the authentic voice), which is lost, or covered over, at the moment of encounter. My project reads American modernism as a return to the site of this lost voice, and a confrontation with the images that replaced it. Orienting my argument around four points -- early, proto-, high, and late modernism -- my project explores how writers at each of these moments approached and worked through image in order to restore contact with the voice.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2016 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Russell, Mackenzie B |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Comparative Literature. |
| Primary advisor | Saldívar, Ramón, 1949- |
| Thesis advisor | Saldívar, Ramón, 1949- |
| Thesis advisor | Greene, Roland, 1957- |
| Thesis advisor | Rocha, Marília Librandi |
| Advisor | Greene, Roland, 1957- |
| Advisor | Rocha, Marília Librandi |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Mackenzie B. Russell. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Comparative Literature. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2016. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2016 by Mackenzie Blake Russell
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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