Reinventing the politics of literature : rediscovery, ritual, and reference as concepts of repetition in the works of Peter Handke and Lee Yangji
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation examines concepts of repetition in the literary works of Austrian-Slovene writer Peter Handke (1942-) and Japanese-Korean writer Lee Yangji (1955-92). The concept of repetition is, in its everyday usage, bound to past traumas, psychological compulsions, and retributive resentments; at the same time, repetition plays a critical role in the development of motor and cognitive skills, the acquisition of new knowledge, and the deepening of understanding. Against the tendency of writers of German- and Japanese-language literature during the twentieth century to draw from socially- and psychologically-oriented understandings of repetition, the literary works of Peter Handke and Lee Yangji reimagined repetition as a portal to renewals of inheritance, rites of healing, and rearticulations of moral and aesthetic commitments. This dissertation argues that the partially overlapping, parallel processes by which Handke and Lee made their rediscoveries of their respective Slovene and South Korean minority heritages during the 1980s -- returns to roots in order to restore a sense of identity ruptured by the Second World War -- were mediated by the literary modes of translation, performance, and allusion; and moreover, these literary modes brought both writers into closer proximity to an enriching and edifying experience of repetition. This dissertation thus neither decouples politics from literature nor lays out a political agenda for literature, but rather takes repetition as a starting point for reconfiguring the political assumptions we bring to reading, writing, and language more generally.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2023; ©2023 |
| Publication date | 2023; 2023 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | McDonald, Thomas Edward |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Berman, Russell A, 1950- |
| Degree supervisor | Levy, Indra A |
| Thesis advisor | Berman, Russell A, 1950- |
| Thesis advisor | Levy, Indra A |
| Thesis advisor | Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich |
| Thesis advisor | Zur, Dafna |
| Degree committee member | Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich |
| Degree committee member | Zur, Dafna |
| Associated with | Stanford University, School of Humanities and Sciences |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Comparative Literature |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Thomas Edward McDonald. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Comparative Literature. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2023. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/vr706kg5546 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2023 by Thomas Edward McDonald
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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