History and reality : on narratives of suffering and reconciliation
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- History and Reality: On Narratives of Suffering and Reconciliation is a literary-philosophical dissertation about literary representations of worldly suffering. Specifically, the texts studied in this dissertation belong to a genre of literature which we could call reconciliatory. Though suffering constitutes the general theme of these texts, these reconciliatory narratives are neither optimistic (in the sense of Leibnizian theodicy) nor pessimistic (in the sense of Schopenhauerian negativity). Rather, they reject philosophical pessimism's conclusion that life is not worth living, not by disputing the reality of historical suffering nor by justifying it in the context of metaphysical ideas of the good, but by insisting on the possibility of reconciliation with such an existence. In a series of highly philosophical readings of Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird, Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, and Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me, I argue that reconciliatory narratives such as these imagine an alternative response to the existential a priori of human suffering, one that not only charts a third path beyond the tired dualisms of moral philosophy, but that also challenges the moral philosophical assumption that the validity of something like existence could ever be conditional on ethical abstraction.
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 | 2022; ©2022 |
| Publication date | 2022; 2022 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Chun, Cody Matthew |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Saldívar, Ramón, 1949- |
| Thesis advisor | Saldívar, Ramón, 1949- |
| Thesis advisor | Greif, Mark, 1975- |
| Thesis advisor | Moya, Paula M. L |
| Degree committee member | Greif, Mark, 1975- |
| Degree committee member | Moya, Paula M. L |
| Associated with | Stanford University, English Department |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Cody Matthew Chun. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the English Department. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2022. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/wt458gb8523 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2022 by Cody Matthew Chun
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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