The queer chronotope : the confessional return in the nineteenth-century fantastic
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Rousseau claims that in writing The Confessions, he seeks to make himself completely transparent to his reader. And indeed, recourse to the confessional mode in eighteenth-century sentimentality often points to sympathy with another, or the desire for thoroughly open communication. With the turn to the nineteenth century, literary historians argue that psychological realism supplants the affective charge of sympathetic discourse all the while retaining the (now implicit) claim to total transparency. In other words, where the diarist once confessed, now the panoptic gaze of the dispassionate realist narrator unearths. But effusive expressions of love, care, and admiration between men, uneasily coexisting with paranoias born of fretful musings and intractable jealousies, continue to haunt the literature of terror in the nineteenth-century. And those expressions are still inscribed in a confessional mode. Therefore, this dissertation sets out to track the persistence of this discursive mode in the traditions of the fantastic in the British, French, and German novels. This dissertation examines how confession flows into a generic configuration called the queer chronotope, which replaces eighteenth-century sentimentality. But distinct to the male confessional plots of the queer chronotope is the denial of sympathy. The texts in question betray the affective mark of being cut off from the sympathetic other of sentimentality. Unlike their literary fathers, the neurotic heroes of male confessional plots no longer delight in unburdening through narrative. Instead, they find themselves trapped in a morose narrative body. The confessional mode in the queer chronotope, as this dissertation argues, becomes a solipsistic prison in which a weakened narrative ego confesses before an omnipotent super ego, deriving from the fear of losing paternal love. And therefore the male confessional plot rehearses the same frustration of satisfaction of the ego ideal, which means narrativizing hypochondria, melancholy, narcissism, self-loathing, and other male obsessional disorders. As a narrative poetics, confession turns into the repetition of an unpleasure.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2015 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Jones, William Dennis, Jr |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Comparative Literature. |
| Primary advisor | Cohen, Margaret |
| Thesis advisor | Cohen, Margaret |
| Thesis advisor | Greene, Roland, 1957- |
| Thesis advisor | Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich |
| Thesis advisor | Saldívar, Ramón |
| Advisor | Greene, Roland, 1957- |
| Advisor | Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich |
| Advisor | Saldívar, Ramón |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | William Dennis Jones, Jr. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Comparative Literature. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2015. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2015 by William Dennis Jones
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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