Browsing by Subject "Fiction"

My dissertation, Fascist Fiction: Inventing the Lesser Evil in Italy and Brazil, accounts for the resilience of fascism by tracing the rhetoric of the “lesser evil”—a discursive practice constitutive of fascism—through contemporary politics and literature in Italy and Brazil. By invoking the looming presence of a graver, more insidious threat the rhetoric of the lesser evil legitimizes fascist violence against dissidents and vulnerable populations. Through an analysis of texts by fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile and his Brazilian counterpart Miguel Reale, I reveal that the rhetoric of the lesser evil is a constitutive part of fascist discourse and that in Italy and Brazil this aspect of fascist doctrine met a favorable combination of subjective and objective conditions which has allowed it to thrive within democratic structures. Finally, I argue that when moral claims such as the lesser evil work to obfuscate the understanding of traumatic and violent events within the public sphere, novels––precisely because of their putative fictionality––can offer persuasive counter-histories that re-contextualize fascist crimes and sometimes provoke acts of reparative justice by the State. My dissertation advances scholarship on the transcultural reach of fascist ideology: it contributes to an understanding of fascism’s place within a broader tradition of right-wing thought that continues to shape present-day politics in Europe and the world, and enriches our perception of the powers of literary forms.

People expend a great deal of time and energy telling each other stories of events that are known to be invented. These fictional narratives—emerging from novels, films, television shows, radio dramas, and other media—can nevertheless leave an impact once a book’s cover is closed or the theater lights toggle on. This dissertation characterizes memories of fiction, a phenomenon both commonplace and understudied within empirical psychology. Not only is characterizing this behavior valuable in its own right, understanding how people remember and recruit memories of fiction also holds theoretical implications: any theory of memory which does not allow or account for how and why people recollect and use memories of events they know to be fiction is incomplete.

In Chapter 1, I knit together the theoretical precedent from prior work in autobiographical memory, mental models, and more, for considering memories of fiction as part of the “autobiographical record.” In subsequent chapters and across six studies, I examine the assumptions of this claim empirically. In Chapters 2 through 4, I characterize the subjective experience and function of memories of fiction by adapting established measures of autobiographical remembering across four studies, such as the Autobiographical Memory Questionnaire (AMQ), Centrality of Event (CES) scale, and Talking About Life Experiences (TALE) questionnaire (Berntsen & Rubin, 2006; Bluck et al., 2005; Rubin et al., 2003). I find that people readily ascribe phenomenological vivacity and functional significance to memories of fiction, and that these reports follow the same patterns as reports of memories of lived experience. On average, memories of fiction are less vivid and significant than personal memories, but not as a hard-and-fast-rule. Thus, these first four chapters provide evidence for claiming that the differences between memories of fiction and memories of lived experience are of degree, rather than kind. Chapter 5 (Studies 5 and 6) explore the extent to which memories from works of fiction are recruited to fulfill similar directive functions as autobiographical memories, especially in the absence of lived experience. Chapter 6 concludes by summarizing this body of work and a discussion of notable differences between memories of fiction and lived experience.

This dissertation analyzes the period of late modernism (roughly 1930-1965) by attending to an understudied subgenre: fictions that depict the experiences of the dead in the afterworld. The project originated from my observation that a number of late modernist authors resorted to this type of writing, leading to the question of what made them do so. Such a project addresses the periodization and definition of late modernism, a period that has received relatively little critical attention until recent years. It also contributes indirectly to the study of European culture before and after the Second World War, identifying clusters of concerns around common experiences of belief and time during the period.

To approach this question, I adopt a situational approach. In this type of reading, I attempt to reconstruct the situations (both literary and extra-literary) of specific authors using historical and biographical material, then interpret the literary work as a response to that situation. Such a methodology allows me to ask what similarities between situations led to these convergent responses of afterlife writing. My primary objects are afterlife novels and plays by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Wyndham Lewis, Flann O'Brien, and Samuel Beckett.

I find that the subgenre provided late modernists with the literary tools to figure and contest changes in experiences of belief and time in mid-20th century Europe. The situation of modernism is marked by the loss of belief in the world, a failure in the faith in action to transform the world, and the serialization of time, the treatment of time as static repetition and change as something that can only occur at the individual rather than the systemic level. While earlier modernists challenged these trends with the production of idiosyncratic private mythologies, late modernists encountered them as brute facts, leading to a shift in aesthetic sensibilities and strategies. Belief was split between private opinion and external submission to authority, and change reappeared under the figure of catastrophe.

“Out of Service: The Work of Character in the Novel of Post-Industrial Society” argues that the formal innovations in the novel since 1945 reflect the form’s revolutionary redevelopment as a technology of social production. Over the last seventy-five years, the novel has registered, both in its form and its substance, a momentous social and economic revolution, in which the manufacturing economies of industrialized Europe and North America have steadily given way to a tertiary service sector devoted to the production of “immaterial” goods like knowledge, care, affect, communication, leisure, and art. This dissertation points to the reciprocal relationship between the work of fiction and the work of service, as two components of a single mode of social production, which is to say the production of human subjectivity and social relations. To produce its social commodities, this ascendant service industry makes use of an entirely new set of tools, which, I argue, include the narrative machinery of the novel. At the same time, the contemporary novel not only draws on the new service class for its subject matter—that is, by taking as its exemplary subject the work of servants, knowledge workers, care providers, artists, and writers—but also incorporates the techniques and methods of service labor at the level of form.

In addition to exploring the socioeconomic trends that have inspired the contemporary novel to engage in the work of satisfying consumers, creating knowledge, and providing care, this dissertation also explores how the rise of service has effected a qualitative shift in how the novel shapes subjectivity. The novel traditionally serves its readers by making abstract economic relations imaginable in the fictional social relations of a literary character. In the realist fiction of the age of industrial capitalism, this character took the form of an autonomous and “problematic” individual, an atomistic figure that obscured the complex network of real social relations required to reproduce it. In this dissertation, I suggest that, as the service economy brings the production of social relations to the forefront of the reader’s consciousness, the novel has a much more difficult time representing subjectivity in the figure of a single individual. The novelists examined in this study—Samuel Beckett, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Kazuo Ishiguro, Rachel Cusk, Teju Cole, and Tom McCarthy—use the methods available to them as social producers in a service economy, including information and communications technology, to explore alternative techniques of reproducing workable social relations in the form of singular and eccentric characters.

*Designated as an exemplary master's project for 2015-16*