Skip to main content
Duke University Libraries
DukeSpace Scholarship by Duke Authors
  • Login
  • Ask
  • Menu
  • Login
  • Ask a Librarian
  • Search & Find
  • Using the Library
  • Research Support
  • Course Support
  • Libraries
  • About
View Item 
  •   DukeSpace
  • Theses and Dissertations
  • Duke Dissertations
  • View Item
  •   DukeSpace
  • Theses and Dissertations
  • Duke Dissertations
  • View Item
JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

Disconsolate Subjects: Figures of Radical Alterity in the Twentieth Century Novel, From Modernism to Postcolonialism

Thumbnail
View / Download
1.2 Mb
Date
2012
Author
Wright, Timothy Sean
Advisor
Moses, Michael V
Repository Usage Stats
795
views
1,081
downloads
Abstract

This dissertation focuses on a group of 20th and 21st century novelists writing in English - Samuel Beckett, J.M. Coetzee, and Kazuo Ishiguro - whose fiction is populated by figures of disconsolation: characters who resist, evade, or - in the case of Ishiguro's protagonists - assiduously attempt to conform to the constitutive social formations and disciplinary technologies of late modernity, among them, notably, the novel itself. These characters thus question the possibilities and limits of political critique and ethical life within a global modernity. I delineate a history of the disconsolate subject that cuts across the categories of modernist, postmodernist, and postcolonial literatures in order to reveal a different literary genealogy, in which an exilic postcoloniality becomes the paradigmatic sensibility for a global late modernist novel.

Georg Lukács argued that the transcendental homelessness of modernity is registered most emphatically in the novel, a form he imagined functioning as a surrogate home for rootless modern subjects. The tradition I describe, whose characters trouble the representational technologies of the novel, disrupts an easy identification with the textual realm as home. I borrow from the critic Neil Lazarus the notion of a vital modernist literary practice that persists after the death of modernism, "a writing...that resists the accommodation of what has been canonised as modernism and that does what at least some modernist work has done from the outset: namely, says `no,'; refuses integration, resolution, consolation, comfort; protests and criticises." This is a writing whose project, he suggests, following Adorno, is "disconsolation." With this in mind, I depart from the conception of an emergent cosmopolitan literature and examine instead a global literature of disconsolation, a literature that allegorizes a radically reconfigured global space whose subjects are no longer at home in the familiar world of nation-states.

A discontentment with the parameters of late modernity was already apparent in the high modernists, many of whom responded by embracing political positions on the radical right or left. However, the catastrophic political experiments of the century led to a sense that attempts to either refine or resist modernity had been exhausted. The works I examine mount critiques of such large-scale nationalist projects as the Irish Free State, the Japanese Empire, or apartheid South Africa - projects that emerged in opposition to a regnant world-system and saw themselves in utopian or liberatory terms. Yet these fictions are unable to affirm more than provisional or imaginary alternatives. A doubly exilic position consequently emerges in these novels, in which a rupture with the nation-state finds no compensation in another form of community such as a global cosmopolitan order. Through their attention to the gaps and fissures opened by the alterity of these disconsolate subjects, these texts function as waiting rooms or holding spaces for a utopianism that is unrealizable in a world of political disillusionment.

Type
Dissertation
Department
English
Subject
Modern literature
Comparative literature
alterity
beckett
coetzee
disconsolation
ishiguro
late modernism
Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/5594
Citation
Wright, Timothy Sean (2012). Disconsolate Subjects: Figures of Radical Alterity in the Twentieth Century Novel, From Modernism to Postcolonialism. Dissertation, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/5594.
Collections
  • Duke Dissertations
More Info
Show full item record
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Rights for Collection: Duke Dissertations


Works are deposited here by their authors, and represent their research and opinions, not that of Duke University. Some materials and descriptions may include offensive content. More info

Make Your Work Available Here

How to Deposit

Browse

All of DukeSpaceCommunities & CollectionsAuthorsTitlesTypesBy Issue DateDepartmentsAffiliations of Duke Author(s)SubjectsBy Submit DateThis CollectionAuthorsTitlesTypesBy Issue DateDepartmentsAffiliations of Duke Author(s)SubjectsBy Submit Date

My Account

LoginRegister

Statistics

View Usage Statistics
Duke University Libraries

Contact Us

411 Chapel Drive
Durham, NC 27708
(919) 660-5870
Perkins Library Service Desk

Digital Repositories at Duke

  • Report a problem with the repositories
  • About digital repositories at Duke
  • Accessibility Policy
  • Deaccession and DMCA Takedown Policy

TwitterFacebookYouTubeFlickrInstagramBlogs

Sign Up for Our Newsletter
  • Re-use & Attribution / Privacy
  • Harmful Language Statement
  • Support the Libraries
Duke University