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Title: | The Emotion of Multitude: The Novel and the Invention of New People |
Authors: | Yoo, Jeewon |
Advisors: | DiBattista, Maria Nunokawa, Jeff |
Contributors: | English Department |
Subjects: | Literature |
Issue Date: | 2024 |
Publisher: | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University |
Abstract: | One of the central debates in studies of the novel is whether the genre is oriented towards experience or collective life. This dissertation approaches this problem orthogonally by looking at novelistic character as the very means by which such debates are framed. Neither resolving the collective dimensions of the novel in the representation of individual experience nor dissolving that experience into the material foundations of everyday life, this dissertation considers character as the very site in which those terms are contested. The account of character in this dissertation is thus augmentative and considers not only a character’s formal relations to other characters but also aspects of the novel that do not always represent persons such as style and narrative structure. Each chapter takes up a paradigm of novelistic characterization and illustrates its extended effects on the novel form. The first chapter shows that character types imply a typifier and examines the distinct relationship between a type and a narrator. The implication is that the representation of a collective involves the alienation of the representing individual from that collective. The second looks at the dialectical relationship between a character’s style of speech or thought and the totality of styles that defines the stylistic norm of the novel such as its polyphony or monologism. A character’s style then is not only a reflection of their particularity but also the novel’s conditions of assimilations, what kinds of individuals are admissible into the collective the novel represents. The third considers the structure of parodic characterization as a model of historiography. The focus of the chapter is on racial parody and how racial difference differentiates not only the parodic characters from their white models but also the racialized present from an unracialized past. The final chapter suggests that the non-narrative moments of a novel, specifically its lyrical moments, can negate its narrative iv structure and thus convey a total dissent from the course of collective life such narratives may prescribe such as colonization or the marriage plot. The unifying theme of all four chapters is the emergence of a new kind of person and how the novel models the significance of this event through the formal changes it registers throughout its form beyond the apparent reach of individual characters. An innovation in characterization has implications not only for the representation of persons but also the structural aspects of the novel and the social models they entail. The novel binds the experience of the individuals to the fate of collective life, so its formal innovations are not only the products of technical ingenuity but also envision reformations of the social world. |
URI: | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zk51vm16c |
Type of Material: | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) |
Language: | en |
Appears in Collections: | English |
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