Recollected Forward: Repetition, Action, and Fantasy in 20th and 21st Century Literature of the Americas Restricted; Files & ToC

Abstract

Recollected Forward considers repetition in 20th and 21st century fiction from the United States and Latin America. It draws on the existential philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard and the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to demonstrate how repetition organizes the formation of hemispheric American identity and agency. Through an analysis of Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, José Donoso, William Faulkner, Juan Rulfo, Jorge Luis Borges, and Richard Powers, I show how the idea of repetition influences action through producing a binary choice that sustains itself through fantasies of linear historical determinations that posit that one either cannot act because of historical determination or can only act through rejecting all historical determination. This binary structure is shown to be a false choice resulting from the fantasy, on the one hand, of total subjection to a history which would allow one to forego any and all responsibility for one’s choices and, on the other, of the absolutely new which could create itself without recourse to history or context. Out of this binary collapse, the Kierkegaardian notion of repetition, which allows for free action only on the basis of a historical condition, appears. The significance of this project comes from its regional articulation since the literary texts in question are all concerned with the specificity of American identity formation in different contexts, where this is continually at issue due to America’s complex cultural syncretism. What these novels dramatize is a key question central to any attempt to cohere an identity: what am I? And how much of this is born from my own self-making and how much of this is given to me from my history? In the end, what appears is that it is only in the tension of living between the past and the future that we can become ourselves.

Table of Contents

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About this Dissertation

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	Comparative Literature
Degree	Ph.D.
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	Literature, Latin American Literature, American Literature, Comparative
Stichwort	appropriation agency freedom novelty history aesthetics
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Marder, Elissa, Emory University
Committee Members	Jill Robbins, Emory University Meighoo, Sean, Emory University

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