The Language of Loss: Writing at the Intersection of Literature and Philosophy Public
Abrams, Jacqueline (2012)
Published
Abstract
The Language of Loss examines the presuppositions that underlie both our conventional and critical discussions of loss, in order to reveal a more nuanced concept that breaks with categories of linear time and encapsulated subjectivity. Often, the experience of loss is taken as a point of departure, assumed at the outset to constitute an event that befalls a totalized subject and, once it occurs, divides time into "before" and "after." Questions about redressing loss, coping with it, even making meaning of it, typically rely on this notion of loss as a given event. This dissertation intervenes by challenging the very concept of loss on which those questions are grounded. Through close readings of specific literary and philosophical works, this dissertation argues that loss is not a definitive event that occurs at a specific moment in time, but rather a "constitutive force" that constantly works upon us. As the nuances of loss emerge, we find that it collapses discrete boundaries between presence and absence, life and death, and operates simultaneously as a force of dispersal and of gathering. Loss turns out to be the very ground for relationality itself, exposing us to the world and to others. We look to the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Ford Madox Ford, Franz Kafka, and Virginia Woolf because, in each case, their writing preserves a link to that more traditional notion of loss, at the same time that it destabilizes the very presuppositions on which it is founded. In different ways, each author confronts the idea that the subject is an entity that possesses its Being, its world, the objects around it, such that it has those things to lose. By challenging notions of self-possession and linear temporality, they force us to re-think the concept of loss as well. Finally, each author elaborates a thinking of creative action--and writing, in particular--that derives from this force of constitutive loss, and exposes the tension between permanence and ephemerality. Thus, rather than dismiss the urgent claims to loss that are a salient feature of modern existence, this dissertation renders them more complex.
The Language of Loss: Writing at the Intersection of Literature and
Philosophy
B.A., University of California, Santa Cruz, 1999
M.A., New York University 2005
Advisor: Elissa Marder, Ph.D.
A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the
James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies of Emory University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in Comparative Literature
2012
Table of Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………….….1
CHAPTER I
………………………………………………………..…………24
Nietzsche's Exposure of the Subject and the Opening of the
World
CHAPTER II
……………………………………………………………..….104
Language and the Deferral of Meaning in Ford Madox Ford's
The Good Soldier
CHAPTER III
……………………………………………..…………………162
Kafka's Fatigue and the Indeterminacy of Loss
CHAPTER IV
……………………………………………….………………220
Imperatives of Elegy: The Constitutive Losses of Virginia
Woolf
BIBLIOGRAPHY
……………………………………………………….……283
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