서브메뉴
검색
Imaginary Transcripts : Dialogue in Nineteenth Century American Fiction.
Imaginary Transcripts : Dialogue in Nineteenth Century American Fiction.
- 자료유형
- 학위논문
- Control Number
- 0017162975
- International Standard Book Number
- 9798384334705
- Dewey Decimal Classification Number
- 700.411
- Main Entry-Personal Name
- Lindemann, Charlotte.
- Publication, Distribution, etc. (Imprint
- [S.l.] : Stanford University., 2024
- Publication, Distribution, etc. (Imprint
- Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2024
- Physical Description
- 253 p.
- General Note
- Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 86-03, Section: A.
- General Note
- Advisor: Woloch, Alex.
- Dissertation Note
- Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2024.
- Summary, Etc.
- 요약Sitting among strangers at the feast of the Phaeacians in book eight of The Odyssey, Odysseus is asked to share his story. He speaks for the rest of the evening, over the next four books. This substantial section, totaling one-sixth of the twenty-four book epic, "purports to be the faithful transcription of that speech."1 In a parallel moment more than two-thousand years later, near the end of a great epic of American literature, the hero of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching Godlooks out on a courtroom packed with unfamiliar faces, ready to tell the story that brought her to the witness stand. But in this case, her testimony is glossed in a single paragraph of narration. The narrator summarizes Janie's long speech rather than ceding the floor to a "faithful transcription" of it. Writing in 1980, Gerard Genette notes the discrepancy between these two narrative techniques as an oversight in the discipline,It is surprising that until now the theory of narrative has been so little concerned with [the question], as though it were completely secondary, for example, that the adventure of Ulysses should be recounted sometimes by Homer and sometimes by Ulysses himself.As soon as we ask the question,who speaks?we notice that every sentence in narrative fiction can be attributed to either the narrator or a character. This pattern is so fundamental to the structure of narrative that it is easy to take it for granted.There are many reasons why an author might prioritize a character's voice over that of the narrator and vice versa; in fact, scholarship on the question has become extensive. For example, the courtroom scene in Their Eyes Were Watching God has been a point of contention in the novel's critical literature since the 1980s. Why does Hurston's narrator insert themself just as Janie takes the stand? Why gloss Janie's first-person testimony rather than letting her speak for herself?The choice to suppress the protagonist's voice seems incongruous at the climax of a novel about self-discovery.3 Questions of voice easily slide into questions of identity, personhood, and representation. Who speaks can be a novelist's shorthand for who is self-realized as a person and adequately represented as a character, or who has agency to advocate for and represent themself. The question points to a central intersection between form and politics in literature, particularly in American literature, where voice, speech, and dialogue are also important keywords in the conceptual vocabulary of democracy. Even today, phrases like marginalized voices or diplomatic dialogue evidence the close association between speech terms and democratic values. However, giving "voice" to a character in any symbolic sense-whether representation, personhood, self-awareness, agency, or equal participation-is not quite the same thing as the substantial page space in prose fiction dedicated to what "purports to be the faithful transcription" of what was said. This latter sense is the topic of my dissertation. This project chronicles the morphology of a literary technique-reported dialogue-and its application in American novels across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Reported dialogue exists in literature well beyond this limited period, and I hope that many of the claims in this project pertain outside it. Nineteenth century American literature, however, is a good setting for this story because, as I'll show, American literature is full of examples of how dialogue, in practice, fails to live up to the democratic values associated with it or resists the pretense to direct representation. For example, ventriloquists and other voice-illusionists are central figures in American fiction across the long nineteenth century from the bibloquist in Charles Brockden Brown's Weiland, to the smooth-talking swindlers in Herman Melville's The Confidence Man, to the storyteller-trickster in Charles Chesnutt's conjure tales. In each of these works, any naive association between voice and identity or speech and "faithful" representation is compromised. These examples are invaluable to my project because they defamiliarize the formal qualities of the literary device by casting them in sharp relief against its own thematic and representational contents. In other words, reported dialogue is so pervasive that it is easy to take for granted; American authors' high degree of self-consciousness around the technique helps produce it as an object of analysis.
- Subject Added Entry-Topical Term
- Modernism.
- Subject Added Entry-Topical Term
- Novels.
- Subject Added Entry-Topical Term
- Ontology.
- Subject Added Entry-Topical Term
- Objectivity.
- Subject Added Entry-Topical Term
- Aesthetics.
- Subject Added Entry-Topical Term
- Literature.
- Added Entry-Corporate Name
- Stanford University.
- Host Item Entry
- Dissertations Abstracts International. 86-03A.
- Electronic Location and Access
- 로그인을 한후 보실 수 있는 자료입니다.
- Control Number
- joongbu:657991