Mind Against Matter uses cognitive literary theory to explore a set of contemporary texts that emphasize characters’ feelings of alienation and isolation from their social and material worlds. Focusing on novels by Nicholson Baker and David Markson, short stories by David Foster Wallace, and the film The Truman Show, I consider how these texts focus on characters’ individual, subjective experiences while deemphasizing their physical environments and social contexts. I argue that by privileging subjectivity in this way, these texts portray their characters as independent, to varying degrees, from their material and cultural surroundings. The texts isolate individual consciousness, causing their characters to live in mental worlds of their own making. While the novel, as a genre, often depicts alienation as a condition deriving from a character’s status as a social outcast, the texts featured in this study treat it as a condition inherent to consciousness, derived from what their creators envision as an inevitable separation of mind from world. Rather than bemoan alienation as a loss of social connectedness, these texts portray it as inherent to mental life. The chapters of this dissertation explore the particular visions of alienation that emerge in each of these texts. In a chapter on Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, I argue that Howie, the novel’s protagonist, views his mind as a machine that operates according to self-sufficient, automatic processes. My analysis of David Markson’s final novels demonstrates that Markson portrays artistic creation as a process through which individual consciousness is isolated from society. David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion treats alienation as a general human condition, as Wallace’s interests in loneliness and solipsism derive, I argue, from his assumptions about the individualized nature of consciousness. Finally, in a chapter on The Truman Show, I argue that the film’s sense of paranoia stems from its protagonist’s sense of being alone in his worldview. I thus present a corpus of works that maintain a close, limited focus on singular fictional minds, shutting out social and physical environments in order to depict the mind as a cloistered, self-enclosed entity. My analysis highlights the ways in which the philosophical underpinnings of these narratives render consciousness as an isolating force, stranding fictional characters on mental islands of their own making.

DISSERTATION ABSTRACT María Vania V. Díaz Romero Paz Title: La Revolución de 1952 en la Novela Boliviana Contemporánea Escrita por Mujeres This dissertation studies the different discourses of nation that underlie contemporary novels written by women authors in Bolivia during the period between 1977 and 2007. My primary corpus is comprised of three novels: Gaby Vallejo’s Hijo de opa (1977), Giancarla Zabalaga’s La Flor de "La Candelaria" (1990) and Verónica Ormachea’s Los ingenuos (2007). These novels allude to the Revolution of 1952 at its different stages, either explicitly or implicitly. Written during different time periods, these novels are a product of their respective historical periods and therefore reveal diverse ways of reading the nationalist discourse and the revolution. My objective is to analyze and discuss the concept of nation and how this concept varies among the different novels by focusing on the Revolution of 1952. The Revolution of 1952 is one of the most important moments in the history of Bolivia, when the conditions for socio-political change converge in order to make possible an “imagined community,” of proposing and implementing a nation-building project based on state capitalism. The mestizo is called upon to serve as a vanguard of this revolution. These novels explore how social, economic, and cultural contradictions make the construction of the nation difficult, and transmit a critique of this process of nation-building, and its nationalist discourse. The main purpose of my dissertation is to examine the recurrence of retellings of the revolution from a feminine perspective in which the domestic space is privileged and the house and family work as a metaphor of the country. The three novels I analyze prioritize female protagonists and the female perspective, embracing a feminist critique of the traditionally patriarchal representation of the revolution. Each of them makes the presence of women visible, prioritizes domestic space as a place of enunciation of national imaginaries and portrays the home as a metaphor for the nation. These authors develop their own political agenda in order to become effective political actors, challenge the patriarchal order and claim their space and their right to participate in nation building. This dissertation is written in Spanish.