Thesis (M.A.)--Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, 2008. / "Einreichungsdatum: 25. Februar 2008." "Dokument Nr. V94473"--Cover. Includes bibliographical references (p. 122-125). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Submitted by Davi Silistino de Souza (dvssouza@hotmail.com) on 2018-02-27T18:37:49Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação - Davi.pdf: 1308006 bytes, checksum: 3dbf8e602397954ecbcacf60eed1b2b6 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Elza Mitiko Sato null (elzasato@ibilce.unesp.br) on 2018-02-28T14:52:18Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 souza_ds_me_sjrp.pdf: 1308006 bytes, checksum: 3dbf8e602397954ecbcacf60eed1b2b6 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-02-28T14:52:18Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 souza_ds_me_sjrp.pdf: 1308006 bytes, checksum: 3dbf8e602397954ecbcacf60eed1b2b6 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-02-09 / Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) Coordenação de confiança e Aperfeiçoamento de financiamento desta Pessoal de Nível pesquisa Superior (CAPES) / As injustiças e opressões enfrentadas pelos subalternos vêm sido estudadas há algumas décadas pelos Grupos de Estudos Subalternos, seja o de origem indiana ou latina. Com o auxílio dessas pesquisas, na contemporaneidade, os indivíduos excluídos adquirem voz, sendo ouvidos e respeitados na sociedade. Considerando esses fatos, a dissertação tem como objetivo contribuir para esse enfrentamento, ao estudar de que maneira a subalternidade é representada nas personagens de Cloud Atlas (2004), romance escrito por David Mitchell. Em nossas análises, evidenciaremos a presença de uma crítica às estruturas hegemônicas na construção das protagonistas, pertencentes a sociedades organizadas em hierarquias sociais e econômicas que propiciam a subjugação e abafamento da voz dos marginalizados. Verificaremos como Mitchell dá voz a personagens subversoras da relação de desprezo, ataque ou mesmo silenciamento. Como aparato crítico-teórico, fundamentamos nossa pesquisa em Grosfoguel (2008), Mignolo (2007) e Castro-Goméz (2005), para discutir questões relacionadas à decolonialidade; em Foucault (2015), Rabinow e Rose (2006), para tratar do conceito de biopoder; em Butler (2003), Foucault (1980) e Stadniky (2007), para estudar as questões de identidade e gênero; em Arendt (2000), Bauman (2014), Butler e Spivak (2007), para debater acerca da liberdade dos subalternos; em Bauman (2014) e Eagleton (2004; 1996), para estudar conceitos relacionados à contemporaneidade; e, por fim, Bhabha (2013) e Santana (2008), para discutir questões relacionadas às diversas concepções de tempo. / Injustices and oppressions faced by subalterns have been studied for some decades by Subaltern Studies Groups, whether of Indian or Latin origin. With the aid of the group researches, contemporarily, excluded individuals acquire a voice, being heard and respected. Considering these facts, the dissertation aims to contribute to this fight by studying how subalternity is represented in characters in Cloud Atlas (2004), a novel written by David Mitchell. In our analysis, we will highlight the presence of hegemonic structure critiques in the construction of characters from subaltern groups. They belong to societies organized in a social and economic hierarchy, responsible for subjugation and muffling of subaltern’s voices. We will observe how Mitchell gives voice to characters who subvert the contempt, attack or even muzzling subalterns. As a criticaltheoretical approach, we base our research on Grosfoguel (2008), Mignolo (2007) and Castro-Goméz (2005), to discuss issues related to decoloniality; in Foucault (2015), Rabinow and Rose (2006), to deal with the concept of biopower; in Butler (2003), Foucault (1980) and Stadniky (2007), to study identity and gender issues; in Arendt (2000), Bauman (2014), Butler and Spivak (2007), to discuss subaltern freedom; in Bauman (2014) and Eagleton (2004, 1996), to study concepts related to contemporaneity; and finally, Bhabha (2013) and Santana (2008), to discuss issues related to different conceptions of time. / 2015/25282-4

A cosmodern reading of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas creates a positive vision of the future for readers through various techniques of fragmentation including fragmentation of voice, language, and time. By fragmentation, I have in mind the consistent interruption of the novel’s voice, language, and time that requires an active and aware readership. The reader’s interaction with the text makes the novel re-constructive. In fact, the global nature of Mitchell’s novel, its hopeful ending, and its exploration of the effects of globalization can be considered as a means of exploring the dynamic relationships between the characters, the reader, and Mitchell’s authorial voice. Rather than falling back on familiar postmodernist truisms such as the hopelessness of genuine communication or the impossibility of truth, Mitchell creates a hopeful vision of the future of the world, one that champions the life, agency, and personal narrative of the individual.

This thesis will examine David Mitchell’s use of postmodern narrative structures and strategies in Cloud Atlas and how these relate to his overtly political concerns regarding relations of power between individuals and between factions. This will involve a discussion of debates surrounding the political efficacy of postmodern narrative forms. I will consider Mitchell’s prolific use of intertextual and intratextual allusion and his mimicry of a wide range of narrative modes and genres. These techniques, along with the complex structural iterations in the novel and the ‘recurrence’ of characters between its parts, appear to reinforce a thematic concern with the interconnectedness — indeed, the repetition — of human activity, through time and a fatalistic conception of being that draws on two central Nietzschean notions, eternal recurrence and the will to power. The vision of humanity and human relations of power that is expressed within Cloud Atlas is open to extended analysis in Foucauldian terms. Against this apparently nihilistic backdrop, Mitchell appears to promote a notion of (albeit limited) individual agency and the capacity for creative narration and reinterpretation of the past as a means to devise new ‘truths’ and explore new ‘meanings’ for the present and the future. I will explore the ways in which Mitchell’s metafictional self-reflexivity (and that of his protagonists), offers a vision of hope and political agency that counters the apparent (Nietzschean) fatalism of the novel.

The literary utopia is often accused of being an outmoded genre, a graveyard for failed social movements. However, utopian literature is a surprisingly resilient genre, evolving from the static, descriptive anatomies of the Renaissance utopias to the novelized utopian romances of the late nineteenth century and the self-reflexive critical utopias of the 1970s. The literary utopia adapts to the needs of the moment: what form(s) best represent the fears and desires of our current historical period? In this dissertation I perform a close reading of three exemplary texts: John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968), Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home (1985), and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004). While I address topics specific to each text, my main focus is on the texts’ depictions of utopia and their spatialized narrative forms. In Stand on Zanzibar Brunner locates the utopian impulse in three registers—the political/bureaucratic, the technical/scientific, and the human(e)—and explores how their interplay constitutes the utopian space. In Always Coming Home Le Guin renovates the classical literary utopia, problematizing its uncritical advocacy of the “Judaeo-Christian-Rationalist-West” but preserving much of the older utopia’s form. In Cloud Atlas the networked narrative structure reflects and enables the heterogeneous, non-hierarchical, and processual utopian communities depicted in the novel. In these science fictional works the spatialized techniques of juxtaposition, discontinuity, and collage —commonly associated with a loss of historical depth and difference—are used to create utopian spaces founded on contingency and human choice. I contend that science fiction is a historical genre, one that is invested in representing societies as contingent historical totalities. Science fiction’s generic tendencies modify the context that a spatialized narrative form functions in, and in changing the context changes its effects. By utilizing a spatialized narrative form to embody a contingent practice, Brunner, Le Guin, and Mitchell cast the future—and the present—as historical, as something that can be acted upon and changed: they have provided us with strategies for envisioning better futures and, potentially, for mobilizing our visions of the future for positive change in the present.

This thesis identifies a trend in recent postmodern dystopian fiction for writers to metafictionally dwell on the place of literature in a future context. This trend springs from similar concerns present in the two most influential dystopian novels of the 20th century, Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Yet, unlike Huxley and Orwell, for whom the marginalization of literature is merely one symptom of the hegemonic control oppressing these future societies, the postmodern writers I identify situate the book’s future disappearance at the epicenter of culture’s demise. In Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2010), electronic technologies have virtually eradicated print literature and the novel’s protagonist, Lenny, mourns the changes in social interactions he sees this shift in technology bringing about. In Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007), marginalized book-lovers see the devastation humanity continuously wreaks on the environment as a product of culture’s disdain for literature.

This dissertation on “Climate Change, the Ruined Island, and British Metamodernism” proceeds from the premise that a perspectival shift occurred in the early 2000s that altered the tenor of British climate fiction published in the decade that followed. The release of a third Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), less than a month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, prompted an acute awareness of the present as a post-apocalyptic condition bracketed by catastrophe and extinction. In response, British authors experimented with double-mapping techniques designed to concretize the supranational scope of advanced climate change. An increasing number of British authors projected the historical ruination of remote island communities onto speculative topographies extrapolated from IPCC Assessments to compel contemporary readers to conceive of a climate-changed planet aslant. Given the spate of ruined-island- as-future-Earth novels published at the turn of the millennium, this dissertation intervenes in extant criticism by identifying David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Will Self’s The Book of Dave (2006), and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) as noteworthy examples of a metamodernist subgenre that makes a distant future of a “futureless” past to position the reader in a state of imagined obsolescence. This project consequently draws on metamodernist theory as a useful heuristic for articulating the traits that distinguish metamodernist cli-fi from precursory texts, with the aim to connect British post-apocalyptic fiction, climate-fiction, and literary metamodernism in productive ways. As the body chapters of this dissertation demonstrate, metamodernist cli-fi primarily uses the double-mapped island to structurally discredit the present as singular in cataclysmic consequence and, therefore, deserving of an unprecedented technological fix. Ultimately, in attempting to refute the moment of completion that would mark history’s end, metamodernist cli-fi challenges the givenness of an anticipated future through which to anchor the advent of an irreversible tipping point. Given the relative dearth of literary scholarship devoted to metamodernist cli-fi, this project posits that this subgenre warrants greater critical attention because it offers potent means for short-circuiting the type of cynical optimism that insists on envisioning human survival in terms of divine, authoritarian, or techno-escapist interventions. / Graduate / 2021-08-08

Данная магистерская диссертация посвящена исследованию способов конструирования языков разных эпох в романе «Облачный атлас». Актуальность работы обусловлена как дефицитом работ, рассматривающих лингвистические эксперименты в современной художественной литературе, так и недостатком в отечественной филологии работ, посвященных творчеству Дэвида Митчелла, которое приобретает все большую популярность. В первой главе рассматриваются теоретические основы воплощения текстового времени и исторической стилизации в художественной литературе. Во второй главе рассматривается такое понятие, как искусственный язык, а также феномен вымышленного языка как подкласса искусственных языков. В третьей главе приводится описание творческой биографии Дэвида Митчелла, структурные особенности его романа «Облачный атлас», а также жанровое своеобразие произведения и представленный в нем спектр тематики. В четвертой главе исследуются способы воплощения английского языка XIX века. В пятой главе рассматриваются характеристики созданных автором английских языков будущего. / The master’s thesis is devoted to exploring the ways of constructing languages of different epochs in the novel “Cloud Atlas”. The relevance of this research work is highlighted by the fact that today within the realm of Russian philology there can be found only a few works dedicated to D. Mitchell and his writing; also it should be mentioned that there are not enough works aimed at investigating linguistic experiments in fiction. The first chapter deals with the theory connected with depicting time in fiction and the phenomenon of ‘historical stylization’. The second chapter explores the term ‘artificial language’ and introduces the notion of an ‘invented language’ as a subclass of artificial languages. The third chapter contains the biography of the author and some information on his novel ‘Cloud Atlas’. The fourth chapter analyzes the means of creating the English language of the 19th century in the text. The fifth chapter investigates peculiar features of languages of the future invented by D. Mitchell himself.

The diploma thesis deals with seven novels by the contemporary British novelist David Mitchell. Using textual analysis, it traces the ways in which the novels are connected, most visibly expressed through reappering characters and realities, and provides an overview of Mitchell's biblioverse. The work also notes the differences between the fictional and the real, which Mitchell's novels examine, and leads to a broader reflection on the meaning of storytelling or the meaning of a cultural encyclopedia.

En adaptionsanalys som utforskar relationen mellan romanen Cloud Atlas av David Mitchell och dess filmatisering (2012) av Tom Tykwer och syskonen Wachowski. Fokuset ligger på skillnader och likheter i narrativ och vilka visuella möjligheter som kunnat tillföras när romanens handlingen gjordes om till filmformat.