How is Bakhtin's conception of novelistic openness distinct from modernist-dialectical irresolution or open-endedness? Is Women in Love a Bakhtinian "open totality"? How is dialogic openness (as opposed to modernist indeterminacy) a "form-shaping ideology" of comic interrogation? / This study tests whether dialogism illuminates the shape of openness in Lawrence. As philosophers of potentiality, both Bakhtin and Lawrence explore the dialogic "between" as a state of being and a condition of meaningful fiction. Dialogism informs Women in Love. It achieves a polyphonic openness which Lawrence in his later fictions cannot sustain. Subsequently, univocal, simplifying organizations supervene. Dialogic process collapses into a stenographic report upon a completed dialogue, over which the travel writer, the poet or the messianic martyr preside. / Nevertheless, the old openness can be discerned in the ambivalent laughter of The Captain's Doll, St. Mawr or "The Man Who Loved Islands." In these retrospective variations on earlier themes, laughing openness of vision takes new, "unfinalizable" shapes.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.39750 |
| Date | January 1992 |
| Creators | Leone, Matthew J. (Matthew Joseph) |
| Contributors | Hensley, David (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001326720, proquestno: NN87541, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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