By investigating the discursive rules of hermeneutics and diagnosis, this study
seeks to problematize particular presuppositions—most notably the presupposition of
sense—of the modern disciplinary hermeneutic context.
Following Barthes's consideration of the Greek modus of the middle voice as a
useful notion in conceptualizing the modern scene of writing, the study advances itself
toward conceptualizing a configuration of the modern reading scene in its middle-voiced
permutation. In such a scene, the moment a reading attempts to read itself from without
its parameters, it arrives at a spatial and temporal crisis (from the Greek krin-ein; to
decide) between its action and the place (of not sense and not not sense) which exceeds
the parameters delimiting the action of reading itself, but which nevertheless conditions
its possibility. The grammar of this crisis is the middle voice; its condition, in the context
of this study, is configured as madness. Madness is thus configured as a function of
interrogation, reading and diagnosis.
At the nucleus of the modem reading scene itself, this thesis opens with an
introduction of the terms middle voice, crisis and madness, and then offers a
consideration of three permutations of reading: Chapter Two, Chapter Three and the
space between. Chapter Two considers a fictional representation of writing in the middle
voice through a reading of Nabokov's Lolita, a text of fiction in the form of a "mad
writer's" diary, whose historical reception has been marked by acts of appropriative
censorship and clinical diagnosis. Chapter Three considers a permutation of the middlevoiced
reading through a reading of Gertrude Stein's lectures on writing. This
consideration is framed by fragments from the writing of Maurice Blanchot, connecting
reading (as conceived by Stein) to madness, figuring the convergence of reading and
madness in writing. The Interchapter, between chapters Two and Three, is an aporetic
space entitled "Madness Itself." By allowing a brief and partial view of the modem
clinical psychiatric setting, and by calling into question the parameters of the surrounding
"chapters" themselves, this section seeks to perform, structurally and thematically, a
moment of crisis recalling the middle voice.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/11229 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Katz, Yael |
| 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 |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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