This thesis stages a meeting between the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the short fiction of Italian writer Italo Calvino. This meeting has as its subject the question of the human and the non-human. What forces make up the human? What assemblages of elements make up language, literature, subjectivity? And what does it mean that these forces come from outside the human at the same time as they create the human? Calvino is often accused of being an unemotional writer, lacking in human warmth. With this I agree completely. Calvino does lack human warmth because he allows non-human forces to penetrate his writing, taking it beyond conventionalized and banal prefabricated emotion into a dimension of new intensities. Deleuze will provide us with a vocabulary of concepts with which to discuss these non-human forces and their potential for moving the human out of itself and into a new assemblage of thoughts, passions and actions.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.56803 |
| Date | January 1992 |
| Creators | Bourassa, Alan |
| Contributors | Massumi, Brian (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 | Master of Arts (Comparative Literature Program.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001327448, proquestno: AAIMM87534, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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