Return to search

Monotonous Feeling: The Formal Everyday in Three Modern and Contemporary Novels

Thesis advisor: Laura Tanner / In "Everyday Speech" Maurice Blanchot eloquently articulates the long held and often rehearsed notion that the everyday eludes representation. Yet, in recent years, literary and cultural studies scholars have begun to explore the limitations of this conception. Monotonous Feeling contributes to this burgeoning conversation by examining three Modern and Contemporary novels that take the everyday's resistance to representation not at a cue for aesthetic transformation but for formal innovation. It argues that Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans, Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, and Marilynne Robinson's Home, which each define the everyday as a mode of taken-for-granted or distracted attention, use formal techniques to make manifest the monotonous attentions of the everyday in order to make us feel what in the formal and affective limitations of our aesthetic approaches we cannot know. In arousing and making use of feelings that we so often regard as signals of a fractured meaning making process, these novels invite, even push, us to consider the value of everyday felt states that might structure our narratives. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:BOSTON/oai:dlib.bc.edu:bc-ir_107987
Date January 2018
CreatorsImre, Kristin
PublisherBoston College
Source SetsBoston College
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeText, thesis
Formatelectronic, application/pdf
RightsCopyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted.

Page generated in 0.002 seconds