Being classified in the ¡§anti-tradition of unclassifiable books,¡¨ Laurence Sterne¡¦s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. has fascinated generations of readers and critics with its seemingly chaotic richness. The narrator Tristram appears to hide his ultimate purpose and unity beneath a cloak of oddity and confusion, which defies any attempt on the reader¡¦s part to ever pinning it down, and thus opens ground for various debates and critiques. Taking Tristram¡¦s many futile efforts at tracing back the origin of his life as the starting point, this thesis attempts to explore the author-narrator¡¦s deliberate use of oddity and confusion. The impossibility of ever finding a coherent and definite beginning of one¡¦s life is read in my study as a metaphor of one¡¦s losing battle at pinning down the concept of self, the embodiment of the ungraspable subjectivity. Not even Locke¡¦s epistemology or the eighteenth-century knowledge of anthropology can serve as an adequate framework of reference for the account of one¡¦s life, if it is to be interpreted as subjectivity. The fact that men are different from one another arises from their individual hobbyhorse, the manifestation of subjectivity, which resists attempts to be defined exactly and thus makes itself unfathomable. This discovery is the very basis of my reading of Tristram Shandy. Since subjectivity refuses to be grasped, my thesis then proceeds to investigate the way in which Tristram represents this ungraspable subjectivity. The concept of staging is employed in this thesis to explore Sterne¡¦s deployment of subjectivity. On the stage where the many facets of each character¡¦s singular microcosm are presented, it is demonstrated that the reader is also drawn into Tristram¡¦s game play, only with the peculiar result that in discovering subjectivity (theirs and ours,) we trespass boundary and assume Tristram¡¦s subjectivity.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0719104-122230 |
| Date | 19 July 2004 |
| Creators | F. Chiou, Theresa |
| Contributors | Chen Kuo-jung, TEE Kim Tong, Rudolphus Teeuwen |
| Publisher | NSYSU |
| Source Sets | NSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0719104-122230 |
| Rights | unrestricted, Copyright information available at source archive |
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