"other" place of language
Subtitle: identity and heterotopia in Joseph Conrad and Witold Gombrowicz.
Published: 2005
Language: eng
Number of pages: 396
Description: This dissertation explores Conrad's and Gombrowicz's narratives in the context of the authors' liminal status as exiles. It theorizes textual strategies and techniques through which their works bridged or integrated certain streams of modernity usually considered separate or incompatible with one another, including diasporic thought, the avant-garde, and the politics of empire/colony.Following a double biographical and theoretical introduction, I read  Trans-Atlantyk, with Nostromo, showing that in spite of clear stylistic, ideological, and generic differences, both are primarily concerned with elaborating an exilic space of hope for the autonomous subject. Under the rubric of "life writing," I examine a selection of autobiographical documents, memoirs and interviews, personal correspondence, and political essays. Again, despite their radically different personal circumstances, both writers elaborated near-analogous programs of ciphered transparency  regarding their exilic audiences, simultaneously searching for elusive "ideal readers" and railing against "weak" readers and "uncomprehending" critics.Finally, I propose a new reading of Cosmos, which I treat as a singularly pessimistic account of the postmodern Western philosophy of the subject. Suspended between the forces of desire and order,  Cosmos's narrator has nowhere to turn to explain the ever more disturbing deformations and mysteries of being he encounters. Gombrowicz traces the speaking subject's hoped-for synchronization of desires with the external world of discourses, things, and individuals, and the ultimate failure of this quest. However, the inscription of that particular failure results in a literary work, Cosmos---thus metatextually both refuting  and redeeming the potential of the work of art as an instrument of liberation.The major ideas that animated this dissertation are: (1) Conrad and Gombrowicz are treated principally as emigre authors, with their common Polish childhood/early adulthood supplying a cultural touchstone in relation to which (frequently against which) they formulated their philosophies of writing; (2) the chosen texts are united by what I term a heterotopic imagination, which after Michel Foucault I theorize as a desire to articulate both a set of existential conditions in the spaces between discourses and a home-in-language. Within the zone of heterotopia, I argue, exilic imagination is what transforms the non-place of language into a linguistic refuge.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-10, Section: A, page: 3635.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2005.

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