Date of Award

1-1-2020

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

Department of English

Content Description

1 online resource (iv, 175 pages)

Dissertation/Thesis Chair

Paul Stasi

Committee Members

Bret Benjamin, Ronald Schleifer

Keywords

Capitalism in literature, Consciousness in literature, Imperialism in literature, Social conflict in literature

Subject Categories

English Language and Literature

Abstract

Knowing Totality reads literary portraits of consciousness at the level of capitalist totality. The largest level of the project argues that there is a formal discord in certain twentieth-century novels between “knowability,” or an accepted community narrative, and character “consciousness,” which reaches beyond it. I locate within these formal breaks social and historical contradictions that characterize capital, where seemingly content-based issues in the texts—Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, and James Joyce’s Ulysses—manifest themselves at the level of form. The pairings place the novels in dialectical conversation, highlighting characters on the periphery of communities that are themselves peripheral in many ways to such centers of accumulation.

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