Online Archive of University of Virginia Scholarship
The Materialist Remainder800 views
Author
Larsen, Soren Bo Aggerbeck, English - Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Virginia
Advisors
Wicke, Jennifer, University of Virginia
Abstract
This thesis investigates "the materialist remainder" in Elizabeth Bishop and Franz Kafka. It is argued that it is the very literariness of their work which opens up a exemplary site for a dialogue with materialist dialectics. Far from demonstrating the irreducible primacy of reality, the materialist core of their work must be understood as an inherent excess in dialectics itself. Such a materialist dialectics is argued by help of the Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Žižek's re-reading of German Idealism and "the passage from Kant to Hegel".
Degree
MA (Master of Arts)
Keywords
Yeats; Voice; Science; Žižek; Reason; Freedom; dialectics; Lacan; remainder; Kant; claustrophobia; materialism; Bishop; Hegel; literature; literariness; Kafka; void of the Other
Rights
All rights reserved (no additional license for public reuse)
Larsen, Soren Bo Aggerbeck. The Materialist Remainder. University of Virginia, English - Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, MA (Master of Arts), 2014-04-24, https://doi.org/10.18130/V3D951.