The Materialist Remainder

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".