Micro modernism: Hosts and parasites in the life of narrative.

摘要

This dissertation outlines a category of modernist text that goes to the trouble of encoding patterns at a level of conceptual resolution that requires an ultra-close reading methodology, and is thus analogous to the micro-scale of visual resolution. The dissertation offers a series of meditations on how modernists not only decided to exploit the micro-scale for artistic purposes, but succeeded in vastly transcending the intellectual "smallness" one might naturally associate with all things micro. One concept this project studies via ultra-close readings on the micro-scale in modernist works by James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov and Luis Bunuel is "parasitism." The interaction of hosts and parasites seems to have been a common preoccupation for these four artists. When the concept of parasitism is represented explicitly in the works of each of these artists, it often seems to function as an embodiment of the dynamics of intertextuality. As a result, this project in part serves to reconceptualize intertextuality in the context of parasitism's manifestations---biological, material, societal, and ideational---as conceived and represented in various ways by these four artists. Thematic appearances of both biological and material parasites function to evoke parasitism on the micro-scale so as to signify synecdochally the presence of macro-scale phenomena described as societal and ideational parasitism. Joyce, Borges, Nabokov and Bunuel, each in different ways, suggest that social systems, ideologies, and ideas are parasitic entities that proliferate through human bodies, human brains, and human-wrought artworks. These artists express a consciousness that they are "carriers" of parasitic ideas, knowledge, and cultural systems, such that the works they produce can be understood as part of a larger life-cycle in which parasitic ideational elements reproduce themselves. Since the hostartists recognize that they are parasitized by their languages, cultural references, and erudition, they also recognize that they are not fully autonomous creators. Ultimately, their clear, clinical perspective on the dynamics of intertextuality and societal relations reveals with wry irony that something civilization generally tends to elevate---art---turns out to be isomorphic with something civilization generally tends to revile---parasitism.