Date of Award

11-5-2002

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

First Advisor

David F Marshall

Abstract

This creative dissertation is a multifaceted meditation on technological civilization circa 2000, from the imagined perspective o f an archaeologist/linguist writing some eight hundred years in the future, as well as his grandson writing two generations later. The Andes-born protagonist looks back on a career during which he has led efforts to reconstruct the English language and the cultural ambience o f a dimly remembered and heavily mythologized “Dosmil” (a contraction of Spanish “Dos Mil” for the year 2000), beginning with excavation of newspaper and magazine fragments found in the one-time English speaking country o f Belize. In a world organized on an anarchic, panoptic basis with forgotten origins in the Dosmil-era Internet, he teams up with Basque collectives just redeveloping space travel based on new, gentle forms o f propulsion acceptable to a humanity still deeply scarred by a sequence o f early-twenty-first century cataclysms stemming from technology run rampant. As the first linguist to visit the Moon, he finds in the remains o f a Chinese base at the southern Lunar pole a priceless cache o f perfectly preserved English language books, especially a single shelf o f titles, all o f which include the word “dick,” apparently collected as a joke by some long-forgotten taikonaut. One of these comes to energize and redirect the protagonist’s entire linguistic quest: Moby Dick. In form, the dissertation is an imaginary future Festschrift bringing together the protagonist’s work, along with some of his grandson’s writings and assorted commentary In by various linguists and other scholars, one hundred years after his successful organization of a return to a Luna long uninhabited. Intertwined in the Festschrift with record o f his youth and o f his later public achievements are writings which the protagonist found too sensitive to release during his lifetime, but which are much appreciated for their vision a century after his arrival on the Moon, as a humankind rapidly expanding into the far reaches o f the solar system begins to grapple with dilemmas not unlike those o f the now far less mythologized Dosmil.

Download

Share

COinS