Date of Award

5-6-1990

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

English

Abstract

This study develops a method of reading the novel which emphasizes single-word repetitions as they rhythmically occur in the artistic text. By analyzing these word rhythms, a reader can disrupt the habitual production of the novel based on the fictional events of the story and, instead, focus on the textual events of the artistic form.Chapter Two provides the vocabulary and the critical theory which informs the other chapters. The words of Roman Jakobson, Wolfgang Iser, Roland Barthes, and Fredric Jameson provide a base for discussion of the novel as an integral structure with an unlimited semantic potential. A three-step interpretive method is presented. The steps include apprehending single-word repetitions, considering the relationship of these small synchronic units to each other and to the integrated text, and restoring the textual diachrony in a way which reveals ideology latent in the text.Chapter Three examines the significance of recurring words such as "point," "sharp," and "cleaver," as they appear in Henry James's "The Figure in the Carpet," The Golden Bowl, and The Ambassadors. The analysis reveals James's method of equating visual impressions and knowledge. For James, the perception of one's reality is a process of defining structurally active points and edges within an immanent textual field. This analysis reveals that repetition can encourage habitual perception within that field, or it can call attention to habitual perception and, in that way, dismantle it.Chapter Four presents a reading of Margaret Atwood's Surfacing. Atwood's text evokes Sigmund Freud's essay, "The Uncanny," by performing the uncanny, both as a theme and as an experience for the reader and/or the narrator. Examination of word rhythms in the text, however, demonstrates that Freudian associations, like all linguistic forms, are relational and subjective. The psychic and geographic journeys of the narrator in Surfacing are much like the reader's journey through the novel: recollection and repetition continually subsidize the text.

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