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SADNESS AFTER POSTMODERNISM:
MOOD IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION
by
Marija Cetinic
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMPARATIVE LITERATURE)
August 2010
Copyright 2010 Marija Cetinic
Object Description
| Title | Sadness after postmodernism: mood in contemporary fiction |
| Author | Cetinic, Marija |
| Author email | cetinic@usc.edu; marija.cetinic77@gmail.com |
| Degree | Doctor of Philosophy |
| Document type | Dissertation |
| Degree program | Comparative Literature |
| School | College of Letters, Arts and Sciences |
| Date defended/completed | 2010-05-24 |
| Date submitted | 2010 |
| Restricted until | Restricted until 02 Aug. 2012. |
| Date published | 2012-08-02 |
| Advisor (committee chair) | Lippit, Akira Mizuta |
| Advisor (committee member) |
Lloyd, David Norindr, Panivong |
| Abstract | My dissertation project is a comparative study of very recent Anglo-American and post-Yugoslav literary texts that address traumatic experience through experimental forms. What interests me in these texts is the manner in which they treat affect as a form of circulation, rather than as the emotional experience of a particular character. By “affect as a form of circulation,” I mean that the feeling of emotions is detached from individuals and thereby becomes the basis of an impersonal distribution of collective experience. The texts that I am studying—including works by Dubravka Ugrešić, David Markson, Salvador Plascencia, Ben Marcus, and Aleksandar Hemon—are characterized by an ambiguous atmosphere of diffuse and unlocatable “sadness”—a tonal quality that emerges as much from their formal properties as from their content. I argue that the new forms and narrative procedures by which these texts transmit the emotional residue of traumatic experience break down the constitution of individual characters and privilege the circulation of affect as a form of exchange and of community.; The dissertation is particularly invested in the politics and the ethics of these experimental literary texts. Trauma theory—as a way of engaging personal and collective experiences of historical catastrophe—has traditionally operated within a psychoanalytic framework that stresses the pathology of the individual subject. Taking up recent work in political theory, my project aims to transform this framework in order to address the contemporary political conditions of globalization, attempting to account for the new forms of transmission and relationality that transnational capitalism has created. My argument is that an adequate understanding of how historical catastrophe functions in this political climate requires a study of how the affective flows that trauma opens create collectivities that are not predicated upon identity categories, and which resist the hegemony of global capitalism even as they are enabled by it. If the operations of capitalism break down national boundaries in order to facilitate the exchange of commodities, my project explores how this opening of transnationality enables other forms of transaction that are not subsumed by the imperatives of the market.; The texts that I study foreground “sadness” as a global condition that circulates as an obstruction underneath or alongside the networks of capital. Sadness is, I argue, the mood of the contemporary fiction I study here. Each chapter of my dissertation focuses on a different mode of such circulation in these texts: archivization, technological connectivity, narration, and the ethics of passivity. The theoretical framework of the study engages extensively with the work of numerous philosophers and theorists, including Jean-Luc Nancy, Gilles Deleuze, Baruch Spinoza, Brian Massumi, Fredric Jameson, and Jacques Derrida. Overall, “Sadness After Postmodernism” aims to make a significant intervention in the manner in which we think about the relation between literature and affect in the context of contemporary politics. |
| Keyword | affect; trauma; mood; contemporary fiction |
| Language | English |
| Part of collection | University of Southern California dissertations and theses |
| Publisher (of the original version) | University of Southern California |
| Place of publication (of the original version) | Los Angeles, California |
| Publisher (of the digital version) | University of Southern California. Libraries |
| Provenance | Electronically uploaded by the author |
| Type | texts |
| Legacy record ID | usctheses-m3227 |
| Rights | Cetinic, Marija |
| Repository name | Libraries, University of Southern California |
| Repository address | Los Angeles, California |
| Repository email | http://www.usc.edu/isd/libraries/services/ask_a_librarian/email/ |
| Filename | etd-Cetinic-3910 |
| Archival file | uscthesesreloadpub_Volume44/etd-Cetinic-3910.pdf |
Description
| Title | Page 1 |
| Full text | SADNESS AFTER POSTMODERNISM: MOOD IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION by Marija Cetinic A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (COMPARATIVE LITERATURE) August 2010 Copyright 2010 Marija Cetinic |
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