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A TIME TO DIE: AGING AND THE NARRATIVE IMPERATIVE
by
James Boyda
_________________________________________________________________
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
(CINEMATIC ARTS - CRITICAL STUDIES)
August 2011
Copyright 2011 James Boyda
Object Description
| Title | A time to die: aging and the narrative imperative |
| Author | Boyda, James |
| Author email | bluestoic@gmail.com;james.boyda@alumni.duke.edu |
| Degree | Doctor of Philosophy |
| Document type | Dissertation |
| Degree program | Cinema-Television (Critical Studies) |
| School | School of Cinematic Arts |
| Date defended/completed | 2011-05-23 |
| Date submitted | 2011-07-27 |
| Date approved | 2011-07-27 |
| Restricted until | 2011-07-27 |
| Date published | 2011-07-27 |
| Advisor (committee chair) | Kinder, Marsha |
| Advisor (committee member) |
Renov, Michael Lippit, Akira Mizuta Seiter, Ellen Marez, Curtis |
| Abstract | “A Time to Die: Aging and the Narrative Imperative” explores how we, as conscious beings, operate our essential and deep drive toward narrative and narrativity—what the project refers to as the narrative imperative—to conceptualize our subjective experience of time as we age. Foremost, this project considers how our impulse toward a varied narrative recourse, a desire for a range of texts and textual forms expressed through numerous medias (novels, poetry, photography, and the cinema), helps us to register ‘being’ as a distended and abstract temporal phenomenon. Consequently, this project stakes a claim in the narrative imperative as our best and most fallible means through which we attempt to negotiate, understand, and defer the finality of ‘end time’ and our predetermined mortal limit: death. ❧ Secondly, the project deals with how narratives (that which inscribe time) and images (that which resist narrative) affect very different modes of knowledge and experience in the world. To look at the temporal dimensions of narratives and images separately and then together as they meet en force in the cinema draws our attention to the dispersed character of aging identity. ❧ The through-line of the project is the active pursuit of the narrative imperative as it is and has been employed in a diversity of texts and textual forms across centuries, from the Age of Enlightenment and then forward as it expands into post-industrial time. As the narrative imperative meets with new medias and modes of representation, the project reflects upon both the limits and possibilities of cognition and reason in a visual age. At large, this work challenges conscripted ways of seeing the breadth of a life (the activity of a ‘life in review’) as any neat or uniform arc, a story that is reducible to a predictable beginning, middle, and end. |
| Keyword | cinema; narrative studies; aging; Alzheimer's; narrative theory; death; dying; comparative literature; documentary; literary studies; autobiography |
| 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-m |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Rights | Boyda, James |
| Physical access | The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the author, as the original true and official version of the work, but does not grant the reader permission to use the work if the desired use is covered by copyright. It is the author, as rights holder, who must provide use permission if such use is covered by copyright. The original signature page accompanying the original submission of the work to the USC Libraries is retained by the USC Libraries and a copy of it may be obtained by authorized requesters contacting the repository e-mail address given. |
| Repository name | University of Southern California Digital Library |
| Repository address | USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 7002, 106 University Village, Los Angeles, California 90089-7002, USA |
| Repository email | cisadmin@dots.usc.edu |
| Archival file | uscthesesreloadpub_Volume71/etd-BoydaJames-186.pdf |
Description
| Title | Page 1 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@dots.usc.edu |
| Full text | A TIME TO DIE: AGING AND THE NARRATIVE IMPERATIVE by James Boyda _________________________________________________________________ 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 (CINEMATIC ARTS - CRITICAL STUDIES) August 2011 Copyright 2011 James Boyda |
