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Authority and Authorship: James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men as a Work of Fictocriticism
Childs, Morgan ; Armand, Louis (advisor) ; Vichnar, David (referee)
viii Abstract This thesis uses James Agee's 1941 book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men to examine the role of so-called fictocriticism in emphasizing the immutability of an author from within a text. The thesis argues that the fictocritical text accounts for the impossibility of extricating the author from writing. Although its precursors date back several centuries- perhaps most notably to Michel de Montaigne-the term fictocriticism was coined in the mid- to late twentieth century to describe texts existing at the interstices of ostensibly fictional and factual genres of writing. Agee's text, borne out of a journalistic assignment for Fortune magazine, blends elements of long-form magazine journalism with lyric poetry with the author's famous sprawling, diaryesque prose, calling the reader to question which elements of the text are rooted in fact and which are simply the author's fabrications or, indeed, whether such a distinction can be drawn. The term can be applied only anachronistically to the 1941 book, yet as defined in these pages it is a befitting description of Agee's otherwise unclassifiable text. Fictocriticism lacks a singular definition, so the examination of Agee's Famous Men as a fictocritical work rests on a thorough revision of the term's history and its lexical implications, both of which...
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"The Grand Conspiracy: A Lacanian Reading of Contemporary Conspiracy Theories"
Bohal, Vít ; Armand, Louis (advisor) ; Vichnar, David (referee)
The numerous and varied conspiracy theories which circulate in the contemporary discourse are subject to hyperstition, insofar as they are grouped into wider, more elaborate structures. Some of them become hierarchic to such a degree, that they may, in Michael Barkun's typology, be labeled as "superconspiracy" constructs. No author is more prolific and systematic in the crafting of these constructs than the guru of anglophone conspiracy theory belief, David Icke. The work attempts to keep as its object of study the work of David Icke and his "reptoid hypothesis," as it is effectively one of the most elaborate and baroque conspiracy theories which populate contemporary political discourse. It is Icke's oeuvre which this thesis attempts to recontextualize within the confines of critical social theory and Žižekian psychoanalysis. The existence of a "paranoid style" as professed by Richard J. Hofstadter can be noted throughout the history of western culture, from the Homeric gods, scheming behind the scenes, to its modern incarnations culminating in the superconspiracy constructs of David Icke, Alex Jones, and others. The work focuses not on specific conspiracy theories and their claim to facticity, but rather attempts to trace the structural features of Icke's construct and establish their underlying...
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Street Art in Galleries: Aura, Authenticity, and The Postmodern Condition
Chiu, Ewelina ; Armand, Louis (advisor) ; Vichnar, David (referee)
This thesis examines contemporary street art and its exhibition in galleries and museums in connection with Walter Benjamin's concepts of aura and authenticity in the postmodern period. Street art is posited as a marginal art evolving out of the tradition of 1970's New York graffiti that can be made to function as a type of anti-spectacle within the spectacle of the mainstream. Situationist theory and concepts within the agenda of Unitary Urbanism (psychogeography, the dérive, and détournement) are used to evaluate contemporary street art as anti-spectacle. Photography, as a primary method of documenting street art, is considered as a mechanically reproduced medium bringing into play discourses of repetition and originality, which are in turn related back to Benjamin's concepts of aura and authenticity. Andy Warhol, his Pop Art iconography, and practice of seriality are also considered as an influence on contemporary street art's imagery and underlying practice. Warhol's promotion of an "art star" persona is also related to such contemporary street art "stars" as Banksy and Mr. Brainwash.
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The New America in Beat Literature:Spontaneous, Far Out, and All That Jazz
Novická, Tereza ; Armand, Louis (advisor) ; Vichnar, David (referee)
1 Thesis Abstract This thesis establishes the Beat Generation as part of the American literary canon despite its rejection of the literary establishment and academic criticism of its day. The portrayal of the American postwar zeitgeist in Beat literature is examined through the innovative literary techniques proposed by Jack Kerouac based on jazz characteristics. The revitalization of poetic and narrative form are identified in Allen Ginsberg's earliest published poetry, notably "Howl; for Carl Solomon" (Howl and Other Poems, 1956), Kerouac's novels On the Road and Visions of Cody and his long poem Mexico City Blues, respectively. The emergence and peak of the initially marginal Beat literary movement that gave rise to the affiliated beatnik subculture illustrates the tradition of avant-garde art becoming incorporated into establishment culture. The first chapter outlines the political and cultural hegemony of the conservative fifties in America with focus on cultural and historical aspects relevant and parallel to the surfacing and development of the Beat/beatnik counterculture, i.e. Cold War policies, McCarthyism, poetic movements, the emergence of bebop and its innovations. The second chapter provides an in- depth analysis of Beat writing in reference to jazz as subject-matter and as influence on both...
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The Avant-Postman: James Joyce, the Avant-Garde, and Postmodernism
Vichnar, David ; Armand, Louis (advisor) ; Pilný, Ondřej (referee) ; Symington, Micéala (referee)
The thesis, entitled "The Avant-Postman: James Joyce, the Avant-Garde and Postmodernism," attempts to construct a post-Joycean literary genealogy centred around the notions of a Joycean avant-garde and literary experimentation written in its wake. It considers the last two works by Joyce, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, as points of departure for the post-war literary avant-gardes in Great Britain, the USA, and France, in a period generally called "postmodern." The introduction bases the notion of a Joycean avant-garde upon Joyce's sustained exploration of the materiality of language and upon the appropriation of his last work, his "Work in Progress," for the cause of the "Revolution of the word" conducted by Eugene Jolas in his transition magazine. The Joycean exploration of the materiality of language is considered as comprising three stimuli: the conception of writing as concrete trace, susceptible to distortion or effacement; the understanding of literary language as a forgery of the words of others; and the project of creating a personal idiom as an "autonomous" language for a truly modern literature. The material is divided into eight chapters, two for Great Britain (from Johnson via Brooke-Rose to Sinclair), two for the U.S. (from Burroughs and Gass to Acker and Sorrentino) and three for France...
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The Language and Subjectivity of a Portrait
Dudešek, Štěpán ; Armand, Louis (advisor) ; Vichnar, David (referee)
In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Joyce shifts away from the traditional objective narration to a more subjective mode of writing. The reader can experience the story and the characters not only through what is actually written but also through how it is written. Joyce employs various language techniques to show different styles that create the feeling of different voices. Four major registers can be distinguished: a child's language, 19th century lyricism, the language of the Catholic school and the more complicated style of the last chapter. The prevalent techniques suggesting a child-like usage are manifested through repetition, childish expressions, use of modality and questions. Lyricism then draws on Byronic and other 19th century parallels, for instance the overuse of adjectives, elevated metaphors and frequent occurrence of standard poetic tropes. The language of the Church is reflected in sermon-like repetition, archaic words, biblical expressions and heavy diction. The language of the last chapter tries to use precise technical terms in an imitation of Thomist and other scholastic texts and manages to incorporate many of the previous elements as well, although often in a self-mocking way. All these techniques and devices in part substitute the traditional objective narrative and help to...
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The self versus the other: an exposition of an individual's condition in the technological society based on Anthony Burgess's novels A clockwork orange, M/F and The doctor is sick
Lauer, Martin ; Armand, Louis (advisor) ; Vichnar, David (referee)
Based on the overall observations of human nature as presented in Burgess's novels the most accurate assumption seems to be that man is both biologically and culturally determined to live in a community. Seclusion is punished with coerced docility to the conventions of the society, as exhibited in A Clockwork Orange and in M/F, or with total rejection by the society in The Doctor is Sick. Freedom appears to be but an apparent, illusory creation of ideology to give the subject a sense of unlimited possibilities. Everything in the Burgessian world of fiction, even the most apparent manifestations of chaos are governed by some underlying structure, which, however cannot be decoded by the main characters. Burgess presents in his novels the condition of the individual, who is being unceasingly exposed to the pressure of the other and inevitably consents to conform to the social order and reinstates his body as a new entity with new relation to the world and social structures. The system, which originally appears as the hateful agency of the other, is finally constituted in the self. Technology, as an exteriorization of human mind, becomes a medium of this transition and as such offers a threat to the individuality of every human being. The loss of individuality, nevertheless, also marks the loss of plurality,...
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Joyce against theory
Vichnar, David ; Armand, Louis (advisor) ; Procházka, Martin (referee)
This work sets out to map the genealogy of a possible location of "Joyce" and "theory" in the present-day Joyce studies, and, equally important, to think of the meanings of the copulative conjunction and which separates/unites the two. The phenomenon of the contagious "Joyce and…" to be found in a plethora of book-, and even more so, paper-titles is significant in its own right, bespeaking as it does not so much a lack of imagination on the part of the scholarly community, as a central tendency of Joyce's writing, variously described as (all-) inclusiveness. Joyce's writing process, itself based on addition and expansion, produced texts whose semantic reference, more than in the case of any other writer, is extra-textual as much as intertextual, deferring its meaning to the lived experience of a specific historical reality no more than to other texts. This tendency, in turn, solicits a repetition in the response of Joyce's readership (from the project of textual annotation of the earliest to the complex genetic examinations of avant-textes of the contemporary Joycean scholarship), whether of the individual exegete, or- again, to a degree paralleled by no other writer-of a reading group. Joyce's texts, from the floating signifiers of "paralysis," "gnomon," and "simony" in the first paragraph of 'The Sisters'...
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Rethinking the Animal: Post-Humanist Tendencies in (Post) Modern Literature
Gridneva, Yana ; Vichnar, David (advisor) ; Procházka, Martin (referee)
This thesis posits post-humanism as a philosophy that engages directly with the problem of anthropocentrism and is concerned primarily with the metaphysics of subjectivity. It studies five literary texts (James Joyce's Ulysses, Virginia Woolf's Flush, Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, Brigid Brophy's Hackenfeller's Ape and J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons) that challenge the humanistic or classical subject through critical engagement with what this subject traditionally saw as its antithesis - the animal. These texts contest various fixed assumptions about animality and disrupt the status-quo of the human. Breaking with the tradition that treats animals exclusively as a metaphor for the human, they attempt to see and understand animality outside the framework of anthropocentric suppositions. This project aims to describe the strategies these texts employ to conceptualize animality as well as the methods they apply to delineate its subversive potential and to disrupt the human- animal binary. Its theoretical framework combines the work of thinkers belonging to the new but thriving field of Animal Studies with the ideas of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. It is this project's great ambition to contribute towards the development of new post- humanist ethics defined by its...
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