Posted Date: Tuesday, October 24, 2006 - 1:58 AM
Title: Now and at the Hour of our Death: The Afterlife in Twentieth-Century Fiction
Chapter 1: No title as yet...hilariously punny suggestions always welcome
This intro has two arguments: firstly, I'm discussing Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette and Close to me & Closer...the Language of Heaven, and how she argues narrative can't represent the afterlife; secondly, I'm looking at the distinction between anthropocentric and theocentric ideas about heaven (ie. ones which are quite specific and often sentimental, and ones which are quite vague and kind of minimalist) and seeing how this actually means narrative vs.poetry because a time element means things have to happen there.
Chapter 2: Dead Endings: Making Meaning from the Afterlife
This is expanded from my triumphant first paper at our superfun day of mini-conference last year. It's about reading and the afterlife, and whether you can only understand a book if you project yourself to a kind of afterlife position at the end of it. This is kind of theory-heavy but basically my argument is that the "anticipation of retrospection" you use to read with relies on a kind of suspended time after it, like eternity, where you can put all the temporally-located bits of the plot together. Then I cunningly attach this anticipation of retrospection idea to the idea of memento mori, making it an odd kind of process which forces you to remember the future. Then I look at Muriel Spark's Memento Mori and Italo Calvino's Mr Palomar as a closing of the hermeneutic circle back to how this narrative-being-read-like-the-afterlife is like living-in-anticipation-of-death.
Chapter 2b: Hopelessly floating half a chapter about Sartre's Nausea and Pincher Martin by William Golding, which seems to have no chance of intergrating into this section. There might be some hope of doing like a 7000 word segue-chapter from reading/living/narrating connections but I need to have a think - I'll never spin it out to a full chapter really.
Chapter 3: Aftereffects: Narrative Restrospection
In this chapter I'm talking about Muriel Spark's (again - there's more to come as well) The Driver's Seat, Ali Smith's Hotel World and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. This is about tense and narration and retrospection and cause and effect. I'm comparing the strange temporality of the memento mori with the idea of predestination which is a figure for distorted cause-and-effect in GR. All this while refusing any gratuitous play with the preterite tense and preterition. Oh yeah, and here's where I reference Desperate Housewives.
Chapter 4: Transparent Hearts and Ghostwords: Omniscience and the Afterlife
This is about Muriel Spark's The Comforters,William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. The transparent hearts are from St Augustine ("the hearts of all will be transparent, manifest, luminous in the perfection of love") which was just too similar to Dorrit Cohn's Transparent Minds to pass up. This is also about telepathy and nineteenth-century spiritualism from Derrida via Nichola Royle, which brings me to writing about The Lovely Bones as an inheritor of the Victorian posthumous novel.
Chapter 5: okay this is where it starts to get sketchy...
this is going to be a bit of a theoretical one again about postmodernism and the idea of post- in general. I'm writing a paper for a conference about Derrida's Archive Fever which might also contribute to this bit. But yeah, sketchy. Jeremy Tambling's Becoming Posthumous is part of the basis for this whole area.
Chapter 6: New Maps of Hell (title ripped off from Kingsley Amis' book about sci fi)
I'm going to write some things about space and architecture and mapping (from Jameson) and how you can see more than one space at once: whether this is like eternity and omniscience and afterlife retrospection and maps and postmodern experience in general. This links to the earlier chapter where I talked about spatial form model for reading. Mainly because Will Self does books with maps in. And Alasdair Gray goes here too.
Chapter 8: Dead Bored (sorry)
This is a chapter about repetition in narrative from Genette on iterative narrative in Proust. I'm going to write about boredom and repetition in Sartre and Beckett and using this strategy for representing infinity. This is also where I'll talk about Flann O'Brien.
Chapter 9: Time Reversals
This is talking about narrative representing eternity via time reversing, repetition implied by playback and linking back to my cause-and-effect chapter before. Martin Amis's Time's Arrow and Slaughterhouse 5 here as well.
Chapter 10: I'd like to write something about American apocalypse vs European posthumousness - Baudrillard saying something about how everything has already happened in America, apocalypse past. This would be cool because it wouldn't be anticipation of the end, but retrospection only.
FIN!
edit: have found lots of horrendous spelling errors, but I'm starting to hate this evil document (it's telling me I'm not doing enough thesis work!) so I refuse to look at it until January: do not judge me on my sketchy thesis plan!
