SPATIAL CONFIGURATIONS IN THREE NOVELS: "JUDE THE OBSCURE," "THE CASTLE," AND "HET ZWARTE LICHT" (SPACE, TIME, HARDY; ENGLAND, KAFKA; CZECHOSLOVAKIA, MULISCH; NETHERLANDS)
Abstract
Literary criticism, in all its varying approaches, tries to discern in the literary work of art the interrelation of the whole and its parts. Critical approaches to the literary work of art do not differ in their aim, but rather in what parts of the literary work each approach selects for scrutiny. This work elucidates the overall structure of Hardy's Jude The Obscure, a turn-of-the-century English novel, Kafka's The Castle, a 20th-century German novel, and Harry Mulisch's Het Zwarte Licht, a contemporary Dutch novel, by focusing on the spatial relationships within these works. The structure of these novels is spatial and is not based on temporally ordered relationships. Of the three novels in this study, The Castle exhibits the clearest example of spatial form. Its structure is essentially like that of an orange, with its similar segments sequenced nebeneinander rather than nacheinander. Although Jude has the same temporal dimension as any other Bildungsroman, its design is not contained in the linear sequence of events; its design is essentially circular. In Het Zwarte Licht, the much distorted chronology that actually juxtaposes events that are temporally disparate is only one factor that achieves spatial form. The vertical relationships between time periods in Het Zwarte Licht are also depicted by the mosaic progression of images that are spatial dimensions of such time periods. Jude, The Castle, and Het Zwarte Licht depict multiple perspectives by making events in time simultaneously coexistence in space. The factor that gives the events of each novel their orientation is the place where they occur. In The Castle, the total accumulation of such places evokes a closed sense of space that suggests volume. In Jude, the accumulation of such places evokes an open sense that suggests surface; in Het Zwarte Licht, the accumulation of such places suggests self-contained spaces located on a surface.
Degree
Ph.D.
Subject Area
Comparative literature|British and Irish literature|German literature
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