The gesture in narrative, art, and theory: Diderot, Jean Paul, and Sterne in the context of an ongoing debate between verbalists and visualists

Ozlem Ogut, Purdue University

Abstract

This dissertation aimed to demonstrate the ways in which visual and discursive modes interact with one another in Jean Paul's Flegeljahre, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and Denis Diderot's Le Neveu de Rameau so as to facilitate pluralistic and dynamic modes of reading and viewing, and thereby challenge monolithic or reductionist approaches to visual and verbal representation. The prominent scholars of text-image relationship, and poststructuralist semiotics have discussed how logocentrism, imagocentrism, and ocularcentrism has been/can be made to cooperate in an attempt to render the universe intelligible and transparent, and to represent a strictly ordered, and hierarchically categorized universe, with its clear demarcations between subject and object, inside and outside, body and soul, reality and fiction. Gestures and speech as they are thematized in the three works accentuate the elusiveness and multi-facetedness of each other, instead of reducing them linearly to pre-established meanings. Narrative language ‘gestures’ in the sense that it stimulates the participatory involvement of the readers, and fosters ongoing semiotic processes. The shifting contextuality and positionality of linguistic elements problematize the notion of language as a static system with fixed, discrete categories, independent of its transmission mechanisms. The metaphoric and dialogic aspects of narrative trigger multiple images which are interrelated, interinfluential, and which constantly transform one another. They can be conceived of as thought-processes that never attain finality. They are always contingent, and in a non-resolvable tension, a process that does not lend itself to fixation, arrestation, or categorial abstraction. Thus, the interaction of text and image in Jean Paul's Flegeljahre, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and Denis Diderot's Le Neveu de Rameau open insights into new modes of textuality and visuality, which cannot be restricted to logocentric or ocularcentric frameworks.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Allert, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Comparative literature|Germanic literature|Romance literature|British and Irish literature

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