From the body to language: life and mind in literature and film from the Modernist Era to the present
Abstract
My dissertation focuses on the ways in which twentieth-century literature intersects with theories of living systems and biosemiotics, the biological capacity for meaning making. My critical readings highlight the process of subjective emergence in Beckett, the drawing out of a world in Woolf, a dynamic, embodied socio-political subjectivity and resistance in Wright and Ellison, and the parallel emergence of art and life in the films of David Lynch. These works present a step-by-step reading that grounds subjectivity in biological processes and demonstrate that an understanding of the coemergence of subject and world, and by extension meaning-making, is a wholly embodied phenomenon. Reading with a focus on the biological foundations of meaningmaking supplemented by the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze at once dissolves the partition between the individual and the objective world so often identified in the literature as well as mobilizes these texts in order to draw out a theory of biosemiotics that is as much aesthetic as it is scientific.
Degree
Ph. D.