CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2015
| Author | Dimovska, Iva |
|---|---|
| Title | Queering Time through the Myth of the Fall in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Marcel Proust's Sodom and Gomorrah |
| Summary | In my thesis I analyze the queering of time through the act of writing in the novels Finnegans Wake (1939) by James Joyce and Sodom and Gomorrah (1921/22) by Marcel Proust, focusing in particular on the role that the myth of the Fall has as a catalyst of these processes. I argue that the ambiguous intertwining of temporality and sexuality introduced by the myth of the Fall in its various versions structures the narrativization of sexuality and temporality in the two novels. Then, I address the ways in which the non-normative rendering of temporality through sexuality which this myth pattern evokes can be interpreted as queer times. In my analysis, queer times in Joyce’s and Proust’s novels emerge at those instances when nonnormative desires and practices result in the complexification of the dimensions of time, or rather, when the intersection of various time modes leads to the possibility of subverting heteronormative organization of sexuality. Looking for the connections between the conceptualizations of queer and modernist time, and their relationship to the notion of human fallibility as evoked by Fall pattern, I invoke the concept of failure that is perceived as a source for productive reinventions of both sexual and temporal experiences in the field of queer studies. Finally, this queer notion of failure is also my starting point in the analysis of the modernist anti-novel which emerges at the narrative intersection of failed sexualities and temporalities as the “queer novel”. In Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah, I argue, the inducement of temporal dissonance through queer forms of sexuality and sociability as motivated by the failure the Fall brings is done through writing. The act of writing for Joyce and Proust becomes a queer temporal project. |
| Supervisor | Vera Elisaova |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2015/dimovska_iva.pdf |
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