Traumatic Familiarity: Fictions and Theories of Community in the Eighteenth Century

<p>This dissertation addresses a crisis of modern collective identity by employing a dialectic of philosophical and literary "realisms." While both philosophical and novelistic discourses are premised on twin gestures (aspiration for correspondence between representation and reality), they arrive at radically different claims about how rational, self-governing individuals constitute - and are constituted by - "legitimate" social bodies. By foregrounding the internal complexity and empirical immersion of "real" individuals negotiating "realistic" social encounters, eighteenth-century novelists engage in a sustained critique of emerging concepts of "legitimate" community. Penetrating even the most basic foundations of social knowledge, such as the capacity to distinguish between "familiar" and "stranger," for example, they expose an unsettling porosity that fundamentally undermines critical assumptions of stable, legitimate social organization, such as consent, the "natural" primacy of the family, and "natural sociability." Thus the novel, as the following chapters argue, a popular literary form derogatorily associated (in direct contrast to works of political philosophy) with women, the young, and the "idle," facilitates critical engagement with historically privileged discourses about social and political legitimacy. </p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

The Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York

Year dc:date.available

2015

Author dc:creator

• Dicus, Andrew Scott

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Nancy Yousef

• Philosophy

Repository record dc:identifier

https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/905

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:academicworks.cuny.edu:gc_etds-1919