Graduation Semester and Year

2015

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in English

Department

English

First Advisor

Penelope Ingram

Abstract

This study contends that sites of the phototextual--that is, narrative works that employ as their chief structural basis any photographic disposition, such as, for example, tangible portraiture and/or a literary styling that implements photographic properties or theory--may be the ideal way to encounter, experience, and respect active (meta)physical exchanges between the Self and Other in the temporal spaces of postmodern American fiction and beyond. By engaging with a pluralistic ethical paradigm comprised from the thought of philosophers like Levinas, Barthes, Derrida, Badiou, and Irigaray, this dissertation examines an array of American phototexts ascribed to the postmodern epoch. Thusly, this very pluralistic inclusivity--operating meta-ethically--is responsible to both a proximity and a difference, and such divergent visions, the traces of such di-visions, inform this analytic with the phototextual. Ultimately, it is through the lens of such aforementioned thinkers, that I posit these phototexts act as the premier ethical conduit for responsibility to the Other, even in spite of the eruptive tendencies rendered by events such as 9/11, thus concluding that such visually-anchored literary discourses can offer both a present and futural ethical model spanning any cultural milieu.

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities | English Language and Literature

Comments

Degree granted by The University of Texas at Arlington

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