The Crossroads of the Underworld and Intertextual Practices: Carnival, Discursive Formations, and the Archaeology of Domination in Nineteenth-Century Literature. (Volumes I and II) (Dickens, Nietzsche, Balzac; England , Germany, France).

Abstract

"The journey to the l and of the dead," "the evocation of the shades," and "the descent to the underworld" represent modalities of a single story whose emergence in literary texts of the modern era is best understood as a very complex intertextual phenomenon. In this dissertation, I weave the critical discourse of the "carnivalized nether world" with Gothic and grotesquely comic literary discourses of the nineteenth century, while concomitantly subjecting the texture of this discursive fabric to the transformative mediation of the genre of the Trauerspiel. These practices yield a yet more illuminating conceptual complexity when considered in light of the traditions of the puppet theater and of pantomime. By occasioning a series of perilous encounters among various discourses (folkloric, anthropological, psychoanalytical, genealogical and archaeological, theatrical and pantomimic, and novelistic) that confront historical events and acts (revolutions and rebellions, monarchical and patriarchal restorations, political repressions, incarcerations, murders), I problematize the conventionally understood, unmediated relation that supposedly exists between modernist texts and the classical tradition of Homer, Virgil, and Dante. This constellation of encounters articulates a vibrant crossroads from which emerge heterogeneous enunciating subjects, texts, and discursive formations en proces, which I then interrogate as transpositional phenomena vis-a-vis the problematics of "difference and repetition," of autobiographical fiction, and of allegorical history and historical pensee sauvage. I explore the conceptual efficacy of those metaphors that putatively describe the intertextual universe: Carnival, apophrades, the journey to the l and of the dead, the demonic pact, the labyrinth, the network. I demonstrate that Foucault's discourse is as Gothically grotesque as Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), Great Expectations (1861), and pensee sauvage are archivally, archaeologically, and compulsively concerned with power, domination, and terroristic circuits of exchange, that La Peau de Chagrin (1831) and Great Expectations carnivalize history, desire, and familial indebtedness as Lacan carnivalizes Hamlet mourning Oedipus, that Nietzsche problematizes historical consciousness as Kreuzgang in Nachtwachen des Bonaventura (1804) and Pip in Great Expectations satirize and make deeply ambivalent the search for origins and genealogical obsessions. The underworldly locale articulated by these defamiliarizing dialogic encounters constitutes a most unusual crossroads.