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"Without tearing the web apart": Pierre, The Marble Faun, and aesthetics of network

University of British Columbia

In this thesis, I suggest Actor-Network-Theory as a methodology for aesthetic analysis that is faithful to the phenomenology of the aesthetic. With ANT, I examine the aesthetic landscapes of Herman Melville's Pierre; or the Ambiguities and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun: or, the Romance of Monte Beni, two works of American literature with notoriously peculiar aesthetic, and discover in the process that new conclusions about the texts can be drawn when we focus less on aesthetic judgments and pay more attention to the particulars of each text. What I find in the two texts are networks, emerging from connections between and among human and nonhuman actors, in which subjects are thoroughly enmeshed. In Pierre, the implication of the involvement in networks is the loss of subjective autonomy; in The Marble Faun, the consequence is the evaporation of the illusion that we can know the world.

Text

2016-07-21

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/58513

English

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/