Non-place and Ma: The Writing of Nowhere

This thesis investigates what formal problems globalisation and the loss of anthropological place pose for the creative writer. It asks how fiction might best represent the journeys of the solitary supermodern “passenger” through an empty and mute world of transient non-places. The exegesis finds that the non-place possesses qualities analogous with sacred space, and that writing informed by the Japanese religio-aesthetic ideal ma (間) may yield sympathetic depictions and understandings of non-place that current treatments are not calibrated to register. The accompanying novel, The Diplomat, or Oblivion applies these findings to a fictional representation of supermodern passengerhood