Fragments of the archaic: Modernist short fiction and structuralist alterity.

Fragments of the Archaic revises contemporary cultural and literary theory's concept of a normative and ossified symbolic order by staging the symbolic as, on the contrary, dynamic, epiphanic, and fragmentary, and thus bordering always on the archaic, the psyche's earliest organizations of drives. Arguing that structuralism retains an archaic and dynamic systematicity that is often collapsed and forgotten in current theory, I use the work of Michele Montrelay (who theorizes the archaic not as dyadically opposed to the symbolic or as fusional), to frame discussions in which I place structuralist formulations of the symbolic next to the epiphanic modernist short fiction of Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Structuralism's seizures of systematicity and modernist epiphanies, because they hinge on moments that emphasize organization over signification, reveal an archaic mode as the ground of possibility for the symbolic. I read both structuralism and modernisnism as participating in a project of describing the point at which orders, of signs or drives, in bordering on each other, seize themselves in an aperception. Focusing on those aspects of structuralist psychoanalytic and anthropological theory that are thought to cast some as Others, I reread the concepts of the phallus, the symbolic, the bar, and the real, as repressions that organize and that can be reinterpreted, as centres that, when they are aware of themselves as functions, touch on the archaic and transform, and when they remain inattentive to their archaic dimension, find concrete Others to reject and expel.Ph.D.English literatureLanguageLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsModern languageModern literatureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/131107/2/9825355.pd