Becoming Nothing, Becoming Everything: Quantum Posthumanism and the Writing of J.M. Coetzee

Drawing on both posthumanism and quantum theory, this thesis introduces what I am calling a framework of quantum posthumanism. Based on the epistemic and ontic aspects of entanglement, nonseparability, and becoming, and a reworking of ideas of agency and objectivity, the thesis embarks on an interdisciplinary (entangled) reading of J. M. Coetzee’s texts that seeks to move beyond the current historicist framing of his work. Utilising some of the key concepts and laws from various quantum interpretations, it seeks to show how such concepts effectively deconstruct boundaries between self/other, human/animal, animate/inanimate, body/environment and therefore, by extension to the literary, between fact/fiction, story/history, external/internal, and ultimately author/character/reader/text. The thesis approaches Coetzee’s writing by focussing on the centrality in his fiction of becoming, not only on the level of characters, but also in terms of the agencies of meaning within the literary event (the transactions amongst reader, author, and text). Quantum posthumanism deconstructs the fixed role and positionality of the external observer/Cartesian subject, represented as the reader/author outside the literary event. It proposes the term phenomenon of meaning to address the entanglement of reader/text/author that become part of the meaning they claim to own. The thesis also challenges traditional uses of concepts such as time, linearity, and origin with quantum posthumanist ideas such as multiplicity, emergence, contingency, and parallelism. Finally, through the framework of quantum posthumanism, the thesis hopes to support the argument for the entanglement of human knowledge and the detrimental illusion of the divide between the humanities and the sciences by demonstrating and exemplifying how inevitably entangled human knowledge is

Everything is fiction: an experimental study in the application of ethnographic criticism to modern atheist identity

This Thesis is an experiment. Within its pages a number of stories will be told, the foci of which will apply a particular methodology—what I call ‘Ethnographic Criticism’—to the examination of a specific concept: modern Atheist identity. First, it will introduce Ethnographic Criticism as a new and significant style of literary analysis aimed at reading fictional texts in order to generate anthropological insights about how particular identities are formed. Second, it will use this new means of criticism to discuss and evaluate how Atheist identity might be perceived as being constructed within a dialectic between seemingly exclusive forms of Theism and Atheism. Ethnographic Criticism exists at the nexus between fiction and ethnography, and its genesis derives from three foundational pillars: ethnographic construction, Ethical Criticism, and discourse analysis. In the three Chapters of Part One, each of these pillars will be established, both exegetically and critically. This examination will play a key role in explicating how the ‘made-up’ qualities of fiction might be converted into the ‘made-from’ qualities of ethnography. Additionally, these Chapters will reveal the roots of Ethnographic Criticism through an analysis of discourses dealing with the ‘literary turn’ in the theory of anthropology, how Ethical Criticism associates fictional character development with identity construction, and the anthropological benefits of discourse analysis. As a case study, I will apply Ethnographic Criticism to an analysis of Atheist identity construction. Due to the combination of a relative absence of existing ethnographic sources on the subject, an ambiguous academic discourse on the definition of the term, and a paucity of cultural units or ‘tribes’ of Atheists in which to observe, my use of Ethnographic Criticism will attempt to fill a methodological lacuna concerning the study of Atheist identity. Thus, in Part Two, I will focus on two fictional texts by the contemporary English novelist Ian McEwan: Black Dogs (1992) and Enduring Love (1997). In this analysis, not only will McEwan’s fictional characters be treated as if they are ‘real,’ historical individuals, they will be evaluated through an anthropological lens in order to isolate within their interactional validations a means to understand how Atheists define themselves via dialectical communication. In this way, and in both explicating and reflecting upon this approach, my experimental analysis will identify a number of dynamic, yet no less precarious, outcomes that might surface from reading fictional texts as if they were authoritatively equal to ethnographic ones

Mirrors of the past : versions of history in science fiction and fantasy

The primary argument of this Thesis is that Science Fiction (SF) is a form of Historical Fiction, one which speculatively appropriates elements of the past in fulfilment of the ideological expectations of its genre readership. Chapter One presents this definition, reconciling it with some earlier definitions of SF and justifying it by means of a comparison between SF and the Historical Novel. Chapter One also identifies SF's three modes of historical appropriation (historical extension, imitation and modification) and the forms of fictive History these construct, including Future History and Alternate History; theories of history, and SF's own ideological changes over time, have helped shape the genre's varied borrowings from the past. Some works of Historical Fantasy share the characteristics of SF set out in Chapter One. The remaining Chapters analyse the textual products of SF's imitation and modification of history, i.e. Future and Alternate Histories. Chapter Two discusses various Future Histories completed or at least commenced before 1960, demonstrating their consistent optimism, their celebration of Science and of heroic individualism, and their tendency to resolve the cyclical pattern of history through an ideal linear simplification or 'theodicy'. Chapter Three shows the much greater ideological and technical diversity of Future Histories after 1960, their division into competing traditional (Libertarian), Posthistoric (pessimistic), and critical utopian categories, an indication of SF's increasing complexity and fragmentation

2017-2018 Undergraduate Bulletin

https://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/bulletins/1073/thumbnail.jp

2018-2019 Undergraduate Bulletin

https://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/bulletins/1076/thumbnail.jp

2015-2016 Catalog

This catalog lists available courses for the 2015-2016 term.https://crossworks.holycross.edu/course_catalog/1010/thumbnail.jp

2019-2020 Bulletin

https://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/bulletins/1077/thumbnail.jp