Narrative Disorientation and Beckett's Bureaucratic Space

IF 0.3 4区 文学 0 LITERARY THEORY & CRITICISM
B. McAllister
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

This essay investigates political implications of narrative space in Samuel Beckett's closed-space narratives, arguing for a narratological understanding of these spatial politics. It focuses on Imagination Dead Imagine, a text that radically disorients reader engagement with narrative space. In this text, Beckett collides bureaucratic narrative logic, which compartmentalises and accounts for all details of narrative space, against trenchantly anti-bureaucratic grammar, in which sentence structure disrupts and undermines spatial ordering. This dialectical relationship between bureaucratic narrative voice and unstable grammar critiques the logic that, in Giorgio Agamben's biopolitical sense, defines the bureaucratic nation-state. By associating narrative space and its inhabiting characters with the bureaucratic logic of modernity, Imagination Dead Imagine enacts and examines what Agamben calls the state of exception, inscribing politics onto the bare life of characters. While the text avoids direct reference to these historical conditions, its structure performs and resists the politics implicit in those conditions.
叙事迷失与贝克特的官僚空间
本文探讨了塞缪尔·贝克特封闭空间叙事中叙事空间的政治含义,并提出了对这些空间政治的叙事学理解。它关注的是想象力,死亡的想象,这是一个从根本上使读者迷失在叙事空间中的文本。在这篇文章中,贝克特将官僚主义叙事逻辑与鲜明的反官僚主义语法进行了碰撞,前者将叙事空间的所有细节都划分开来并加以解释,后者的句子结构破坏了空间秩序。这种官僚叙事声音与不稳定语法之间的辩证关系批判了阿甘本生命政治意义上定义官僚民族国家的逻辑。通过将叙事空间及其居住的人物与现代性的官僚逻辑联系起来,《想象死去的想象》制定并审视了阿甘本所谓的例外状态,将政治烙印在人物的赤裸生活上。虽然文本避免直接提及这些历史条件,但其结构表现并抵制了这些条件中隐含的政治。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
0.20
自引率
0.00%
发文量
33
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