Strange Characters: Dialogic Selves and Cosmopolitanism in Carl van Vechten's Peter Whiffle

IF 0.2 3区 文学 0 LITERATURE Comparative Critical Studies Pub Date : 2020-11-03 DOI:10.3366/ccs.2020.0379
Laura Scuriatti
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Abstract

Carl Van Vechten's novel Peter Whiffle. His Life and Works (1922) is a work of ‘autobiografiction’, merging biography and autobiography, and drawing attention to the fictional elements of life-writing. It problematizes authorship and posits selfhood as a dialogic, polyphonic construct, dependent on the strategies, content, and structure of narrative. The article explores the complex intertextual presence of George Moore's Confessions of a Young Man in Van Vechten's novel: they both propose different aspects of a similar story of two friends with cosmopolitan and refined tastes, whose subjectivities are mediated by constant references to other literary characters, and who depend on one another's narratives to have access to their own selves, or at least to become authors of works of art about themselves. Drawing on Adriana Cavarero's and Lucia Boldrini's studies on auto/biographical selves, and on Rebecca Walkowitz's and Homi Bhabha's theories of cosmopolitanism, the article argues that Peter Whiffle's emphasis on dialogic subjectivity questions the notion of authorship and creates a problematic, parodic form of cosmopolitanism. This type of cosmopolitanism does not contribute to any productive experiences of self-knowledge or of knowledge of the foreign ‘other’, but rather asks crucial questions on the very possibility of these experiences.
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奇怪的人物:对话塞尔维斯与世界主义
卡尔·范·维登的小说《彼得·惠弗》。他的《生活与作品》(1922)是一部“自传小说”的作品,融合了传记和自传,并引起了人们对生活写作中虚构元素的关注。它将作者身份问题化,并将自我定位为一种对话的、复调的结构,依赖于叙事的策略、内容和结构。本文探讨了乔治·摩尔的《一个年轻人的自白》在范小说中复杂的互文存在:他们都提出了一个相似故事的不同方面,讲述了两个具有世界性和高雅品味的朋友,他们的主体性是通过不断引用其他文学人物来调节的,他们依靠彼此的叙述来接触自己,或者至少成为关于自己的艺术作品的作者。本文借鉴了Adriana Cavarero和Lucia Boldrini对自我/传记自我的研究,以及Rebecca Walkowitz和Homi Bhabha的世界主义理论,认为Peter Whifle对对话主体性的强调质疑了作者的概念,并创造了一种有问题的、戏仿的世界论形式。这种类型的世界主义并没有促进任何关于自我认识或对外国“他者”的认识的富有成效的体验,而是对这些体验的可能性提出了至关重要的问题。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
0.40
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0.00%
发文量
29
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