Confession and the German and American Novel: Intimate Talk, Violence and Last Confession [electronic resource].

9781088315996

Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2019.

1 online resource (239 p.)

Access is available to the Yale community.

This project explores the tight yet convoluted relations between confession as idea and set of textual forms and practices and its transition from a religious to secularized, epistemological performance in key instances of the twentieth century American and German novel. In exploring the modern human condition as a confessional condition without a confessor, I consider confessional instances as thick communicative acts that establish emotional and narrative aspects of relations, generating insights about communication and the public and political roles of private and intimate talk. The chapters explore institutional, political, affective and epistemological aspects of this transition in works by William Faulkner, Franz Kafka and Robert Musil. A basic structure still present and efficacious in modern confessional instances is the substitutional structure of sacramental confession. In the traditional sacramental structure, confessing to a priest substitutes purity for fault and cleans the slate of sinfulness. In modernity, the affective aspects of confession have taken precedence. We still expect some reward in return for revealing our most private meanings; what we expect is however not salvation and absolution, but the recognition of our feelings. While the institutions that implement confession use it instrumentally, both for overt and covertgoals, the (modern) confessant's interest lies in being listened to and in involving her interlocutors in a performance that appeals to empathy. Confession in the German Pietistic traditions and their literary heirs form fascinating points of comparison with the Evangelical/Calvinist context of early America. While some confessional frameworks continue to guide and inform modern confessions, distinctive features also point to specific historical, cultural and political contexts. In the German context, the shift from religious to modernist aspects of confession is structured around a series of crises, emerging from the Reformation and the Wars of Religion to the collapse of the feudal system that challenged conceptions of authority and guilt crucial to confession's ability to produce meanings and construct relations. In Kafka, I recast a central political relation of subject to authority even as a confessional relation as modernity was reshaping itself following World War I. In emerging Puritan traditions that gradually found voices independent of their European origins, confession also came to serve epistemic functions. Some ministers administered confessions of personal experience and religious affections to screen prospective members as having saving faith. The minister Jonathan Edwards for example believed that if there is saving faith, affections become visible. Visibility for Edwards implies a direct epistemological link, not in a personal manner as in interior mystical experiences (that then looks for language to be communicated), but inherently communicable through sharing in the experience of confession. Confession challenges established poetics and requires the development of stylistic devices that attempt to capture personal and idiosyncratic meanings and minimize the mediation between language and experience. The proto-modernist concern of identifying true emotions becomes a pertinent challenge both for exploring mental states and for rendering them visible and communicable in the twentieth-century modernist novel. I especially focus on the confession of strong emotions (especially hatred) as expressed in stream of consciousness and how they are textually shaped and made visible in confessional moments. Another interpretative framework concerns the confessional space, both literally – the spatial characteristics of occurrences of intimacy and confession – and metaphorically, as the communicative and political medium for confessional performance. Language and confession depend on the physical and psychic medium, and the control of space in these instances often means the control of language as well. Retracing the intricacies of coerced introspection of trauma, Musil for instance subverts the modern notion of confession as a function of (self)-knowledge and healing as the victim is obliged to mediate linguistically his own victimization, thus not only becoming subjected to his own reluctant awareness but also actively made to construct the narrative that renders it visible and present it as an independent communicative act.

Dissertations & Theses @ Yale University.

Books / Online / Dissertations & Theses

English

January 17, 2020

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2019.

Yale University. Comparative Literature.