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An Uncertain Poetics of the Intoxicated Narrative: Drugs, Detection, Denouement

Sanyal, Sudipto
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1367932599

Abstract Details

2013, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, American Culture Studies.
This dissertation attempts to examine how certain modes of intoxication touch, affect, transform and underlie the movement of narrative, which has been for the longest time our primary mode of ordering reality. Operating somewhat speculatively, this study contends that that most, if not all, narratives either function in an intoxicated manner, or desire the operations of intoxication. The articulation and untangling of the "intoxicated narrative" as I have termed it, is the central impulse of this dissertation, which aims at unravelling the constant need for and presence of intoxication that narratives carry in their very grain. To do this, I have examined what I tentatively call narratives of detection, i.e., narratives that unfold roughly in the manner of detective fiction, which I have posited as the dominant genre of modernity. These narratives — dating from the early 19th century to the early 21st — usually (though not always) include the figure of a detective or detective-substitute, operate causally and teleologically, and are apparently set within a framework of strict logic and rationality. At the same time, though, these narratives frequently destabilize, derail and subvert their own logical operations. I connect this derailment to the obscure presence of intoxication (in various forms) that inflects them constantly, because from its very inception, detective fiction appears to have had a subtext of intoxication coursing through its veins. To this end, I have explored the different ways in which intoxication appears in these otherwise reason-dominated narratives, be it as a thematic element in the story, or as a reader's intoxication with text, or the critic's intoxication with the act of analysis. Most importantly, this project attempts to liberate the glimmerings of intoxication that the narrative process itself is subject to, and to trace a connection between the intoxicated narrative and the increasingly databasal (i.e., non-narratival) logic of the internet. Is the internet the extreme logical conclusion these intoxicated narratives of detection have been wending their way towards? And is this indeed the reason these narratives have become the underlying structural obsession of postmodernity? These are some of the questions this project hesitantly seeks to locate answers to.
Ellen Berry, PhD (Advisor)
Supriya Chaudhuri, PhD (Committee Member)
Don Callen, PhD (Committee Member)
Phil Dickinson, PhD (Other)
221 p.
American Literature; American Studies; British and Irish Literature; Film Studies; Latin American Literature; Metaphysics; Modern Literature
Intoxication; drugs; narrative movement; detective fiction; Sherlock Holmes; noir; postmodernity

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Sanyal, S. (2013). An Uncertain Poetics of the Intoxicated Narrative: Drugs, Detection, Denouement [Doctoral dissertation, Bowling Green State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1367932599

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Sanyal, Sudipto. An Uncertain Poetics of the Intoxicated Narrative: Drugs, Detection, Denouement. 2013. Bowling Green State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1367932599.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Sanyal, Sudipto. "An Uncertain Poetics of the Intoxicated Narrative: Drugs, Detection, Denouement." Doctoral dissertation, Bowling Green State University, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1367932599

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

bgsu1367932599
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© 2013, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License An Uncertain Poetics of the Intoxicated Narrative: Drugs, Detection, Denouement by Sudipto Sanyal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by Bowling Green State University and OhioLINK.