Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/2440/114476
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Type: Theses
Title: This is not a love story
Author: Koromilas, Kathryn
Issue Date: 2016
School/Discipline: School of Humanities
Abstract: The work is a thesis novel combining a creative and exegetical exploration into the viability of beginning a fictional exploration into the nature of love. The work explores the potential for the novel form itself to help interrogate what love is and what love means. As the work is a poioumenon, a work about the production of itself, it also documents the author’s thinking about producing the work, the author’s experimenting with forms and voices for writing the work, and the author’s exploration of the dialogue between fiction and criticism. The current incarnation of This is Not a Love Story is that of an unfinished novel, a novel-in-progress, where the author (the autobiographical author and the fictional author) begins writing stories about love through which she hopes to discover some new philosophical understanding. The project begins ambitiously, however, the author is quickly overwhelmed by the task and, unable to find a form or voice, can only think about writing a novel about love. She therefore crosses over into the novel to become Author, the chief conceptual architect behind the novel, “the great prose form in which [is explored], by means of experimental selves (characters), some themes of existence” (Kundera, The Art 143). The novel is then also narrated by these “experimental selves.” Novelist, who is a retired philosopher, helps with the imaginative process. Woman and Man are ending their marriage and their exchanges (dialogic and epistolary) are the literary vehicles through which the investigation of love is executed. Professor offers philosophical counselling on the problem of love. Doctor offers psychological insights. Finally, Critic punctuates the text with the exegetical work in fictive form. The work is executed in three parts named after three “memos” (of the five written by Italo Calvino) on the qualities a writer should embrace. Each part is framed by a summary of the memo and a brief exegetical response to guide the reader. In “Multiplicity,” the project of discovery is introduced, but Author, overwhelmed, cannot write the story. In “Visibility,” Novelist arrives to help Author write the couple’s dialogue and get the story going. In “Exactitude,” Woman and Man, now estranged, write letters contemplating love’s nature from their own particular perspective. The fictive exegesis occurs in Critic’s commentary and Author’s reflections and functions as the metafictional voice on structure, form, content, creative process and experimental goals. Because the entire work is a discovery there is exegetical work throughout and all “experimental selves” participate in the event. The intermingling of the exegetical with the fictive thus makes this a poioumenon (Fowler 372)—a novel that is also about the production of itself. In conclusion, the work explores the viability of doing philosophy and literary theory in fictional form. Because of its intrusion into and disruption of the narrative, this requires a form that allows for more telling than showing, a form that undermines complex character creation and plot, something that contemporary theorists and the reading public often reject as exhausting and unsatisfying. This is certainly a problem for a writer producing a literary work of this sort. However, I argue that late modernist and postmodernist writers like Calvino, Kundera, Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, and Coetzee embed allegorical thinking in their work while demonstrating that such novels can be both intellectually and emotionally engaging for a reader. Finally, this hybrid form is important because it aligns itself with a growing excitement about how the humanities can bridge gaps between abstract philosophical or scientific knowledge and concrete anthropomorphic knowledge.
Advisor: Castro, Brian
Dissertation Note: Thesis (M.Phil..) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2016.
Keywords: creative writing
poioumenon
fiction
metafiction
postmodernism
modernism
philosophical fiction
love
Calvino
Beckett
Coetzee
Gaddis
Robbe-Grillet
Provenance: [Pt. 1 Novel]: This is not a love story -- [Pt. 2 Exegesis]: An Exegesis
This electronic version is made publicly available by the University of Adelaide in accordance with its open access policy for student theses. Copyright in this thesis remains with the author. This thesis may incorporate third party material which has been used by the author pursuant to Fair Dealing exceptions. If you are the owner of any included third party copyright material you wish to be removed from this electronic version, please complete the take down form located at: http://www.adelaide.edu.au/legals
DOI: 10.25909/5b9b003eb8a60
Appears in Collections:Research Theses

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04whole.pdfExegesis182.92 kBAdobe PDFView/Open
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