| dc.description |
This thesis is composed of a critical component, “Portrayals of Ludwig Wittgenstein in Contemporary Western Novels”, which develops the genre of Wittgenstein Fiction as coined by Marjorie Perloff by identifying motifs and subject matter in three contemporary novels, and a creative component, Nakadai, which, going on the findings in the critical component, is an exemplary contribution to the genre of Wittgenstein Fiction.
The critical component identifies three novels which feature fictionalized versions of Ludwig Wittgenstein and proceeds to analyse these novels using secondary texts. By doing this I move closer to an approximation of what Wittgenstein Fiction is. The findings of the critical component are that Wittgenstein Fiction can be defined in three ways: a genre whose use of an intellectual epic form simultaneously evades and satirizes the empirical world; a creative non-fiction genre in which conflict arises from that necessary disharmony between the author’s forms of life and empirical reality; a genre which uses minimalist forms to create satires of contemporary universities and research institutions. I conclude that all three novels feature satirical conflict between the empirical world and the way in which the author presents that world; furthermore, that all three novels feature biographical conflict between the author and the empirical Wittgenstein.
The creative component, Nakadai, is a contemporary literary novel with Speculative and Sci-Fi elements, which constitutes an exemplary addition to the Wittgenstein Fiction genre. The novel follows a gay Japanese linguistics professor called Hiroshi Nakadai who lives in a parallel world. During his PhD he makes a Faustian pact with an intergalactic being called the Great Word who forces Nakadai, and his tutor Professor Mutton, to construct a Word Machine: a device which will allow the Great Word to enter Nakadai’s reality. The novel is told from the perspective of Nakadai’s PhD student, Nicola Hillam-Joiner, and several other characters. This alters the subtle epistolary structure used in Correction and the diary-like structure used in Wittgenstein Jr. by adding more than two narrative voices, as well as dialogue within those narrative voices. This makes the novel about authorship. Nakadai also takes the cultural/religious elements of The World As I Found It and turns them into discourses on Englishness, nationality and Catholicism—though usually seen from the Japanese perspective. |
|