Refiguring reader-response: theorising experience in postmodern fiction

dc.check.date10000-01-01
dc.check.embargoformatEmbargo not applicable (If you have not submitted an e-thesis or do not want to request an embargo)en
dc.check.entireThesisEntire Thesis Restricted
dc.check.infoIndefiniteen
dc.check.opt-outYesen
dc.check.reasonNot applicableen
dc.contributor.advisorGibbs, Alanen
dc.contributor.authorKavanagh, Ciarán
dc.contributor.funderIrish Research Councilen
dc.date.accessioned2020-02-06T11:50:07Z
dc.date.issued2019
dc.date.submitted2019
dc.description.abstractThis thesis aims towards a revitalisation and reformulation of reader-response theory, focusing on the means by which readers navigate interpretive ambiguities, what certain interpretive strategies reveal through their deployment, and how these interpretive strategies might be changed by this process. This thesis therefore regards reading and interpretation as experiences, focusing on the reader as the active agent in whom these experiences take place. Its analysis is conducted across three primary interpretive frameworks: genre, the author, and embodied experience. The thrust of this thesis is both general and specific, in that the theories explored aim towards a certain universality, while the texts explored through them are generally British and American novels in the overlapping spheres of postmodernism and science fiction: Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962), William Gibson’s “Fragments of a Hologram Rose” (1977), Joanna Russ’s We Who Are About To (1977), Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) and J.G. Ballard’s Crash (1973). Science fiction is chosen as a complementary focus due to both its special relationship to postmodernism and its particularly active and distinctive generic markers. Postmodern texts have been chosen as the primary focus due to the fact that they habitually disrupt interpretive frameworks, which tends to highlight the frameworks in question. Moreover, a focus on postmodernism not only illustrates the means by which interpretive frameworks are disrupted, but how readers manage, assimilate and, eventually, domesticate these disruptions. This thesis thereby focuses not only on the synchronic in-the-text interpretation, but also on a wider cultural, diachronic interpretation.en
dc.description.statusNot peer revieweden
dc.description.versionAccepted Version
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdfen
dc.identifier.citationKavanagh, C. 2019. Refiguring reader-response: theorising experience in postmodern fiction. PhD Thesis, University College Cork.en
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10468/9621
dc.language.isoenen
dc.publisherUniversity College Corken
dc.rights© 2019, Ciarán Kavanagh.en
dc.rights.urihttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/en
dc.subjectPostmodernismen
dc.subjectTheoryen
dc.subjectScience fictionen
dc.subjectReader-responseen
dc.subjectEnglish literatureen
dc.thesis.opt-outtrue
dc.titleRefiguring reader-response: theorising experience in postmodern fictionen
dc.typeDoctoral thesisen
dc.type.qualificationlevelDoctoralen
dc.type.qualificationnamePhDen
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