Dissertation committee:
Επιβλέπουσα: Μυρτώ Ρήγου, Καθηγήτρια, Τμήμα Επικοινωνίας και ΜΜΕ, ΕΚΠΑ
Βασίλης Καραποστόλης, Ομότιμος Καθηγητής, Τμήμα Επικοινωνίας και ΜΜΕ, ΕΚΠΑ
Κύρκος Δοξιάδης, Ομότιμος Καθηγητής, Τμήμα Πολιτικής Επιστήμης και Δημόσιας Διοίκησης, ΕΚΠΑ
Έλλη Φιλοκύπρου, Καθηγήτρια, Τμήμα Επικοινωνίας και ΜΜΕ, ΕΚΠΑ
Ελισάβετ Αρσενίου, Καθηγήτρια, Τμήμα Επικοινωνίας, Μέσων και Πολιτισμού, Πάντειο Πανεπιστήμιο
Γιάννης Σκαρπέλος, Καθηγητής, Τμήμα Επικοινωνίας, Μέσων και Πολιτισμού, Πάντειο Πανεπιστήμιο
Γιάννης Πρελορέντζος, Καθηγητής, Τμήμα Φιλοσοφίας, ΕΚΠΑ
Summary:
This doctoral thesis deals with clarifying the complex relationship between philosophy and
literature. More specifically, through the comparative study of four authors and five of their novels
(Thomas Mann-The Magic Mountain, Witold Gombrowicz-The World and Pornography, Julio
Cortazar-The Lame and Roberto Bolaño-The Wild Detectives), we examine in which way fiction
can present philosophical reflection and how its particular traits transform and modify
philosophical concepts. The central issue upon which we analyze the novels is that of subjectivity
or the self, as addressed by the phenomenological tradition, specifically Maurice Merleau-Ponty
and Paul Ricoeur. Guided by the constitutive importance they attribute to intersubjectivity and a
dialogic self that is rooted and constituted in a network of reciprocity relationships, we examine
how all this conceptualization is presented within the novels. The aim of the thesis is to
demonstrate how the work of the four authors, although heterogeneous and coming from different
cultural and historical contexts, constitutes a particular genealogy that problematizes the solid
separation of literary (and philosophical) modernism and postmodernism. In other words, it stands
"between" the - albeit weakened relative to the traditional Enlightenment centripetal subject -
subjectivism of modernism and the anti-subjectivism/humanism that governs literary
postmodernism and its philosophical connotations. The thesis is divided into four sub-sections.
Initially, we are faced with the constitutive precariousness that characterizes every comparative
project, namely the anxiety of its legitimization. Thus, in the first chapter, through a review of
literary theory and drawing mainly from philosophical hermeneutics (Gadamer, Ricoeur) and
reception theory (Iser, Hans Robert Jauss), we set out our interpretive approach and the creative
re-appropriation of novels in which we will proceed. Then, in the second chapter, we attempt to fit
the texts into their context and see how they are classified based on the modern-postmodern
dichotomy. Being aware of the critique of the Eurocentric character of the two currents by the post
colonial theory, we turn to the theories of World Literature (Casanova, Moretti), which allows
intercultural communication between different literatures. The critical distinction of center and
periphery within the World Community of Letters allows us to see how minor, peripheral
literatures can receive not only literary currents but also philosophical theories coming from the
center and embellish them with local characteristics. Thus, in the next chapter we move to a
biographical analysis of the authors, emphasizing the constitutive importance of exile in the
formation of their work and showing their established philosophical background. We also proceed
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to a formalistic, genre-centered analysis of the works. We identify commonalities that bring them
into
conversation (creative variants of the Bildungsroman, which undoubtedly has
phenomenological implications) and make them amenable to a phenomenological reading. In the
fourth and last chapter, we proceed to a close reading of the novels and a comparison of them with
the thought of Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur. Focusing on central phenomenological concepts
categories such as time, world, otherness, sense and memory, and narrativity, we see how these are
presented within the novels. We finally conclude that the texts, despite their differences, represent
subjectivity in a way similar to that of the two thinkers. However, at the same time, having formed
their own, special "literary philosophy" (Macherey), they transform and concretize the abstract
statements of philosophical discourse. Thus, the dimension of reciprocity is not exactly placed in
an intermediate place, sometimes it imperceptibly leans sometimes towards the ontological
primacy of the self (Mann), and sometimes of otherness (Bolano). The aim of the thesis, beyond
the enrichment of the already existing bibliography, related to the four writers, is to constitute a
specific credential of the ever-increasing research focus of interest both on the part of Comparative
Literature and Philosophy, in comparison, translation and analogy, as precarious ways of bridging
otherness and heterogeneity and achieving intercultural communication.
Keywords:
Philosophy, literature, self, phenomenology, comparatism, interculturality.
