Strategies of Inwardness: Narrative Apprehension and the Modernist Quest for the Locus of Authenticity offers an innovative reading of works by three seminal European Modernist authors: Joseph Conrad, Italo Svevo, and Andre Gide. My research uses both a narratological and a reception approach in order to synthesize the application of narrative strategy as form (production) and the nature of that form for readers (reception). The result is a discovery of how the reader and narrative relationships within these texts work to resignify complex patterns around understanding, thus denying the authority of historico-notional assumptions in relation to thematic topics such as imperialism, Freudian psychoanalysis, and representational art.
Disseratation Committee: Robert Shulman, Jane Brown, Claudio Mazzola