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UVM Theses and Dissertations

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Format:
Print
Author:
Muhlstock, Rae Leigh
Dept./Program:
English
Year:
2007
Degree:
MA
Abstract:
In both The Role of the Reader and The Limits of Interpretation, Umberto Eco talks about the "open work," the set of texts that contain, "among its major analyzable properties, certain structural devices that encourage and elicit interpretive choices" (Limits 50). In the presence of choice, the reader's subjectivity opens the text up to many, maybe numerous, interpretive possibilities, and in so doing implicates the reader in the generation of the text itself.
This definition informs my own definition of the "aporetic novel," a subset of the genre of the novel that relies on the experience of the interpretive impasse in its creative structuring of the conflict of understanding. Like Eco's open work, the aporetic novel allows readers multiple ways in, but, like the original Greek that gives it its name, allows "no way out." The aporetic novel instead traps the reader in a reciprocal cycle of hermeneutic inquiry.
My study of aporia in the contemporary novel centers around the hermeneutic potential of Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, which uses three meta-fictional interpretive impasses-those of the writer, the reader, and the text itself-to convey to the reader the affects, limitations, and freedoms of their own acts of interpretation as they arise not just in House of Leaves but in all of literature.
The aporia at the center of House of Leaves and the other works that I discuss structures the novel's plot and character development, and more importantly, also structures the reader's interpretation of the work (when the reader is able to interpret the work) as a coming-to-understanding of both the narrative and the reader's own subjectivity. Through this brand of structure, the novels that I have brought together in this corpus allow the reader the rare opportunity to witness those acts of interpretation that commonly occur beyond immediate perception, allowing the reader the occasion to gain some understanding of the ways in which we, as interpreters of literature and life, tend to understand.