Connecting through distance: defamiliarisation, estrangement, and the twentieth-century anglophone novel

Thesis

This thesis argues for a critical framework that recognises the mutually reinforcing interconnection between aesthetic defamiliarisation and affective estrangement in the twentieth-century Anglophone novel. By examining the potential of defamiliarisation and estrangement as relational-connective aesthetics and affects of strangeness – alongside productive critical practices – this thesis advances that this heretofore understudied interplay uniquely gives rise to affective forms of “connecting-through-distance”. Specifically, my study attends to how the process of aesthetic making strange illustrates forms of connection representationally, among characters who are represented as estranged, but also phenomenologically, between an estranged reader and the aesthetic object. Tracing alternative contours of the estranging and the connective in twentieth-century literary criticism reveals the potential of isolation as a forger of connection, thus indicating a more complementary relationship between proximity and distance. To show the wide reach of this tendency across the twentieth century, I chart the interplay between defamiliarisation, estrangement, and connection in novels by Virginia Woolf, George Lamming, Beryl Gilroy, Christine Brooke-Rose, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Having the category of the novel as a central anchoring point, helps draw connections but also continuities among writers from different traditions and across different novelistic categories. This new way of grouping, alongside but also beyond recognisable categories of literary classification, surfaces a new tradition in the twentieth-century Anglophone novel. This tradition returns characters and readers to reconfigured forms of collective being by way of a new aesthetics of belonging achieved through forms of defamiliarisation, estrangement, and connecting-through-distance.

Authors: Vouza, I

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-eo8pyknj0
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Subjects: British literature; Twentieth century; Anglophone literature