Thomas Hardy as a threshold figure and crisis of representation in his poetry—a deconstructionist reading

Download

index.pdf

Date

2015

Author

Özgür, Nilüfer

Metadata

Show full item record

Item Usage Stats

437
views

108
downloads

Thomas Hardy is a poet who produced most of his poetry in the Victorian age but published it largely in the twentieth century when the literary sensibility was predominantly modern. Although Hardy is not conventionally considered a Modernist poet, he shares with Modernists an element that can be referred to as the linguistic crisis by which they try to get over the sense of anxiety against the backdrop of a chaotic world and problematized language. The forerunner of Deconstructionism, Derrida, exposes a long established history of logocentric thinking, which has continually been moving between binary oppositions and Platonic dualities. Derrida simply puts forward the idea that there is no logos, no origin, and no centre of truth. The centre is always somewhere else; he identifies this as a “free play of signifiers.” Consequently, the anxiety of the poet with modern sensibility to find a point of reference inevitably results in a “crisis of representation,” or, in a problematic relation between language and truth, signifier and signified. This crisis can be observed in Hardy’s poetry, too. For this purpose, this research focuses on four key concepts in Hardy’s poetry that expose this problematic relationship between language and truth: his agnosticism, his concept of the self, his language and concept of structure, and his concept of time and temporality. These aspects are explored in the light of Derrida’s Deconstructionism with reference to poems by Hardy which heralded the Modernist crisis of representation.

Subject Keywords

Deconstruction, Deconstruction

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12619649/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/25365

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Shakespeare's Hamlet as a precursor of the Theatre of the Absurd Doğan, Buket; Norman, Ünal; Department of English Literature (2008) Being regarded as a dramatist of all times, Shakespeare and his work is studied with a modern view point by many critics. Every historical period finds in him what it is looking for and what it wants to see. Shakespeare is part of a modern tradition trying to mirror human psychology and condition in all its absurdity. The innovations that the theatre of the Absurd has brought to the stage not only provide an influence for the works of the later generations but also, they make it possible to look back at the...
Nostalgia and style: the life and works of Abdulhak Sinasi Hisar Tanvir Wasti, Syed (Informa UK Limited, 2020-06-01) Abdulhak Sinasi Hisar, a famous writer whose active career may be said to have spanned over the first 60 years of the 20th century, is celebrated within Turkey for his inimitable prose style, steeped in nostalgia and expressed with great elegance and charm. His three short novels, based both on his childhood memories of life and on depicting characters he observed in an Ottoman capital that once had a sparkling civilization, and his biographies of major writers who were his friends, along with his essays on...
The Voice of the Imperial in an Anti-Imperialist Tone: George Orwell’s Burmese Days Ağın, Başak (2012-09-01) First published in 1934, George Orwell’s Burmese Days, which can be read as an example of both descriptive realism and fictional realism, is considered to be a colonial example of British literature because of its publication date. However, based on the personal experience of the author as an imperial officer in Burma, the novel has an anti-imperialist tone, which can also make it possible to read it through postcolonial eyes. As a result, the novel stands as an example of ambivalence since it has both the ...
The economic adventures of Robinson Crusoe : an institutionalist critique and reinterpretation Karagöz, Ufuk; Özveren, Eyüp; Department of Economics (2011) In 1719, Daniel Defoe wrote his first fiction The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe without knowing that the protagonist of the novel, Robinson Crusoe, would be liberated from his cultural matrix and deployed as a dominant economic metaphor with the advent of the so-called marginalist revolution in the second half of the nineteenth century. This thesis intends to: i) with reference to an habits of thought approach, unearth the institutional nature of the metamorphosis of Crusoe from ...
"Tradition and the female talent": Narrative poetry by women in the Victorian age. Öz, Fahri; Çalışkan, Sevda; Department of English Literature (2003) This study analyzes the question of tradition within the narrative poetry written by female poets, and deals with the strategies they employed to mark then- difference as women poets while they struggled to exist and make room for themselves in the canon in the Victorian age. The scope of the study İs confined to long narrative poetry by women in the Victorian age (1830-1901). The works to be studied are the Gondal poems (composed 1836-1848) by Emily Jane Brontö; Aurora Leigh (1859) and "Lady Geraldine's Co...

Citation Formats

N. Özgür, “Thomas Hardy as a threshold figure and crisis of representation in his poetry—a deconstructionist reading,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2015.