Dead Letters for Living Spirits: An Exploration of Aura in "Pale Fire", "The Crying of Lot 49" and "Infinite Jest"
The present master’s thesis attempts to explore the concept of aura, as Walter Benjamin understood it, through the literary/audio-visual works of art found in "Pale Fire", by Vladimir Nabokov, "The Crying of Lot 49", by Thomas Pynchon and "Infinite Jest", by David Foste...
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| Tipo de recurso: | tesis de maestría |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2019 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) |
| Repositorio: | Docta Complutense |
| Idioma: | inglés |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:docta.ucm.es:20.500.14352/14419 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/14419 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | 821.111(73)Nabokov, Vladimir7pal.07 821.111(73)Pynchon, Thomas7cry.07 821.111(73)Wallace, David Foster7inf.07 82"19" Aura Consumerism Entertainment Postmodernity Work of art. Consumismo Entretenimiento Posmodernidad Obra de Arte. Escritores Literatura Prosa Filología inglesa 5701.07 Lengua y Literatura 5505.10 Filología |
| Sumario: | The present master’s thesis attempts to explore the concept of aura, as Walter Benjamin understood it, through the literary/audio-visual works of art found in "Pale Fire", by Vladimir Nabokov, "The Crying of Lot 49", by Thomas Pynchon and "Infinite Jest", by David Foster Wallace. Thus, it is my purpose to show how the unique aesthetic experience of these art works’ proximity —i.e. John Shade’s poem, "The Courier Tragedy" and the perniciously addictive film “Infinite Jest”— affects those who obsess over them; i.e. Charles Kinbote’s mad inquisitiveness in the first novel, Oedipa Maas’ paranoid epic in the second one, and the consequences of addiction to entertainment for American society in the third one. In other words, it is the ‘aura’ of those three works of art —or lack of it, as is the case with "Infinite Jest"— which forces characters to assume the inherent conflict between artistic production and mechanical reproduction within the highly-globalized, post-war world they live in. The conclusion will shed light over the qualities of storytelling integrated in the novels (again, by using Benjamin’s works), which helps justify how committed, original works of art need to be revived by a suitable audience willing to resurrect them by assimilation —i.e. reading or listening— for them to become immortal. |
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