| This dissertation examines figures of kin identity in four twentieth-century authors of imaginative literature: Andrei Bely, Danilo Kis, Miroslav Krleza, and Yuri Olesha. These authors utilize metaphors of kin identity, such as the assertion that a child "has its father's ears," or that they are "one flesh and blood," to figure problems of aesthetic unity confronted by the literary text. Through involved reading of kinship metaphor's participation in the metafictional levels of specific texts, I suggest that kin identity figures fundamental issues of identity, self-consciousness, and the relation of literary fiction to the complex of conventions or "social fictions" that organize human culture (like inherited names, inherited social status, myths of the nation as a "family" united by blood, and the inheritance of wealth). Insofar as societies maintain themselves through time by relating the identities of children to the identities of their parents, heredity is itself a process of substitution and therefore capable of resonating powerfully with the processes of figural substitution that underlie literary texts. Metaphors of kin identity provide a uniquely rich point of entry into the study of self-reflexivity in literary fiction as well as into the relation between cultural texts and cultural systems. |
