| This PDE consists of a contextual essay "The Diffusion of Self in the Twenty-first Century Novel" and two novels, a hypertext novel and a so-called "flatland text" novel. This study seeks to provide an answer to the question: what, at the advent of a new millennium, constitutes a new novel? Where is the voice of the author, or, in Sidney's parlance, the vates, the moral and psychic center, and what constitutes this vocal presence? The essay looks at how Aristotle defines it, what Sidney says of it in the middle of the renaissance, and what Bakhtin says in the twentieth century. All these descriptions work together to determine what, in fact, is the place of the writer in the new novel and how is the author different from the author of past centuries? All agree that the writer is of utmost importance. The renaissance, as the ancients before them, holds that the writer is crucial as a moral compass guiding the reader of the text. The modern theorist will agree, though, as Bakhtin says of the cultural acceptance of many people in the novel form, there is a more inclusive collection of voices allowed in the investigation. New writers are very close to Romantics in that they, unlike their neoclassicist renaissance colleagues, embrace low as well as high culture.; Modernism changed the world. Society and psychology play a large part now in literary theory. What we have done with the author in our narrative, I argue, cuts to the question of who we are and what we have become a century after Darwin, Freud, and Marx shifted the paradigm of our understanding of the world away from the Judeo-Christian realm. Each writer will guide us into a "new reality." The postmodern writer breaks the frame and the new way of telling stories is called "new realism." But this new realism has an old mission, mirroring Sidney's dictum, they exist to "teach and delight." As the elements of fiction, the tools writers use to tell their stories, change, so, too, do the stories. I introduce several novelists who tell their stories, and many say that they are trying to make sense of this new reality of this changed and structureless world.; Finally, at the end of the essay I investigate the claims of hypertext fiction which has emerged to take the place of the moral center, of the vates. The question hypertext asks is if authority and morality is relative, do we need this center? Hypertext says no and tries to actually do away with the vates. I examine the success of this by looking at both the theorists who have studied hypertext fiction, and an actual hypertext novel. The novel is to be read alongside a flatland version of the narrative. The presence of this is to graphically display several of the points the hypertext theorists have discussed regarding the creation of the newest form of authorial voice. The philosophy behind this is that the best way to understand what has happened to the narrator is to hear the newest incarnation of this narrator. Only then can we discern the difference between the renaissance authorial voice, Sidney's vates, and the voice that has developed in the post postmodern novel.*; *This dissertation is a compound document (contains both a paper copy and a CD as part of the dissertation). The CD requires the following system requirements: Microsoft Office. |
