The Event of Literature: An Interval in a World of Violence

Abstract

This dissertation claims that literature is best understood as an event of language. Borrowing from the late work of Hans Georg Gadamer, the event nature of literature is articulated as the full presencing of language expressed in the experience of the equal significance of the physical and meaning aspects of language. This full presencing of language is made possible by a co-equal engagement of the reader by the work and of the work by the reader. Insofar as this co-equal encounter reduces neither reader nor work, the event opens a space for a respectful and peaceful manner of being in the world. Requiring the engagement of whole embodied person, literature as an event is further clarified, with attention to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as an operation of and on the flesh of language and persons. I explore the way literature as event operates through treatment of oral and written literary traditions, with reference to ancient and modern literature. After developing the theory of literature as an event in Part One, in Part Two, I turn to the notion of composition in performance, developed by Milman Parry and Albert Lord in relation to oral literature, in order to illustrate the performative and collaborative nature of all literature.