Doctoral defence: Indrek Ojam "The Poetics of Scene and Estonian Modernist Novel"
On January 18 at 15:30 Indrek Ojam will defend his doctoral thesis "The Poetics of Scene and Estonian Modernist Novel".
Supervisor:
Jaak Tomberg, University of Tartu
Opponents:
Epp Annus, Tallinna University
Cornelius Hasselblatt, Gröningeni University
Summary
In literary studies, the word modernism has usually designated radical literary works that have sought to break away from tradition and establish a new type of poetic vision of the world. But the word modernism has also designated the period of cultural history from the second half of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century, when literature recorded and reacted to many social changes such as the spread of ideas of equality and democracy, urbanisation, and the explosive development of technology. This doctoral thesis develops a methodology for studying modernist innovation in fiction by using the concept of scene and uses it on various Estonian-language works throughout 20th and 21st century. First, the thesis gives as an introduction an overview of various ways scholars and critics have conceptualised and periodised modernism in Estonian literature, giving examples from the Noor-Eesti to studies in the 21st century. Next, as its main aim, modernist fiction is constructed through the methods of narratology and phenomenology with a special emphasis on the nuances of how bodily feelings (or “affects” as conceptualised in late humanities and social sciences) are represented in the literary text. At least since Aristotle's "Poetics", narration has been understood on the basis of verisimilitude: in the narrative, typical events occur to characters with typical characteristics of their era. In order to create a fictional world that appears natural and motivated to the reader, it is necessary to have sufficiently probable events and characters. However, among the novels that emerged in the latter half of the 19th century and the early 20th century, there are many whose realism cannot be explained solely by the presence of probable and typical events and characters in the narrative. These works often foreground not the events that signify the characters' (often dramatic) life changes, but rather an increasingly elusive affective atmosphere that does not belong to any individual character but rather emerges from the interactions between people and the obscure realms of human-nature connections. One productive way to make sense of this shift in literary poetics has been to analyse the relationship of narration with one of its possible counterparts, description. One of the goals of the theoretical part of this thesis is to re-examine the opposition between narration and description and to demonstrate its inevitable limitations. Having considered the semantic contradictions between narration and description, the thesis opts rather for the concept of 'scene', derived from Fredric Jameson's book The Antinomies of Realism (2013) and developed here further. A scene presents reality in a fundamentally different way from narration, allowing greater access to physical sensations and to a large extent omitting the dimension of causality, which is central to narration. After the introductory and theoretical sections, the thesis delves into a few milestones in Estonian literary history to reinterpret them in the light of the concept of scene. Examples from Estonian modernism are divided into three subgroups, each with its peculiar historical context. The first group of examples consists of works by Jaan Oks, Leo Anvelt, and Reed Morn. Their works can be understood as manifestations of fin-de-siècle culture, with the primary question being the vitality, life forces, and sexual identity of the human subject. Jaan Oks may be the author who most successfully applied the poetics of the scene in early 20th century Estonian literature. Oks reveals the essential lability of the human subject and its physical susceptibility to the environment, making it difficult to even speak of stable gender identities. Leo Anvelt uses the poetics of the scene to depict the world of his protagonist, Rein Endise, in his novel 'Viirastusi valges öös' (Ghosts in the White Night) but allows the protagonist's fate to unfold in a rather intellectual logic. Reed Morn's novel 'Andekas parasiit' (The Talented Parasite) provides an example of a work where the affective world of the protagonist is strongly rationalized, and the possibilities of the poetics of the scene are therefore used very modestly. The second group of examples explores Viivi Luik's 'Ajaloo ilu' (The Beauty of History) and Mati Und's 'Sügisball' (Autumn Ball) as fruits of late Soviet-era urbanized reality, in which people's affective life is strongly influenced by the perception of emerging globalized and intertwined world. The third group of examples comes from the significant literary trend in early 21st-century Estonian literature that deals with the literary representation and working through of traumas created in the post-World War II totalitarian society. This group includes the works of Ene Mihkelson, Eva Koff, and Carolina Pihelgas. Main conclusion that can be drawn from the study, is that the concept of scene enables to track modernist innovation through more than century long period. Another important conclusion is, that the concept of scene is well suited to explain the literary depiction of obscure but existentially significant phenomena such as sexuality and trauma. It is also argued that the concept of scene works most fruitfully in literary studies when narratological and phenomenological methods are complemented carefully by more contextual information from sociology, gender studies, technology, and other fields of historical understanding.
The defense will take place at University 16-109 and can also be watched via Zoom (Meeting ID: 918 9871 6116, Passcode: 632168).