Abstract

Conventional theories about the "origins of the novel" have generally presupposed the occurrence of paradigmatic shifts in epistemology prior to the novel's emergence in order to explain the formal exigencies of the generic innovation. Such presuppositions tend to obscure the historical significance and specificity of the novelistic figuration by reducing the genre to a conceptual category, and consequently eclipse the transitional phenomenon of "origin," which is fundamental to understanding the transformation of the representational regime itself. ;This dissertation proposes to wrest the term "origin" from essentialist usage and recast it in terms of the eccentric rhythm of Ur-sprung or originary leap, which gives rise to the two-fold process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, marking the transitional situation. Simultaneously, the thesis attempts to transpose the question of the novel's origin from its conceptual mooring in the institution of literary history to its historically singular constellation in the place or intermediate state of passage from the premodern to the modern symbolic. By locating the novel in the disjunctive intersection of "origins," I seek to show how the novelistic genre informs, as much as is informed by, the lack of symbolic authority which underwrites this passage. ;The dissertation focuses in particular on how, unlike capital which proceeds by attacking and dissolving the "patriarchalist" symbolic link based on territorial integrity and hierarchical affective bonding, the novel functions to neutralize, recode, or overcode the deterritorialized flows, not by waging war against the patriarchal despot, but paradoxically by laying elaborate siege to, and reterritorializing, the bodies of the woman and of the colony . The result is a new "perverse" topography in which the split between the imaginary fantasy of the heterosexual masculine ego and the "pure reason" of the white capitalist superego is subtended by, and suspended over, the phantasmatic opacity of the reterritorialized bodies. The novel is thus what propels the modern symbolic of capitalism inexorably in the direction of "patriarchy in other terms," determining it as capitalist patriarchy