| Description |
My dissertation explores the relationship between reading acts and the reader's own desire. I investigate various models of the individual, subjective experience of reading in a number of key literary works, ranging from late-Victorian novels (such as Dracula and The Picture of Dorian Gray) to the writing of important modernists like James Joyce and William Faulkner. I aim to provide a loose, critical compendium of solitary readers: readers who obsessively read "texts" (both in literal and in figurative senses)-in hopes of assimilating to the world, or of changing, ignoring/forgetting, and even escaping from their own immediate situations-by means of reading, and through their readerly fantasies. Such analysis helps us understand both how reading is portrayed in these fictional works, and how we (as readers) discover an outlet for our emotions through the act of reading. |
