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"THE WHOLE WORLD COULD BREAK INTO A THOUSAND LITTLE PIECES": ANXIETIES OF INCOMPREHENSIBILITY AND COMMUNITY IN MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FICTION
Gluckman, Stephen Bassett
Gluckman, Stephen Bassett
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Thesis/Dissertation
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2025-05
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English
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https://doi.org/10.34944/mn82-a055
Abstract
This dissertation contributes towards a broader understanding of the anxious voice and experience, especially as this voice and experience emerges in the narrative fiction of modern America. In its examination of voice-centric novels of modern and contemporary American fiction, it gives credence and weight to the voice and lived experience of everyday anxiety by showing, despite its tendencies towards obstruction, its critical and personal dynamism. While the affect of anxiety is often understood as a “narrowing,” “strangling constriction” that shuts down productive engagement with society, this dissertation argues that this perspective ignores how anxiety almost always emerges from a sense of loss of firm footing or connection in the world. Inspired by the philosophy of Stanley Cavell, I argue that as much as anxiety often marks a fissure or a loss of reason, it also marks or is born from a sense of fissure or loss of community. This is true, even when ironically, and tragically, anxiety emerges as and emerges out of an avoidance, withdrawal, or denial of responsibility and a connection to others. While anxiety may destabilize individuals and their speech, there remains an anxious voice, often one that reaches out as a plea to be heard and distresses in being incomprehensible, untranslatable, and thus rendering that individual abandoned and alone. If we allow ourselves to hear past the circumlocutions, compulsive chatter, and staggered gasps, we may find something both beautiful, piercing, and regenerating in the anxious experience and voice. We may, at the very least, help the anxious individual back to their place in the sensemaking community or discover how a community, in acknowledging its collective anxieties, may lead itself not to ruin but to productive rearticulation.
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