Abstract

The dissertation, Divining the Gap: Postmodern Textuality in Rimbaud, Beckett, and the Internet examines the work of Arthur Rimbaud and Samuel Beckett from the viewpoint of postmodern textual criticism. Rimbaud's Lettres du voyant, Une Saison en enfer, and "Democratie" and Samuel Beckett's L'Innommable are given poststructuralist analysis. The dissertation also investigates the potential of the Internet as a postmodern medium of textual exchange and production, specifically as manifest in the application of electronic mail. ;Throughout the dissertation, I argue that the criticism of postmodern textuality is articulated by gap. "Gap" is an over-arching term which implies a break from modernist norms, conventions, and expectations, and which includes textual and critical manifestations of such concepts as aporia, rupture, difference, and asynchronicity, among others. It is also a tool which marks the deconstructive notion of the in-between. "Divining the Gap," therefore, refers to the poststructuralist critical methodology that such an examination necessarily demands--a methodology which "divines," or locates as with an hermeneutic divining rod, that which the structuralism of modernity has left buried, undefined, and unrecognizable beneath layers of binary dualisms. ;The project discusses two authors of differing historical periods and genres--Rimbaud's nineteenth century correspondence and poetry and Beckett's twentieth century novel. It also discusses the Internet as a late twentieth century textual medium through a genealogical treatment of the levels of difference implicit in the act and artifact of writing. The three seemingly disparate subjects of Rimbaud, Beckett, and the Internet are related through an evolutionary treatment of textuality in terms of authorship, translation, historicity and technology