Katabasis and self as point of view: Crafting the reader, an affective experience

Wilson, Jacob 2024. Katabasis and self as point of view: Crafting the reader, an affective experience. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

This thesis consists of two parts: a novel and a critical commentary. Katabasis is a hyperrealist novel set in the American suburbs, filtered through an obsessive and imaginative central intelligence. Where modernists represented the fragmented nature of thought as language itself, in Katabasis, the affect of that language, the actual embodied experience of the reader becomes the replication of consciousness. The critical commentary focuses on understanding consciousness through the lens of writing and reading. It begins by proposing a third lipo for the Oulipo movement: the systemic lipo, the study of the system all writers use to compose meaning—the human brain—and argues for the use of empirical studies in cognitive linguistics, semiotics, narratology, and neuroscience to understand the reader. By synthesizing Antonio Damasio’s three levels of self and Italo Calvino’s levels of literature, a model of the reader is constructed to show how a reader’s synkymic intelligence allows us to revise our core beliefs. Further, by extending the linguistic signifier to the sensory, a model for affective signifiers is developed. These signifiers (ampules) compose affective arcs which generate the reader’s experience of a text. I explore how the idea of affective arcs ideas influenced the development of Katabasis and conclude with three case studies from the novel: the first shows how shadow imagery functions; the second demonstrates how ampules imbued with feeling may be revoked within a reader; and finally, I demonstrate how the model of the reader works to create an affective experience in the denouement of Katabasis.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Schools > English, Communication and Philosophy
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PR English literature
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	1 July 2025
Last Modified:	01 Jul 2025 15:21
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/178215

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