Date of Award

Spring 6-13-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D. in English

Organizational Unit

College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, English and Literary Arts

First Advisor

Joanna Howard

Second Advisor

Patrick Cottrell

Third Advisor

Bin Ramke

Fourth Advisor

Jennifer Pap

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

All Rights Reserved
All Rights Reserved.

Keywords

Fiction, LGBTQ+, Literature, Poetics, Surveillance, The Neutral

Abstract

This dissertation is a novel, STATES OF ZERO, accompanied by a critical preface on rupture in the works of German artist Rebecca Horn and Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

The critical preface “ON RUPTURE, ESTRANGEMENT, & EXTENSIBILITY: THE NEUTRAL IN REBECCA HORN AND THERESA HAK KYUNG CHA,” investigates negating interruptions in Rebecca Horn and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s lives—a life-threatening illness and its ensuing chronic conditions in the former, and displacement, exile, and linguistic rupture in the latter—that shape their innovative, multimedia works and their understandings of subjectivity, embodiment, articulation, and relationship. Their compositions, pitched at hyperbolic limits of self and language, touch Maurice Blanchot’s neutral—that substance which both underlies and threatens to obliterate speech altogether. In this preface, I explore some ways Horn’s works, given these ruptures, are expressive of this touching of the neutral and discuss the possible senses, embodiments, and modes of relationship her works—staged at the intersection of the human, nonhuman, mechanical, and environmental—offer as a result. Her works, intended to touch and to hyperbolize the limits of sense, ask us to encounter previously unimaginable configurations of self and other, insisting we reckon with the essential plurality of self, as we approach what Blanchot considers “the impossible” utterance this mode of articulation allows. I then take up Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s multimedia work to extend the conversation into the invitational nature of rupture and its socio-ethical-political implications.

The novel, STATES OF ZERO, is a composition that lives in this tradition of rupture. Set in a fictional, totalitarian state, the novel follows Zero, a woman who finds herself paradoxically embedded in the heart of the state’s increasingly totalitarian structure through her work at its national laboratory, even as her increasing disability—caused by early chemical exposure in her environments and exacerbated by ongoing clinical invasion—makes her its powerful, if unintentional, dissident. This early rupture in her form ensures she cannot become—or conceive of—a singular subject imagined by the state. Instead, she becomes a person of increasing alterity, an “impossible” body articulated across human, environmental, mechanical, clinical, and nonhuman worlds, in an aporia of unresolvable crossings. At the bottom of these crossings is the mother—Zero’s own sick mother, as well as the state’s toxins, clinical invasions, heteronormative structures, releasing dreams, and queer relationships that have mothered her form into its present state. This results in a narrative form that is as experimental and polyvocal as Zero herself. The novel itself becomes an impossible body, suspended across varying times and spaces, mechanisms of recording and surveillance, an unnamed narrator(s), and Zero’s own consciousness. As Zero, the state, and their intertwined narratives reach a point of no return, the novel and its world is flooded—with a local storm, and a teeming, lyric passage expressive of Blanchot’s neutral, where Zero may, finally, conceive of an impossible form for becoming into a possible future.

Copyright Date

6-2025

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

Rights Holder

Leah Nieboer

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Format

application/pdf

Language

English (eng)

Extent

257 pgs

File Size

1.2 MB

Download

Available for download on Sunday, July 18, 2027



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