Date of Award
2008
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Program
Comparative Literature
Supervisor
Elias Polizoes
Abstract
Nikos Kazantzakis and Georges Bataille both express a fascination with the utmost limits of the possible. My thesis explores this mutual preoccupation by way of a guiding concept: the wound. The wound skirts limits and dramatizes their rupture. It conveys a violent disruption of our ordinary modes of existence, ultimately proving radically transformative. My thesis considers limits as they are drawn, contested and transfigured by Kazantzakis and Bataille. It develops in three thematically-ordered chapters which treat the limitations of experience, the limitations of expression, and the question of transfiguration. Throughout, I argue that Kazantzakis, informed by both Bergsonian vitalism and the mystical writings of the Greek fathers, performs a Bataillean modification of the “human situation.” Ultimately, I demonstrate that a radical reconfiguration of the limits constituting the profane world requires a wounding of our habitual modes of seeing, knowing, and saying. This wounding is not a privation but a dynamic enrichment in perpetual process.
Recommended Citation
Dasios, Maria, "SKIRTING THE ABYSS: LIMIT-EXPERIENCE IN KAZANTAKIS AND BATAILLE" (2008). Digitized Theses. 4707.
https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/digitizedtheses/4707