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Year:: 2024
Contributor:: Kan-Sperling, Lucia (creator); Redfield, Marc (thesis advisor); Bewes, Timothy (reader); Brown University. Modern Culture and Media (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: Media studies; Experimental poetry; Digital media; Derrida, Jacques; Cybernetics; Contemporary literature; Semiotics and literature; Postmodernism (Literature); Posthumanism; Metaphor; Experimental fiction; Ecocriticism in literature; Ambient music; Ubiquitous computing; information; Literary form; Tan Lin
DOI: https://doi.org/10.26300/7xf7-zz08

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Abstract:: This thesis argues that the work of contemporary writer Tan Lin proposes, through the figure of “ambient textuality,” an intervention into existing theories of “ambience” by performing a relational, varyingly attentive or non-attentive experience of the world as fundamentally structured by systems of signification. Theories of ambience have emerged amidst global paradigms that increasingly destabilize the boundaries of the “self”: particularly, the increasing ubiquity of networked computational technologies and the horrors of climate change and the end of the Anthropocene. They generally propose an alternative to the problem of the transcendental subject through a dissolution of the subject-object boundary via a primordial, pre-linguistic state of phenomenological unity with one’s environment. This theoretical foundation, however, I argue, produces an opposition between language and materiality, “nature” and “culture,” that only reinforces the same metaphysical binaries these theories aim to resolve. I thus turn to Lin’s “ambient textuality,” analyzing his works "Seven Controlled Vocabularies" (2010) and "The Patio and the Index" (2011) as two different iterations of the same logic of reading, which appears as a systemic, de-hierarchized, non-individual process of supplementary substitution between signs, predicated upon a constitutive absence. Grounding a theory of ambience in the inextricability of metaphor and materiality, I argue, might help us to uncover a more productive critical and (eco-)political potential in the concept of “ambience.”
Notes:: Senior thesis (AB)--Brown University, 2024; Concentration: Modern Culture and Media

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Kan-Sperling, Lucia, "Ambient Textuality, Textuality as Ambience: Metaphor and Materiality in the Writing of Tan Lin" (2024). Modern Culture and Media Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://doi.org/10.26300/7xf7-zz08

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Modern Culture and Media Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the Modern Culture and Media department.
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Ambient Textuality, Textuality as Ambience: Metaphor and Materiality in the Writing of Tan Lin