Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
2-2025
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Program
Comparative Literature
Advisor
Giancarlo Lombardi
Committee Members
Eugenia Paulicelli
Paolo Fasoli
Subject Categories
Comparative Literature | English Language and Literature | Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | French and Francophone Literature | Literature in English, British Isles | Philosophy | Physics | Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics | Theory and Criticism | Translation Studies
Keywords
textuality, relational reading, translation, genre, gender, Woolf, Barthes, Genette
Abstract
This study examines the palimpsest as a memory-mapping trope through a variety of literary, philosophical, and theoretical texts, while establishing it as a concept for multilayered textuality.
In Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (“Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré”), Gérard Genette introduces the idea of a “palimpsestuous reading” as an “open structuralism” – a “reading [of] two or more texts in relation to each other” – explaining how such reading practice comprises the co-existence of two kinds of structuralism: one that is “concerned with the closure of the text” with a “deciphering of its inner structures”; and one that focuses on the relations between texts, as in an “intertextual” approach in the Kristevan sense. Genette’s centering his work on “the way [texts] reread and rewrite one another” – more so than an insistence on the closure of the individual text itself – has given the impetus for this project in an effort to practice the “open structuralism” that is both proposed and explored in his Palimpsests.
The temporality of the palimpsest, described by Jonathan Gil Harris, is both “polychronic” and “multitemporal” in its heterogeneous structure, also conveying a “spectrality” of the “present moment” by giving rise to a “spectralization of temporality” in Sarah Dillon’s terms, within “a play of multiple temporal traces” of “matter” or “material.” Harris’s formulation of the palimpsest configuring such temporal modes as “supersession” and “explosion” – through which the “apparition of the ‘old’ text shatters the integrity of the ‘new’ by introducing into it a radical alterity that punctures the illusion of its wholeness or finality” – proffers a “dialogic” “third temporality,” foregrounding the affinities or “untimely relations” between texts as a “temporality of conjunction.”
Such multilayered nature of texts inviting us to engage in a “relational reading” within their palimptextuality is the subject of my dissertation wherein the palimpsest is explored as a memory-shaping and genre-generating trope which, through the act of “translation,” establishes its own rhetoric and temporality.
Recommended Citation
Kalostyan, Selin, "Palimpsests of the Mind: Memory, Anamnesis, Temporality" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6093
Included in
Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, French and Francophone Literature Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, Philosophy Commons, Physics Commons, Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics Commons, Theory and Criticism Commons, Translation Studies Commons
