Boz, Buket; (2024) Rethinking the Night: Dystopian Impulses, Transgression and the Emergence of the Irreal. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This dissertation offers a comparative analysis of dystopian works depicting different aspects of the night. It questions whether and how the vulnerable conditions created by oppressive ideologies can be transformed into transgressive moments, and examines what this transgression signifies. I argue that the novels indicate the emergence of the irreal as a way of experiencing the night and as a literary mode, which underscores that both the nocturnal experience and the novels themselves facilitate the transgression of frames of reality, hegemonic organizations, and ocular-centric ideologies. Each chapter traces the ocular-centric organization of the night drawing on theories of space and power and then explores the possibility of irreal transgressions. Chapter 2 argues that in Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading and Bilge Karasu’s Night, imagination is a transgressive act that leads to the problematization of the ocular-centric construction of reality. Chapter 3 uses the figure of femme fatale in film noir to deconstruct the night's association with women’s dangerous sexuality and explore the transgressive nocturnality of female figures in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Chapter 4 demonstrates that women who are marginalized within the night in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Haruki Murakami’s After Dark create an irreal otherworld through anti-ocular acts that subvert the ocular-centric male hegemony. Chapter 5 examines the political and economic organization of sleep in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Kenneth Calhoun’s Black Moon and argues that sleep is a nocturnal and anti-ocular act that challenges the attempts to manipulate it. Reading the novels from a nocturnal perspective demonstrates an alternative method of literary analysis that goes beyond genre categorizations and stylistic or historical conventions. It also highlights the importance of taking into account the night when addressing issues regarding surveillance, freedom of expression, discrimination, resistance, and identity formation.

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