In the middle was the word: The writerly gestures of Nikolai Gogol, Franz Kafka, and Bohumil Hrabal

Nikolai Gogol is a historical oddity. Franz Kafka is composed of never-ending and seemingly irreconcilable dualities. Bohumil Hrabal defies categorization by creating his own category independent of all others. Each of these writers in their own way has come to be seen as out of place or even an aberration. Having stripped away the linguistic, national, geographical, and historical labels from Gogol, Kafka, and Hrabal, potential interpreters are only left with the fact all three are writers. It is the fact that Gogol, Kafka, and Hrabal are writers that ruptures the otherwise impenetrable surfaces of their writing. And it is in the rupture caused by the problem of being a writer that this dissertation aims to place itself with the goal of answering the question: What does a writer do? This dissertation uses the concept of gesture to examine writing as an ethical activity outside the confines of praxis and production. When writing inhabits its gestural mode it can fully expose its own ethical foundations. By examining the writerly gesture in three seemingly disconnected writers my dissertation triangulates the analysis directly on the problem of writing, while also exposing the deeper connection the act of writing creates among Gogol, Kafka, and Hrabal. The introduction details the centrality of writing as an act for each of these writers and provides a basic definition of gesture that will be further explored through language, the body, and ethics in the successive chapters. In my first chapter I look at Hrabal and the linguistic nature of the writing act by examining how he comes to define his own writing through the idea of pabeni, Hrabal's untranslatable word for his own method of writing. The chapter examines the way in which this untranslatable pabeni creates a rupture in language that writing is able to sustain and revel in. In the second chapter I examine the bodily elements of writing through Gogol's often violent descriptions of the intertwining of the body and writing. The chapter examines the body as the place of this writerly rupture. In the third chapter I examine the Kafka's understanding of 'proper' writing by examining the how Kafka's gestural writing creates a rupture in the space of the ethical. This intersection of writing and ethics allows the dissertation to return to the idea of language that was central to the first chapter and examine how this intersection of writing and the ethical exposes a responsibility to language as such at the core of the writerly gesture. The dissertation concludes by examining how the concept of gestural writing provides a response to the Platonic criticism of writing.