| The purpose of my work is to define metonymy. It examines the impact of relativity on the history-oriented epistemology inherited by the early twentieth century and the subsequent attempt to turn uncertainty into an ethos in the postmodern period. Assuming that the relationship between time and self constitutes a stable society in a metonymic or historicist world, I then examine how, with the advent of the railroad and the increasing notoriety of relative time, writers such as Thoreau, Dickens, de Quincey, Norris, Valery, and Einstein himself try to deal with a disintegrating faith in tradition and its authentication of individual talent. Their works pose a way of starting to read Elizabeth Bishop's poem, "Chemin de Fer" (the main occasion for this study).;The study argues that psychoanalysis develops as a last-ditch effort on the part of metonymy to survive the threat of relativity. It takes a look not only at the fictional basis of Freud's primal scene, but at the paradox of memory itself: and it proposes that the superego represents, not the law of the father, but his lawlessness and that the ego's most primal and most narcissistic desire is for the order that Freud says is part and parcel with superego-rather than ego-formation.;The study goes on to propose that Lacan is metonymy but only through the repression of Freud. Yet his excision is also the moment in which metonymy transforms itself into simile so that an uncertainty caused by relativity can take on a compensatory dimension by becoming the means to authenticity. The work's thesis that authenticity is social and the basis for just action rests on this shift from metonymy to simile in postmodernism and its insistence on discontinuity, difference, and deferral.;At the end, the work is meant to demonstrate the theorization of simile as paradigmatic of postmodernism and to show how it might occur experientially, just as the beginning chapters are meant to demonstrate how thinking metonymically might feel. |
