Post-cinematic anxiety

Donovan, Graham Paul (2024). Post-cinematic anxiety. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

Preview

Donovan2024PhD.pdf
Text - Accepted Version
Available under License All rights reserved.
Download (1MB) | Preview

Abstract

This thesis consists of an absurdist detective novel and a critical commentary, both of which engage with the contradictions suggested by the notion of “total cinema” and other similar critiques. The creative aspect is a novel titled The Palace View. The novel puts a number of the issues raised throughout the critical work into tension in a fictional world entirely composed of cinema. The critical aspect employs a framework—or “diagnosis”—of “post-cinematic anxiety”. A number of critical texts are explored to chart a genealogy of post-cinematic anxiety as it occurs in short fiction, film theory, and postmodern criticism. These texts provide a theoretical ground upon which to conduct a short survey of modern films, from blockbusters to low-budget exploitation films, all of which display the “symptoms” of the diagnosis. The films reviewed provide a view of post-cinematic anxiety away from theory, and further establish the persistence of the symptoms of post-cinematic anxiety in a popular medium. These symptoms are then applied to a reading of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, arguing for novel as a sustained expression of post-cinematic anxiety in literary fiction. Finally, the work explores the novel submitted with this thesis, considering it alongside the findings of the critical work and the literary absurd. The ultimate purpose of this work is to create a terminology for otherwise disparate phenomena relating to the ambient anxiety about cinematic presence, and to interrogate the category of “post-cinema” on phenomenological terms.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):