Operatiivinen vainoharha normaalitieteen aikakaudella: Jaakko Yli-Juonikkaan Neuromaanin kokeellinen poetiikka

Abstract

This publication-based doctoral dissertation in literary criticism investigates the experimental poetics of the novel Neuromaani (2012) by Jaakko Yli-Juonikas. This study maps out and contextualizes the poetics of Neuromaani. I define poetics as the creative principles, conventions, and/or techniques informing a literary work as well as their study. Experimental literature is committed to raising fundamental questions about literature and its own literariness. The research questions of my study are: What is the poetics of Neuromaani like? How is it constructed? How does it work? My research material comprises the novel itself and the supplements to it that were published separately in literary magazines. Included in the discussion are also reviews of the novel and a dance performance inspired by it. The study is positioned in the framework of French theory and the new materialist approach informed and influenced by it. I scrutinize Neuromaani as a literary machine – a term coined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari – that produces assemblages and operates through the actual and the virtual as well as repetition and affects. I also apply Gérard Genette’s theory of transtextuality, taking into account the ways it has been developed further in the field of narratology. I use theoretically and conceptually contextualizing close reading as the method of my analysis. The study consists of five articles and an introductory chapter. In each article, I focus on a different element of the novel’s poetics: the excessiveness, the materiality, the schizophrenic language and structure, the usage of found material and collage techniques, and the novel’s relation to semiocapitalism. I argue that all these viewpoints are essential to understanding the experimental poetics of Neuromaani. I introduce the concept of “excess novel” using Neuromaani as a paradigmatic example. An excess novel forms its affective relation with the reader and with other extratextual elements through its excessive poetics. I show how the different transtextual relations actualize as affective relations. I argue that the poetics of Neuromaani is experimental in that it revises and reshapes literary expression by experimenting with repetition, opens up the novel’s internal excess towards its exterior, and challenges readers and critics to re-evaluate their position in relation to the assemblage of the novel.