OFF THE RAILS: BRICOLAGE AND THE POETICS OF APERTURE IN CHINA MIÉVILLE'S NEW WEIRD

Abstract

Operating on a Sapir-Whorfian premise of language and symbolic discourse in constructing worldviews and defining the lived experience of reality, this thesis examines how political manipulations of language have the insidious power to mould and entrench particular worldviews. It argues that it takes a crucial defamiliarisation, a cognitive estrangement and ‘unhoming’ from the monolithic totality of an instituted cognitive hegemony, to make the transition from the passive mode of letting oneself be constructed by discourses to forging one’s own meaning, through the mechanism of bricolage. Through the rejuvenation of stultified worldviews and limiting cognitive templates, an interminable process of revising and renewing one’s position gestured at in the conclusions of his novel, possibilities of ideological emancipation are materialised through Miéville’s poetics of aperture. Finally, the trajectory of the thesis culminates in a consideration of the metatextual element in Miéville’s fiction, of the project of bricolage not just represented in but performed by the text which ultimately engineers a space for reader empowerment in the real world.