The Line of Flight of a Desiring Machine: the Schizoanalysis of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk

• Main Authors: Hsieh Chenglun, 謝政倫
• Other Authors: Pedro Dovolis
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/sf345j

碩士 === 國立彰化師範大學 === 英語學系 === 102 === Abstract This thesis, The Line of Flight of a Desiring Machine: the Schizoanalysis of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, maintains that the author of The Monk, M. G. Lewis, belongs to the Nietzschian cultural physicians, who offer an alternative insight to the world. In the late 18th century, including Lewis, a bunch of Gothic novel writers can be regarded as the contemporary cultural physicians, who contradict the rationality dominated classicism in their own ways, and cope with the omnipresent ideological domination, which defines normalcy and Oedipalizes the dominated, the oppressed, and the conformists into the docile bodies. Lewis is one of the cultural physicians and pursues his line of flight to reach beyond the restrictions of his time through Ambrosio, the protagonist in his novel. Through Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis, Ambrosio becomes a desiring machine, and readers get to investigate how the desire of Ambrosio works and helps to achieve his deterritorialization. However, whether Ambrosio follows the line of flight and deterritoriates or not is not of the utmost consequence. Deterritorialization is a process to break through the Oedipalization, and an awareness of the fascistic influence. The schizoanalysis of Ambrosio provides us a model who tries to flight from the Oedipalization in order to become a schizophrenic, but eventually pays his price. To see Ambrosio’s journey in a different light would mean for one to step on the Open Road themselves, following the disconcerting trajectory of schizoanalytic understanding: an understanding awake to the miseries of territorialization but yet painfully unclear over how to find the path to freedom.