| dc.description.abstract | This thesis explores the extensive use of conceptual and narratological doubling in Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014). It suggests that the repeating, overlapping, intertwining and intermingling of all aspects of the novel is used by Lerner to depict and urge the reader to imagine the potential co-existence of a better collective future in the present moment, and that this future is only slightly different from our current world. Our awareness of such potential futures realities, the novel suggests, relies on an ontological shift in our experience of the present moment. These shifts are co-explored with the reader through the novel’s autofictional and metafiction inclinations and the protagonists’ various experiences throughout the narrative to see which of its actualizations are most viable and sustainable; to separate ‘bad forms of collectivity’ from its utopian counterpart. To explore collective future potentiality through doubling, this thesis will refer to and interpret through theories which are incorporated and presented within the narrative, such as Whitmanian collectivism, Giorgio Agamben’s philosophical meditations on a potential future community and Walter Benjamin’s historic conceptualization of the ‘messianic now’. Since the novel explicitly expresses a desire to connect to the reader and the outside world through its genre of autofiction, metacommentary and direct reader references, the thesis also considers authorial intent. This thesis is thusly the result of a close reading of 10:04 which considers both the novel’s intratextual theoretic references and Lerner’s expressed extratextual theoretical inspirations, such as Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory on heteroglossia and plasticity of the novelistic form, to systematically make visible the interconnectivity between novel’s themes surrounding collective futurity and the actualization of said themes through conceptual and narratological doubling. | eng |