Laurence Sterne and the “uncrystalized flesh:” discursive maiming, textual healing, and the hermeneutics of the body in Tristram Shandy

This thesis addresses the significance of corporeality in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. It argues that a closely highlighted relationship between body and dialogical language counters Enlightenment objectification of the body, as manifest in the emerging sciences, philosophy, and culture. It applies historical and current theoretical frameworks to Sterne’s novel—looking to eighteenth-century medicine and philosophy and broadly to Bakhtin’s twentieth-century theories upon dialogue and the carnival—in order to elucidate its rejuvenation of dead tropes like the “grotesque body” and its heavy reliance upon conventions of dialogue that involve a commanding corporeal presence. As the thesis explores these narrative qualities, it reveals the body in Tristram Shandy to effectively displace the growing importance of epistemological certainty, and in the process reassert the ethics of a view of the body as an integral aspect of human nature and human understanding, rather than an impediment to it or a mere vessel of it.