Author Type

Graduate Student

Date of Award

Fall 11-25-2025

Document Type

Thesis

Publication Status

Version of Record

Submission Date

December 2025

Department

English

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Thesis/Dissertation Advisor [Chair]

Ian MacDonald

Abstract

This thesis offers a reading of Hiroko Oyamada’s The Hole as discourse surrounding modern neoliberalism’s dissolution and transformation of boundaries between socio-political domains, such as the public/private, and its consequent effects on individual subjectivity and interpersonal relationships. Within the novella’s depictions of the mundane, I also seek to argue that Oyamada’s employment of the liminal, through distortions of space and time, is used to depict the precarity of marginalization as an always present force due to the pervasiveness of capitalism, but purposefully hidden to maintain security in illusion.

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