Date of Award
Fall 2025
Document Type
Thesis
Publication Status
Version of Record
Submission Date
March 2026
College Granting Degree
Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College
Thesis/Dissertation Advisor [Chair]
Michael Harrawood
Additional Committee Member 1
Mark Tunick
Additional Committee Member 2
Justin Perry
Abstract
In this paper I use a dialectical materialist conception of ideology to analyze how it functions through language in Franz Kafka’s story The Metamorphosis. Beginning with Hegel’s account of consciousness as constituted through contradiction and its material reorientation in Marx and Engels, this project situates ideology within the social relations that shape human life. I then employ Evald Ilyenkov’s conception of material generation and Valentin Volosinov’s semiotic theory, arguing that signs constitute the material medium through which ideological meaning is produced and through which consciousness learns to misrecognize its own conditions. Using this framework, I interpret Gregor Samsa’s transformation as an instance of alienation in which inherited ideological signs override the evidence of material reality, rendering both Gregor and his family unable to apprehend him as a human subject. Ultimately this thesis shows that ideology works by severing the dialectical relation between consciousness and the social world that situates it.
Recommended Citation
Sethi, Sidhanth, "A DIALETICAL MATERIALIST READING OF LANGUAGE AND IDEOLOGY IN THE METAMORPHOSIS" (2025). Harriet L Wilkes Honors College Theses. 3.
https://digitalcommons.fau.edu/etd_honors/3