Browsing by Author "Wald, Priscilla"
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Item Open Access Against Compulsory Sexuality: Asexual Figures of Resistance(2022) McDowell, MaggieIn the aftermath of the #MeToo moment, we are called to revisit old conversations about human dignity, gendered power, and the conditions under which consent can be freely given. To date, the shape of this discourse in the mainstream has lacked sustained analysis through the frameworks of critical feminist and queer theory, particularly these fields’ insight that gender, sexuality, and behavior mutually inform each other. I argue that to understand and begin to repair the sexual politics of our present moment we must take seriously these fields’ contention that sex, like gender, is a historically and socially determined category and, therefore, that its definition is malleable. Only by understanding what we mean when we say “sex” can we begin to disentangle the role sex plays in shaping social conventions and power differentials.
My dissertation reads the narratives of 20th- and 21st-century American popular culture through the lens of the emerging field of asexuality studies. Asexuality studies constitutes a growing body of cultural as well as scientific inquiry. As Kristina Gupta (2015) suggests, asexuality can act as a useful critical foil to compulsory sexuality, that is, to the unspoken social imperative to desire and to engage in sexual activity with other people. We see evidence of compulsory sexuality not just in the omnipresence and presumption of the (heterosexual) couple in cultural and social institutions, but also in our own assumption, for instance, that a single individual must be in want of a partner.
Reading against the grain of compulsory sexuality, whose discursive dominance Ela Przybylo (2011) has termed sexusociety, in this dissertation I analyze three figures of asexuality that exists on the on the margins of sexual culture. The figures of the Spinster, the Child, and the Robot do not operate outside the limits of sexusociety but rather trouble it from within. More often than not the resistance they face is indicative of the hidden mechanisms of compulsory sexuality at work in sustaining the society they exist in. These figures of resistance, canonically asexual or not, serve as inflection points where the (il)logic of compulsory sexuality begins to fray. All three figural types are all slurs that have been levelled against asexuals, and are figures that, when they present in fiction, are presumed asexual until proven otherwise. I examine the way that they resist compulsory sexuality rather than claiming a straightforward asexual identity for them, because I am uninterested in the question of whether asexuality should be thought of as a distinct sexuality, or outside of sexuality altogether. Rather, embracing a relatively capacious definition of asexuality as my analytic expands the archive available to me and allows me to identify limit cases of compulsory sexuality where its operations fail to cohere.
Starting from existing groundwork laid in the intersections between asexuality studies and queer and feminist scholarship, as in Cerankowski and Milks’s Asexualities: Queer and Feminist Perspectives (2014) and Ela Przybylo’s Asexual Erotics (2019), I use these figures to illustrate how compulsory sexuality masks the ways we have been preconditioned to allow our own sexual objectification and to participate in the objectification of others. To read asexually is to make a vital intervention into a conversation about the ways compulsory sexuality constrains our quotidian interactions with each other and with the world. It is to begin to imagine a new, more just way of relating that does not transform the other into an object of desire, but rather, as radical feminist Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz puts it, comprises “a relationship of whole to whole.” I offer no definitive way out of sexusociety in these pages. I extend an invitation, though, to think of asexuality not as an absence or withdrawal, but as a potential to disturb patterns by offering new perspectives on old patterns of objectification, complicated consent, and self-denial in the service of adhering to unfulfilling narratives.
Item Open Access American Experiments: Science, Aesthetics, and Politics in Clinical Practices of Twentieth-Century American Literature(2013) Andrews, Lindsey CatherineThis dissertation is concerned with the relationships between experiments in literature, science, and politics in twentieth-century United States culture. I argue that the three can be considered together by understanding "experimentation" as a set of processes rather than a method, and highlighting the centrality of writing and reading to experiments in all three arenas. Drawing on scientist Ludwik Fleck's concept of "valuable experiments," I read specific experiments in each field in conversation with the others, highlighting the ways in which science and politics require aesthetic structures, the ways in which science and literature reconfigure politics, and the ways in which politics and literature can intervene in and reconfigure scientific practices. Ultimately, I try to develop a reading practice that can make visible the shared transformative capacities of science, literature, and radical politics.
In the course of three chapters, I analyze the formal and conceptual innovations of writers such as William Burroughs, Ralph Ellison, and Carson McCullers, who were intimately affected by the uses of experimental science in corrective institutional practice. In doing so, I develop a concept of "experimental literature" that is distinct from avant-garde literature and can account for the investments that these writers share with scientists such as Albert Hofmann, Albert Einstein, and Margaret Mead. I argue that experimental writers denature literary genres that depend on coherent subjects, transparent reality, and developmental progress in order to disrupt similar assumptions that underpin positivist science. By understanding valuable experimental science and writing as continuous challenges to standardized scientific knowledge, I show how these writers contribute to ongoing radical social projects of queer and black radical traditions--such as those of George Jackson and the Combahee River Collective--which are grounded in knowledge as an aesthetic and political practice.
Item Open Access Back in the World: Vietnam Veterans through Popular Culture(2009) McClancy, KathleenIn his Dispatches, Michael Herr quotes the gonzo photojournalist Tim Page: "Take the glamour out of war! I mean, how the bloody hell can you do that?[...] Ohhhh, war is good for you, you can't take the glamour out of that. It's like trying to take the glamour out of sex, trying to take the glamour out of the Rolling Stones." This dissertation is in essence an exploration of Page's question, examining how popular media during the American conflict in Indochina first removed and then restored the glamour of war. For most of its history, the United States has been defined by a certain level of militarism, a glamorizing of the process of regeneration through violence reflected in this quotation, but the late 1960s and early 1970s saw a challenging of this warrior ethos; this challenge was reversed by the 1980s, when American militarism was taken to a new, paramilitary, level. In this project, I propose that this oscillation in the association of masculinity and violence was directly linked to popular media's depiction of the Vietnam war and of the soldiers who fought it. American society is haunted by Vietnam, not just because it was the first war the US lost (as the cliché would have it), but because of the ways in which popular culture presented the war to Americans: in particular, because of the ways the American public received this war through the emerging technologies of their television screens. The rapid response of television news to the conflict created an image of mundane warfare not through any intention on the part of broadcasters but because of the nature of the medium itself; over the next twenty years this image was both mystified and moderated by the more delayed media of film and literature and eventually molded into the now-familiar Vietvet killing machine.
In five chapters, I chronicle the evolution of the iconic Vietvet through the twenty years following the war. Following the methods of Raymond Williams and the Birmingham School, I trace the history and development of images from Vietnam as well as the interaction of those images with popular narratives of war, violence, masculinity and heroism in America. I start with Susan Jeffords' work in The Remasculization of America, taking her emphasis on the cultural narratives that fostered the restoration of patriarchal ideologies; I then move through Marita Sturken's discussion of the creation of cultural memory from historical artifacts in Tangled Memories. To these foundational texts, I bring an emphasis on form and technology to shift the focus from the narratives to the mechanisms of transmission themselves. In my first chapter, I show how the relatively new medium of television, and the depiction on the nightly news of Vietnam as both mundane and corrupt, called into question the image of the heroic soldier, finally replacing that image with the demon of the uncontrollable violent vet, driven insane by an unjust war. My next two chapters look at how this image was rehabilitated through its recharacterization in the less immediate channels of novels and film, a recharacterization driven by national debates over the diagnosis of PTSD and the design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. And in my final two chapters, I show how the image of the overly-muscled Supervet killing machine from pulps and blockbusters replaced the broken, victimized effigy.
I focus on the evolving history of veterans of the Vietnam War in particular because the strong interdependence of the history of that war and popular culture functions as a spotlight on the nature of the relation between media, history and cultural memory. Television coverage of the Vietnam War to a large extent worked not only to expose the inherent immorality of that particular conflict, but also of war more generally and of the image of the soldier hero. But in the two decades between the end of the Vietnam War and the first Gulf War, the standard history of the war had resolidified into one glorifying combat and violence. By looking at this changing social understanding of Vietnam, I hope to reveal the greater mechanisms by which the newly emerging media technologies of the 1960s through the 1980s drastically changed the nature of representation of warfare, violence, and masculinity: first routinizing, then rejecting, and finally enthroning the image of the explosively violent soldier yoked to the state.
Item Open Access Beyond Blood and Belonging: Alternarratives for a Global Citizenry(2011) Bardill, Jessica DawnIn my dissertation, I interrogate the ways blood influences identity construction and how it shifts into a paradigmatic story, known as a blood narrative, that further determines belonging. In five chapters, I argue that the use of a blood narrative undermines sovereignty as well as the creative evolution of nations. I move from an examination of a blood narrative throughout American literature (chapter 1), through a study of legislation and science (chapters 2 and 3). In these latter two chapters, I turn to the Cherokee Nation's expulsion of Freedmen and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians' new membership requirement of DNA testing, which demonstrate influences of a blood narrative upon policy and legislation, and how biotechnology maintains this narrative through DNA and genomics. Finally, I explore novels from Gerald Vizenor (White Earth Anishinaabe) and Thomas King (Cherokee) that offer alternatives to a blood narrative (chapters 4 and 5). I use the term alternarrative here instead of counternarrative to focus on original alternatives, particularly from the alter position of the Native, not on reactionary or countering stories. The alternatives to this blood narrative emerge in both the modern and traditional stories of Native American peoples, providing recourse to understanding identity in ways other than blood. This new sense of belonging is especially important in a world where so many identities are determined by national boundaries, and limited by blood. These alternative narratives provide a new way of moving forward by embracing a survivance for the future, not just reacting to the past.
Item Open Access Black Femininity through the White Speculum: The Implications of Medicosocialism and the Disproportionate Regulation of Black Women’s Reproductive Autonomy(2016-09-02) Smith, Imari Zhané; Smith, ImariAt the crux of health disparities for women of color lies a history of maltreatment based on racial difference from their white counterparts. It is their non-whiteness that limits their access to the ideologies of “woman” and “femininity” within dominant culture. As the result of this difference, the impact of the birth control movement varied among women based on race. This project explores how the ideology attributed to the black female body limited black women’s access to “womanhood” within dominant culture, and analyzes the manners in which their reproductive autonomy was compromised as the result of changes to that ideology through time. This project operates under the hypothesis that black women’s access to certain aspects of femininity such as domesticity and motherhood reflected their roles in slave society, that black women’s reproductive value was based on the value of black children within slave culture, and that both of these factors dictated the manner in which their reproductive autonomy was managed by health professionals. Black people’s worth as a free labor force within dominant culture diminished when the Reconstruction Amendments were added to the constitution and slavery was deemed unconstitutional—resulting in the paradigmatic shift from the promotion of black fertility to its recession. America’s transition to the medicosocial regulation of black fertility through Eugenics, the role of the black elite in the movement, and the negative impact of this agenda on the reproductive autonomy of black women from low socioeconomic backgrounds are enlisted as support. The paper goes on to draw connections between post-slavery ideology of black femininity and modern-day medicosocial occurrences within clinical settings in order to advocate for increased bias training for medical professionals as a means of combating current health disparities. It concludes with the possibility that this improvement in medical training could persuade people of color to seek out medical intervention at earlier stages of illness and obtain regular check-ups by actively countering physicians’ past transgressions against them.Item Open Access Designing Community: Architecture, Race and Democracy in American Life Writing, 1900-‐‑1950(2017) Seeskin, S. AbigailThe turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century saw unprecedented growth and change in the demographics of United States urban environs. Not only did U.S. cities grow bigger, they grew increasingly multicultural and multiracial. American architects, urban planners, and social reformers responded to this change by attempting to instill democratic values in American cities through zoning, gridding, and housing reform that sought to alternately include immigrant populations while excluding populations seen as not white (in particular, black communities). Designing Community: Architecture, Race, and Democracy in American Life Writing, 1900-1950 examines autobiographies produced in this era that use architectural metaphors in order to either enforce or challenge this democratizing project. Narrations of the self granted space for members of minoritized populations to show the limits of the architectural project to build democracy.
In a critical introduction and three subsequent chapters, I use methods of literary analysis to study life writing as well as novels, essays, newspaper articles, and poetry. Through my analysis of three life writing texts, I center autobiography as a genre critical to the production of community formation in the United States. Each chapter examines both a particular writer as well as a particular autobiographical technique. In my first chapter, I primarily examine the 1924 autobiography of Louis Sullivan titled The Autobiography of an Idea. I argue that Sullivan uses techniques lifted from the Bildungsroman in order to show his readers who they, too, can develop into democratic subjects. In my second chapter, I examine the 1950 memoir of the Jewish immigrant writer Anzia Yezierska titled Red Ribbon on a White Horse. I argue that her use of the confessional produces space for her to generate self-determination as a critical component to the production of multi-ethnic community. In my third chapter, I examine Richard Wright’s 1945 memoir Black Boy. I argue that his use of the testimonial enables readers to see human life as innately interconnected. In my conclusion I show that architectural metaphors continue to govern contemporary visions of democratic life in the United States, particularly as Donald Trump’s administration has campaigned to build a wall on the United States’s southern border. I argue that this is a moment in which those invested in racial justice should listen to minoritized voices.
Item Open Access Diasporic Reasoning: The Idea of Africa and the Production of Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America(2012) Bigsby, Shea WilliamThis dissertation explores the significance of Africa (both as a literal geographic space and as an imagined or symbolic space) in 19th century American intellectual and literary culture. I argue that when nineteenth-century intellectuals grappled with the institution of slavery, the significance of slave revolt, and the extent of black intellectual capacities, they dealt not only with a set of domestic social and political concerns, but also with a wider epistemological crisis surrounding the very idea of Africa and Africanness. The paradoxical legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, which produced unthinkable dislocation and suffering even as it created new diasporic networks of black affiliation built around a common African origin, forced a reexamination of conventional thinking about history, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, education, and civilization.
Diasporic Reasoning traces the impact of the idea of Africa on specific American intellectual outlets, including popular historiography, the novel, and the university. I contend that in each of these cases, the engagement with the idea of Africa enriches the possibilities of thought and leads to a fruitful reframing or refinement of established ideas, genres, and institutions. I begin with an exploration of the different historiographic uses of "representative men" in Ralph Waldo Emerson's Representative Men and William Wells Brown's The Black Man (Chapter One). I argue that Brown's contribution to the genre of collective biography complicates the apparent "universalism" of Emerson's earlier text, and forces us to rethink the categories of the universal and the particular. In Chapter Two, I continue to examine the impact of the African diaspora upon historical consciousness by arguing that the encounter with the specter of slave insurrection produces cognitive (and in turn, formal) ruptures in two historical novels, Herman Melville's Benito Cereno and George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes. Chapter Three focuses not on a literary genre, but on the circulation of knowledge through the institution of the modern university. Building from a comparative reading of the educational philosophies of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Edward Wilmot Blyden, I argue that Blyden's provocative conception of an "African university" draws out and extends upon the implications of Emerson's thinking on education. Finally, in the Epilogue, I look at the syncretic uses of "Ethiopianism" in Pauline Hopkins' Of One Blood, J. A. Casely Hayford's Ethiopia Unbound, and W. E. B. Du Bois' Darkwater in order to explore the new paths that Pan-African and diasporic thought would take in the twentieth century. I argue that these works reflect the degree to which an evolving anthropological understanding of the idea of "culture" and the specific political contexts of anti-colonial struggles across the African continent would complicate the kinds of intertextual possibility available in the nineteenth century. This dissertation thus traces the often-surprising intellectual interrelations of America and the African diaspora, and in so doing, opens up a more nuanced approach to the study of nineteenth-century literary and intellectual culture.
Item Open Access Disorientations: Experimental Form in Asian American Literature(2019) Ramos, ChristopherDisorientations: Experimental Form in Asian American Literature explores the relationship between unconventional, experimental, avant-garde, or broadly nonrealist aesthetic form in the major works of three seminal writers of Asian American literature — Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart (1946) and “The Story of a Letter” (1946), Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976), and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée (1982) — and the role that these works played in the foundation and development of an Asian American literary canon and Asian American studies in general. Focusing on how the aesthetic maneuvers and formal conventions of these works are not only shaped and informed by, but directly shape and inform, their political and social commitments, this dissertation traces how these works in turn shaped and informed the trajectory of the Asian American literary and critical traditions which established themselves by mobilizing them. This dissertation argues that these works seek to create languages for diasporic Asian experiences that were previously unavailable and were interdicted by the political and social conditions and historical violences of European and American imperialism and white supremacist racism which informed and made possible those same diasporic experiences by warping recognizable literary conventions and genres, often realist and/or autobiographical; and in doing so both created a new register which not only registered those histories of violence, but would also provide crucial material through whose deployment Asian American studies and literature would consolidate themselves and their core political commitments and critical vocabulary.
Item Open Access Engendering Genocide: Representations of Violence in the Long Twentieth Century(2020) Nunn, NoraGenocide studies typically emphasizes economics, law, history, political science, and sociology as the disciplines most relevant to understanding the phenomenon of premeditated mass slaughter, and the scholarship has been dominated by men, both as subjects and authors. Engendering Genocide intervenes in a field traditionally dominated by the social sciences, illustrating how U.S. literary and cultural texts provide a space for their creators and their audiences to imagine the transnational, gendered, and often quotidian nature of genocide. Weaving together literary criticism, feminist theory, and a transnational American Studies methodology, this project analyzes representations of the crime in the twentieth-century United States. Unbound to the empirical protocol of social sciences, my objects of study—which include novels, memoirs, manifestos, photographs, and film—allow for the imagination of political possibilities unafforded to other disciplines. I demonstrate that by giving this crime a name and telling its story, the figures in my project relied on both word and image in order to make visible a specific kind of violence they saw repeating in different iterations throughout human history, and in turn, to instigate nations to interfere in the domestic affairs of other sovereign powers. By chronicling their efforts, Engendering Genocide considers the ethical and aesthetic challenges and consequences involved in these acts of representation. Based on this analysis, I ultimately conclude that the horror of genocide cannot be fully represented—and that’s precisely one of the factors that makes the crime so dangerous: it can hide, so to speak, in plain sight.
Item Open Access Fossil Capitalist Realism: Petrofiction, Climate Change and the Endless Twentieth Century(2020) Ravenscroft, Claire EliseThere is incontrovertible evidence, public acceptance and mounting alarm that the fossil-fueled growth economy is at the root of global warming. Yet, reducing fossil fuel use remains beyond the boundaries of a certain political reality, one apparently distinct from “the reality of climate change” that scientists and critics continually invoke. This project addresses these competing realities from the standpoint of narrative form, asking: how does the realism of lowered expectations for our environmental politics relate to the realism of literary representation, which has largely ceded the task of depicting environmental crisis to non-realist genres like science fiction and apocalypse? What exactly is the “reality” named by these political and literary realisms, and why does it conflict with the reality of climate change? Analyzing works of contemporary petrofiction and the literary genres used by scholars to conduct and communicate our environmental research — like the tragedy-fable of the Anthropocene or the naturalism of New Materialism — Fossil Capitalist Realism explores the past 50 years’ twin realities of ever-heightening energy consumption and free market ideology as a question of narrative form, thinking beyond the defeating realism of energy politics today.
Item Open Access Graphic Intimations: Postwar to Contemporary Asian Diasporic Art and Writing(2019) Douglas, KitaGraphic Intimations: Postwar to Contemporary Asian Diasporic Art and Writing follows the oblique tensions in Asian diasporic creative compositions between art and writing, performance and inscription. Identifying the graphic—written and/or drawn—as a preeminent form for Asian diasporic artists and writers in North America, this project connects scholarship in Asian American literary studies on questions of form and social formation with the material histories of Asian diasporic visual culture. From postwar graphic internment memoirs to New York City subway writing, this dissertation traces the Asian diasporic graphic’s investments in embodied creative practices that intimate the sensible and sensual in queer, interracial, and cross-cultural liaisons.
Charting the history of the graphic as a twinned positivist technology of measurement and a visceral aesthetic response, this dissertation proposes that the Asian diasporic graphic intimates social possibilities formed in, but not necessarily of, the purview of nation and the state regulation of Asian North Americans as populations. Accordingly, this work examines how these artists’ staging of the graphic encounter might enact disruptive performances of unforeseen social intimacies and political affiliations during these decades that trouble the fidelity of visual documentation.
Item Open Access Ground Plans: Conceptualizing Ecology in the Antebellum United States(2015) Feeley, Lynne Marie"The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions," writes Thoreau: "Let us spend our lives in conceiving then." This dissertation depicts how Thoreau's fellow antebellum antislavery writers discerned the power of concepts to shape "the universe." Wishing for a new universe, one free of slavery, they spent their lives crafting new concepts. "Ground Plans" argues that antebellum antislavery writers confiscated the concept of nature from proslavery forces and fundamentally redefined it. Advocates of slavery routinely rationalized slave society by referencing a particular conception of nature--as static, transhistorical, and hierarchical--claiming that slavery simply mirrored the natural, permanent racial order. This dissertation demonstrates that to combat slavery's claim to naturalness, antislavery writers reconceptualized nature as composed of dynamic species and races, evolving in relation to one another. In four chapters on David Walker, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, and Gerrit Smith, it shows that this theory of nature enabled these writers to argue for the complete transformation of society to bring it into line with what they characterized as nature's true principles. This dissertation thus restores the concept of nature as a crucial intellectual battleground for abolitionism. Moreover, it shows these politically-charged antebellum debates over nature's meaning to be crucial to the story of natural science, showing that abolitionists speculated on the natural principles that would eventually constitute the founding insights of ecology.
Item Open Access Guided by Voices: Poetry, the Paranormal, and Mythmaking(2021) Cooper, L.J.This dissertation reconsiders the relationship between nineteenth and twentieth century artists and the paranormal. Historically, the term “paranormal” has denoted an array of otherworldly phenomena that has captivated artists and the public alike. Indeed, this period, host to William Blake’s spiritual visions and William Butler Yeats’s ghostly dictations, showcases the indelible influence the paranormal has had on art. Unsurprisingly, this influence has long attracted critical attention. The prevailing narrative of critics such as Leon Surette and Helen Sword argues that the period’s artists expressed their paranormal interests by aestheticizing the practices of spiritualist movements, which professed the existence of a “spirit world” that could be contacted by humans via séances or psychic mediums. But there has been little consideration of how artists identified these interests with the very mechanics of artistic creation, believing art could engage otherworldly phenomena in ways that spiritualist techniques could not.
In Guided by Voices, I argue that a diverse strand of nineteenth and twentieth century artists conceived of poetry as an access point to a transgressive, generative kind of paranormality. Some, for instance, understood the poetical text and its creator as haunted entities, while others believed their poetry-making could conjure spirits. Regardless, these poets all turned to the paranormal to achieve liberation. In their quest to expand the imaginative possibilities of their craft, they invoked the paranormal to revolutionize our perceptions of language, humanity, and politics. When read as such, their work comprises a distinct historical arc, a tradition of liberated poetics that unifies artists across disparate times and spaces. Hence, Guided by Voices not only reassess artistic engagements with the paranormal but also illuminates conceptual-historical links between artists that scholarship has not yet recognized.
Over three chapters and an epilogue, I demonstrate how parapoiesis, the unique enmeshment of poetry and the paranormal, enables a series of liberations: liberation from embodiment; liberation from poetic form; liberation from individuality; and liberation from sociohistorical reality. Close readings of primary sources direct my assertions, as do some wide-ranging theoretical reference points. I harness Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology to help articulate my definition of the paranormal, for example, and I incorporate Georges Bataille’s ideas about the mythic to flesh out my examination of poetical mythmaking. The project does, however, draw as much from a popular imaginary as it does academic discourses; folk spirituality’s characterizations of ghosts, magic, and the occult also help anchor my claims.
Ultimately, I argue that parapoiesis’ significance lies in its capacity to transform, often in a material sense, our world. Parapoiesis illustrates how and why poets perceive their works’ relationship with paranormality as intrinsic, procreative, and alchemical. I contend that these poets reveal a broader facet of nineteenth and twentieth century artistic production which maintains a contemporary resonance and usefulness: art’s paranormal entanglements deconstruct prevailing ideological narratives and histories, imagine alternative, liberatory ones, and, in doing so, alter the very material conditions within which culture itself germinates.
Item Open Access Habitats of Abandonment: Subjectivity and the Aesthetics of Dispossession from the Industrial Revolution to the Great Depression(2016) Callahan, ClareThis dissertation draws on American literature from the Industrial Revolution to the Great Depression to fashion a theory of abandonment, a term that designates both a material reality and a conceptual framework; abandonment names what remains unincorporated into the governing economic, political, gender and racial logic. This study examines, therefore, literary representations of poverty, homelessness, forms of working-class labor, and the work that race and gender do within these conditions of existence. It arises from the intersection of the Marxist, feminist, poststructuralist, and queer theory that has sought not only to account for the inequitable economic distribution of goods but also to confront the deeper problem of injurious power structures and hierarchies.
The literature of abandonment discounts the practice of seeking recognition within a dominant structure of power; rather, abandonment brings to light the spatial practice of the subject’s struggle for re-signification of such structures. Thus, one can begin to conceive of the abandoned subject by asking what one produces when one inhabits a space typically deemed uninhabitable—by discovering forms of being where one’s being is impossible or illicit—because it is in this act that subjectivity for the otherwise abject becomes possible. This study asks more specifically how literature as an aesthetic practice imagines the production of an abandoned subjectivity and, by extension, alternative social, economic and political structures.
The driving question of this dissertation is, how can a concept such as abandonment allow one to address without interpellating its subject? That is, can one value the abandoned as such, without incorporating it into an injurious system of evaluation or the prevailing neoliberal discourse of recognition? This entails asking how these processes are represented as being deeply aesthetic and what the relationship is between literary form and “habitat.” That the fact of abandonment is not quite available for representation, at least not without recovering it from itself, but is available for inhabitation, is illustrated in each of the texts this dissertation examines. In bridging socioeconomic material and thematic readings with a study of literary form, this dissertation argues that literature itself performs the very calling into being and inhabitation of this spectral space; which is to say, literary form lays bare the spatial underpinnings of narrative, allowing one to enter into the currents of dispossession rather than their fixed social positions.
Item Embargo Haunted by the Other Life: Choice and Subjectivity in U.S. Economics and Fiction, 1870-1920(2023) Benack, CarolinThis dissertation argues that the American conception of individuality underwent a significant cultural and intellectual revision between the 1870s and 1910s, which laid the groundwork for what would eventually become the neoliberal individual. Where the individual of liberalism was primarily characterized by Property ownership, the last few decades of the 1800s witnessed an increase in efforts to tie individuality to choice-making. The narrative that began to gain prominence in the 1870s was the story of an individual carefully assessing its desires and, through its choices, directly expressing these wishes to the world. This association between choice and the individual did not mean that Property ceased to matter as a category; rather, Property became so fundamental an assumption that its origins––at least to some parts of the population––ceased to require an explanation.I trace this shift from property-owning to choice-making individuality through the two genres of writing that, since the advent of modernity, have consistently articulated what it means to be the subject of capitalism: economics and the novel. Neoclassical economics famously introduced the rational, utility-maximizing individual to the discipline in the 1870s, which would come to be a highly influential narrative in the quantitative social sciences of the twentieth century. As Chapter One shows, this development in economics was paralleled by an increase in novelistic depictions of self-interested decision making as ethical, which constitutes a marked departure from the sentimental logic of earlier nineteenth-century literature. This narrative did not go unchallenged, however: Economists and novelists from Thorstein Veblen to W.E.B. Du Bois pointed out that choice-making individuality is only a believable narrative for those who fit the White middle-class mold. As I show in Chapter Two, “The Conditioned Individual,” novelists like Theodore Dreiser and Edith Wharton, as well as Veblen and the institutional economists he inspired, depicted social milieu is the primary determinant of tastes and desires. As such, they argued, what one ostensibly wants does not amount to an authentic expression of self. Du Bois and his fellow African American novelists, we see in Chapter Three, mount an even more fundamental critique: the Property presupposed by the choice-making individual, they demonstrate, relies on a long-standing practice of expropriating a racial Other. Along with Pauline Hopkins and Sutton Griggs, Du Bois shows that sharecropping and Jim Crow legislation established a social order in which Black self-ownership remained tenuous, thus reinforcing a dividing line crucial to White identity, namely the one between the Propertied and the Unpropertied. Hopkins’s, Griggs’s, and Du Bois’s insistence on the importance of Property in the White imaginary suggests that at least one reason for the rising popularity of the choice narrative in the late nineteenth century was that it served to conceal the deep reliance of Whiteness on Property and its racial Other––a project particularly urgent in the wake of the abolition of slavery.
Item Open Access Imagined Democracy: Material Publishing, War, and the Emergence of Democratic Thinking in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, 1855-1867(2010) Haile, AdamThis dissertation traces the evolution of Whitman's democratic thinking across the first four editions of Leaves of Grass, covering the auspicious years 1855, 1856, 1860 and 1867. While democracy is the master political term within Whitman's later editions, it was nearly devoid from the original one, in which republican political concepts were still regnant. The argument put forth is that in the space of twelve years, Whitman's relationship to democracy went through a strikingly classic dialectic trajectory: emergence, consolidation and fissure. The immediate engine driving this progression was the Civil War, but behind this immediate cause was the slower, broader motor of modernization, particularly modernization's expansion of markets, for in the market's circulation and interconnection of people and commodities Whitman saw a model for an expansive and integrative democratic collectivity. The first chapter explores the importance to Whitman of the physical print room as a uniquely hybrid site in the course of modernization, for while it was one of the first to exploit the expanding industrial market, it also maintained pre-industrial forms of artisanal labor late into that progression. The print room thus became a site where the industrial market's reach and pre-industrial labor's affective relationship to the product and its consumers could be combined, and the print room therefore plays a central role, in ways both subtle and profound, in Whitman's poetry, in his understanding of the emerging democratic nation, and in his own literary productive practice. The second chapter turns from an investigation of democratic social space to an investigation of democratic time, noting how a nearly forgotten event, a loan between Whitman and James Parton, ended the "afflatus" under which the early editions were produced and prompted Whitman to revamp Leaves' relationship to history. Whitman's experience of personal debt failure led him to reconsider the ways in which his political project was susceptible to similar collapse, for the circuits of affective connection upon which his democratic project was based depended not only on their reach through space but on their forward projection through time, particularly the continual recycling of death into life, what Whitman called the "perpetual payment of the perpetual loan." Whitman sought to reduce this contingency by abstracting the political project of the work from his immediate social world (America) to a political philosophy (democracy) which stood above and outside of time. The 1860 edition thus marked the emergence of democracy as the book's central political philosophy. Yet this strategy proved insufficient when Whitman confronted the one barrier to affective exchange that his verse could not bridge: the dead bodies of the Union soldiers. This unbridgeable difference reverberated outward through the circuits of Whitman's poetry, dismantling the political and affective structures he had been building up to 1860. A text which previously declared the absence of both the past and death - "the greatest poet ... places himself where the future becomes present," "the smallest sprout shows there is really no death" - now becomes doubly haunted by ghosts, once by the dead bodies of Union soldiers which, as much as Whitman declares he "will henceforth forget," he cannot, and again by the strange emergence of new "Phantoms, gigantic, superb." These phantoms represent for Whitman the inversion of democracy's promise, democracy become nightmarish and zombie-like, and his fundamental triangle is haunted by its inverse: a melancholic Whitman; the overmastering re-emergence of the "bards of the past" and explicitly antiquated poetic forms; and a threatening, sovereign federal power autonomous from the people. The revisions Whitman introduced to the post-war edition of 1867 tell the story of a crisis in democratic confidence on behalf of democracy's former champion. Taken all together, the first four editions of Leaves form a chronicle of the archetypal democratic poet's struggle with democracy during U.S. democracy's most critical decade.
Item Open Access In Transit: Women, Photography, and The Consolidation of Race in Nineteenth-Century America(2017) Casey, Brenna CaseyIn Transit: Women, Photography, and the Consolidation of Race in Nineteenth-Century America charts the accretion of historical and often obscured memory upon our textual and visual world. Rapid innovations in transportation and photographic technologies developed alongside processes of violent racialized conflict in the antebellum United States. The coincidence of these phenomena in the long nineteenth-century elaborated racial and gender differences through textual and visual production. This dissertation analyzes the evidences of these naturalized narratives in the oscillating movements of women required to navigate multiple, indiscrete, and often unconventional identity categories.
In Transit traces the physical, textual, and imagistic movements of three figures of intrigue—colonial Peru’s tapada limeña, the sensational white captive Olive Oatman, and the famed abolitionist Sojourner Truth. It does so at three flashpoints of United States policy that mark the violent refinement of racial and gender formations: the specter of Latin American independence, Indian Removal, and the protracted Abolition of Slavery. This project demonstrates the ways in which white Americans of the nineteenth-century turned to cultural and commercially available representations of gendered and racialized difference to make sense of their quickly shifting world. These cultural products of Enlightenment-era Europe—travelogues and art works that could help piece together the meaning of new persons represented by new media—are deeply implicated by long histories of colonialism, enslavement, and empire. This project contends that formations of race and racist ideology in the United States are the outcome of the dense transfer of interracial intimacy across global networks. By demonstrating the permeability of narrative and photographic frames for these women and others like them, this project exposes both penetrable national borders and porous boundaries of abiding racial identities.
Item Open Access Laughter without Humor: Affective Passages through Post-War Culture(2015) McDonald, FranThere is a scene in Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale in which Offred, eponymous handmaid to the totalitarian theocracy that now governs America, is overwhelmed by the sudden need to laugh. Spasms wrack her body. She crams her hands into her mouth, she fears she will vomit, she imagines she is giving birth. Finally, well aware that her convulsions would register as subversion to a regime that polices bodies and supervises affects, Offred crawls into a cupboard in an effort to "compose herself." Laughter without Humor arose from this passage, from the inexplicable laughter that overwhelms Offred's disciplined body and demolishes her carefully composed self. The suspicion that laughter challenges the self-contained "I" has always been buried in our idioms: the subject "dissolves" in laughter, the individual proliferates suddenly into a "barrel" or "bundle" of laughs, ontological boundaries are breached as we "roar" or "bark" with laughter. In the twentieth-century, laughter appears across a wide variety of artistic forms as a vigorous affective force capable of convulsing being and exploding calcified structures of thought. This project examines the interrelationship between fictional depictions of humorless laughter and the dissolution and reconfiguration of the subject in poststructuralist theory.
The field of humor studies, which counts Aristotle, Kant, and Freud among its contributors, avoids laughter's irrational properties and instead offers scientific reasons--physiological, evolutionary, and psychological--as to why we laugh. In contrast, Laughter without Humor seeks to understand laughter on its own terms by posing an alternate question: what does laughter do? In four chapters, I consider four discrete strains of humorless laughter: the dankly corporeal flow of a specifically female "dangerous laughter" (Chapter 1), the blustering wave of "ecstatic laughter" associated with mystic experience (Chapter 2), an infectious "grotesque laughter" that tosses the individual back and forth between ontological categories with uncanny fervor (Chapter 3), and the shattering shriek of "atomic laughter" that indexes the experience of total nuclear annihilation (Chapter 4). In particular I focus on literary work from William James, André Breton, T.S. Eliot, Nathanael West, Henri Michaux, Kurt Vonnegut, Stanley Kubrick, Margaret Atwood, and Steven Millhauser; and on philosophical texts by Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Hélène Cixous, Catherine Clément, Julia Kristeva, Édouard Glissant, Brian Massumi, and Eugenie Brinkema. I ultimately argue that the messy burst of laughter disturbs the intelligibility of both self and text. In so doing, it clears a space to imagine new, provisional models of personhood that are based on affective entanglement rather than rational self-containment.
Item Open Access Lost Bodies/Found Objects: Storyville and the Archival Imagination(2017) Sparks, Nikolas OscarIn “Lost Bodies/Found Objects: Storyville and the Archival Imagination,” I engage the numerous collections and scattered ephemera that chronicle the famed New Orleans vice district of Storyville to show the ways in which black life is overwhelmingly criminalized, homogenized, and silenced in narratives of the district. Storyville, the city’s smallest and last vice district, existed from 1897-1917 under the protection of city ordinances. The laws attempted to confine specific vices and individuals within the geographic limits of the district to protect the sanctity of the white family and maintain private property values in the city. As a result, the district strictly managed the lives of women working in the sex trade through policing and residential segregation. While all women were subject to these restrictions, black women were often barred from the relative comforts of the district’s brothels and forced to live and work out of shared shacks called “cribs.” Similarly, though to a much lesser degree, black men who worked in and frequented the district faced their own forms of segregation and racial violence. Turning to a largely obscured set of archival objects discovered through primary research—housing records, biometric technologies such as Bertillon cards, travel literature, and Blue Book guides—I read how discourses of waywardness, domesticity, race, and sexuality at the turn of the twentieth century converge to illuminate the vexed social life of Storyville. I argue that when read alongside popular histories, literary interpretations of the district, and discourses on black social life at the turn of the twentieth century, the records of the district challenge the archival narratives imposed upon them and expand historical approaches to the archives of Storyville.
Item Open Access Machine Poetics: Pound, Stein and the Modernist Imagination(2011) Tost, TonyThis dissertation intervenes in the fields of modernist criticism and new media studies to examine an under-appreciated reciprocity between them. I argue that this reciprocity has not yet been adequately incorporated into a critical reckoning of the modernist period, a literary age too often neglected by new media studies as an epoch of "old media" productions. Even if modernist poets did create works largely intended for traditional book-bound channels, the imaginations that produced those works were forged in the combustible mix of new media and technologies that emerged in the early 20th century.
The argument focuses on the poetics of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, innovative poets who composed some of the most prescient, insightful writings on record about the connections linking technological and poetical developments. Through an examination of these poets' speculative writings, I argue that their experimental poetic methods emerged from their understanding of the challenges posed by new media and technologies. Among these challenges were new velocities of signification that emerged with the proliferation of the telegraph, new capacities for the storage of information that arrived with the introduction of the phonograph, an altered relationship to language itself with the externalized alphabet of the typewriter, and a new feel for how meaning could be generated through the montage logic of the cinema.
Drawing on a critical perspective derived from Martin Heidegger, pragmatist philosophers, Frankfurt School theorists and new media scholars such as Friedrich Kittler and Marshall McLuhan, I examine how modernist poetry, when framed as a media event, can help us understand how technological and media shifts influence our conceptions of our own inner and outer domains.
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