Browsing by Subject "Aesthetics"

This thesis explores the confluence and clashes between local and global cultural flows in Latin America through the multiple literary movements and tendencies for which the Colombian author, Fernando Vallejo, acts as a unifying agent. My analysis pulls from Decolonial, Aesthetic and World Literary theories, in order to analyze how cosmopolitanism and globalization resonate in contemporary Latin American letters through a survey of three geocultural categories: the Colombian local, the Latin American regional, and the literary global. My analysis of the local tracks the formal evolution of the Colombian Novela de la Violencia into the contemporary Novela Urbana and the parallel political challenge to the conventional Lettered City in Colombia after the Violencia. In terms of the regional, I critique the idea of a positive and universally stabilizing cosmopolitanism through a collective analysis of a generation of Latin American writers that were forced to travel to the cosmopolitan center through exile rather than as an act of freewill, a generation that I refer to in this project as the Generation of '72. And my evaluation of the global considers how a singular World Literary aesthetics and political economy of prestige weights negatively on contemporary Latin American authors. Through a survey of the roughly fifty novels and short stories that fall under the purview of both the Colombian Urban Novel and the Generation of `72, I conclude that aesthetic borders - the places where multiple forms of perception converge- open up spaces and forums of critique of rigid cultural models and century old aesthetic formulae, a tendency that I refer to as a poetics of globalism.

This project focuses on the question: how might we understand the politics of contemporary art? Grounding my research in feminist political theory, I argue that art’s most critical function—in the US-based context of neoliberalism—may be found in art’s ability to perform the work of social reproduction. I draw the concept of social reproduction from feminist and critical theory to mean two things. First, regarding social reproduction as a paradigm for social change, I ask how works of art participate in building subjects and structures that prefigure alternative, life sustaining worlds. Second, regarding social reproduction as the labor of care, I develop a theory of art as a source of critical hope and sensible rejuvenation. My work thus complicates the common belief—held for example in critical theory—that sensible stimulation obscures critical awareness and encourages apolitical escape. To the contrary, I find art to offer needed resources for critical world-building precisely through the aesthetic dispositions that artworks prompt. I build this argument through close attention to the work of three US-based women artists: Simone Leigh, Roni Horn, and Mika Rottenberg. By foregrounding the work of these artists in conversation with recent feminist thinking on affect and political economy, my research reorients the discourse on aesthetics and politics away from an emphasis on knowledge and subject representation, toward the undervalued work of somatic care and subject formation.

In the context of today's global mobility, information, bodies and goods are circulating across the globe, and even further into outer space. However, we face a paradox: the more we move, the more we become sedentary. The modes of transportation that enable our global mobility are working against us, insidiously dwindling our psycho-physical mobility. Globalization is thus not the world becoming bigger (or too big), but the world becoming immobile. Taking the body as the central non-place of political space, Architectures of Aliveness: Building Beyond Gravity interrogates the possibility of inhabiting circulation as a pragmatic form of resistance to the contemporary immobilization of life. In an era in which bodies and goods are ever more constantly in global circulation, architectures of aliveness ask, what would an experience of weightlessness do for us?

Biotechnology serves as the current dominant model for enlivening architecture and the mobility of its inhabitants. Architectures of aliveness invert the inquiry to look instead at outer space's modules of inhabitation. In questioning the possibility of making circulation inhabitable --as opposed to only inhabiting what is stationary--architectures of aliveness problematize architecture as a form of biomedia production in order to examine its capacity to impact psychic and bodily modalities toward an intensification of health. Problematized synchretically within life's mental and physical polarization, health is understood politically as an accretion of our capacity for action instead of essentially as an optimization of the biological body. The inquiry emerges at the intersection of biotechnology, neurosciences, outer space science and technology, and architecture. The analysis oscillates between historical and contemporary case studies toward an articulation that concentrates on contemporary phenomena while maintaining an historical perspective. The methodology combines archival research, interviews, and artistic and literary analysis. The analysis is informed by scientific research. More precisely, the objective is to construct an innovative mode of thinking about the fields of exchangeability between arts and sciences beyond a critique of instrumentality.

The outcomes suggest that architectures of aliveness are architectures that invite modes of inhabitation that deviate from habitualized everyday spatial engagements. It also finds that the feeling of aliveness emerges out of the production of analog or continuous space where the body is in relation with space as opposed to be represented in it. The analysis concludes that the impact of architecture on our sense of wellbeing is conditioned by proprioceptive experiences that are at once between vision and movement and yet at the same time in neither mode, suggesting an aesthetic of inhabitation based on our sense of weightedness and weightlessness.

These outcomes are thus transduced to the field of media studies to enchant biomediatic inquiry. Proposing a renewed definition of biomedia that interprets life as a form of aesthetic relation, architectures of aliveness also formulate a critique of the contemporary imperialism of visualization techniques. Architectures of aliveness conclude by questioning the political implications of its own method to suggest opacity and agonistic spaces as the biomediatic forms of political space.

Art in the Interregnum: The Aesthetics of Transition, 1973-Present adopts the interregnum, a concept imported into critical usage by Antonio Gramsci, as a periodizing framework for understanding cultural production today. While incarcerated in Turin during the early 1930s, Gramsci wrote: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Adapting this formulation to the era of neoliberal globalization, I argue for reading contemporary works of art in relation to the long crisis of the 1970s, examining how writers, photographers and filmmakers encode the “morbid symptoms” of the contemporary, which include the erosion of liberal democracy, the rise of mass migration, and the exhaustion of modernization. I devote three chapters to the phenomena enumerated above, analyzing, respectively, Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile (2000) and Pablo Larraín’s Tony Manero (2009) as a return to the primal scene of neoliberalism—the 1973 U.S. backed Chilean coup; the photography Harry Gamboa Jr. and Anthony Hernandez as competing representations on the mobility of labor; and the recent fixation with landscape in recent photography and fiction as an aesthetic challenge to the expansive logic of economic development. What brings these works together is a commitment to what I call the “aesthetics of transition,” a mode of representation that attempts to make visible the interregnum between the failure of existing political structures and emerging social forms, bringing the post-1970s into view as an historical period.

This dissertation deals with Cuban art criticism and other written texts related to Abstract Art. From a critical perspective that relates art to society and political and institutional practices, all of the above texts are interpreted as bearers of aesthetic ideologies, which are expressed in the paradigms from which Art Criticism attempted to validate Abstraction. This study further demonstrates that the dominant discourses in the realm of Art Criticism are strongly related to Ideological State Apparatuses. Art Criticism not only mediates between the artwork and the spectator, but also between artistic acts of provocation and the establishment.

Abstraction in Cuba constituted an important axis in the polemic between autonomous art and socially committed art, but the debates themselves were subsumed in ideological and even political battlefields. Art Criticism oriented these debates, by emphasizing certain problems, and diminishing the importance of other ones.

This dissertation is organized in function of the dominant questions that Cuban Art Criticism addressed. The first chapter accordingly deals with definitions of abstract art that were prevalent in art writing and publications from 1948 to 1957, a period in which Art Criticism is mostly concerned with the autonomy of art. The second chapter follows the debates about the social commitment of abstract art, which became predominant during the first years of a Marxist-oriented Revolution. This polemic is implicit in the emergence of an Anti-Academic movement in the visual arts, and it began to lose its strength once the Cuban Avant-Garde started to gain institutional recognition. After being relegated to a peripheral position, the question concerning the social commitment of Abstract Art became crucial after the triumph of the Revolution. The final chapter deals with the relations between Abstract Art and the diverse documents that embodied and defined the Cultural Policy during the Cuban Revolution.

Throughout, this study strives to establish the place of Abstract Art in the Institutional, and discursive practices from 1959 onwards. This place is defined by its instability, as it is constituted through intermittencies and steps backwards on the path towards the institutional consecration of non-figurative tendencies.

This dissertation attempts to shed explanatory light on the work of Johann Sebastian Bach by situating it within the broader framework of Lutheran theological aesthetics. Although Bach has long been considered one of the most influential musicians in European history, he wrote very little about himself and the personal convictions that inspired his music. This vacuum has prompted theologians and musicologists to explore – and speculate about – the nature of those convictions and the historical sources that shaped them. Here I argue that Bach was a sophisticated interpreter of Lutheran aesthetics, who used music to make the beauty of Christ’s cosmic redemption more audible to his listeners.In order to defend this thesis, I adopt the following methodology: in chapter one, I present a conception of Bachian aesthetics from both theoretical and practical perspectives. In chapter two, I open up a historical vantage point for understanding that aesthetic conception: the thought of Martin Luther and his followers. Although Luther has typically been considered an anti-aesthetic figure, I follow the recent Luther scholarship of Mark C. Mattes and Miikka E. Anttila, who argue that Luther held to a radically Christocentric conception of beauty. After presenting my condensed rendering of Lutheran aesthetics, in chapter three I seek to situate music within that theo-dramatic framework. For Luther, music is one of the most beautiful gifts of God, which was created through Christ and can help Christians gain a foretaste of the heavenly beauty achieved by Christ’s crucifixion. In chapter four, then, I re-read chapter one in light of chapters two and three, with the goal of presenting Bach as a sophisticated interpreter of Lutheran aesthetics. In chapter five, I pivot to consider the implications of this study for the modern academy and church, two locales that are critical for both Bach and this dissertation. In particular, I suggest that neither the modern academy nor the modern church offer an entirely hospitable locale for studying and understanding Bach’s music. The dissertation closes by offering several alternative cultural locales for understanding Bachian aesthetics, to which both the contemporary academy and church should pay more attention.

This dissertation attempts to shed explanatory light on the work of Johann Sebastian Bach by situating it within the broader framework of Lutheran theological aesthetics. Although Bach has long been considered one of the most influential musicians in European history, he wrote very little about himself and the personal convictions that inspired his music. This vacuum has prompted theologians and musicologists to explore – and speculate about – the nature of those convictions and the historical sources that shaped them. Here I argue that Bach was a sophisticated interpreter of Lutheran aesthetics, who used music to make the beauty of Christ’s cosmic redemption more audible to his listeners.In order to defend this thesis, I adopt the following methodology: in chapter one, I present a conception of Bachian aesthetics from both theoretical and practical perspectives. In chapter two, I open up a historical vantage point for understanding that aesthetic conception: the thought of Martin Luther and his followers. Although Luther has typically been considered an anti-aesthetic figure, I follow the recent Luther scholarship of Mark C. Mattes and Miikka E. Anttila, who argue that Luther held to a radically Christocentric conception of beauty. After presenting my condensed rendering of Lutheran aesthetics, in chapter three I seek to situate music within that theo-dramatic framework. For Luther, music is one of the most beautiful gifts of God, which was created through Christ and can help Christians gain a foretaste of the heavenly beauty achieved by Christ’s crucifixion. In chapter four, then, I re-read chapter one in light of chapters two and three, with the goal of presenting Bach as a sophisticated interpreter of Lutheran aesthetics. In chapter five, I pivot to consider the implications of this study for the modern academy and church, two locales that are critical for both Bach and this dissertation. In particular, I suggest that neither the modern academy nor the modern church offer an entirely hospitable locale for studying and understanding Bach’s music. The dissertation closes by offering several alternative cultural locales for understanding Bachian aesthetics, to which both the contemporary academy and church should pay more attention.

The aim of this dissertation is to expound the role of vision in John Calvin’s theology. Given the many-sided and often confusing—sometimes even apparently contradictory—nature of Calvin’s account and use of the category of vision, I set out to illuminate the implicit and deeply rooted coherence of his thought on this topic. Calvin’s treatment of vision consistently intertwines two fundamental elements: (1) a theological interpretation of the literal, bodily sense of sight, and (2) the use of sight as a metaphor for comprehensive, penetrating ‘spiritual’ understanding. A dominant strand of scholarship, along with much popular thinking about Calvin, tends to regard him as either an extreme iconoclast or, if the visual is acknowledged as playing a role in his theology, as always insisting on recourse to ‘the word’ over against the visual. (The word, for Calvin, encompasses both Jesus Christ as ‘Word’ and ‘words’ proclaimed or spoken about Christ, including, for example, the Christian sermon and sacred Scripture.) By contrast, I contend that visual patterns of thinking pervade his thought, even without recourse to the word, which is to say the use of language to describe or clarify the visual. To this end, I propose that his theological use of vision is best elicited according to an implicit distinction between simply ‘seeing’ (frequently, specere) things as they appear to present themselves—that is to say, perceiving a thing isolated from God and all other created things; and ‘beholding’ (frequently, aspicere) things as they truly are—that is to say, understanding a thing in relation to God and, by extension, to all other created things. Seeing indicates the superficial perception of some thing, grounded in mere physical perception, while beholding indicates dynamic vision, which may also be called ‘insight,’ involving the exercise of faith, in which some thing is comprehended in relation to the divine and thereby to all other created things. While beholding may or may not entail physically seeing an object, it does require that a thing be understood in relation to its source and end, which, according to Calvin, is God. Seeing and beholding are related in that both are modes of visual comprehension—involving a range of modes of visual encounter, from literal sight to mental picturing to singular visual manifestations of the divine—though seeing is a relatively diminished mode of visual comprehension in relation to beholding. Around this seeing-beholding distinction I organize what I call Calvin’s ‘theology of vision.’

The bulk of this dissertation is occupied with an exposition of Calvin’s theology of vision. After developing an account of it, I close by drawing out some of its implications for current debate in theological aesthetics. I suggest that Calvin gives us theological tools for articulating the mystery of humanity’s visually mediated encounter with divinity in a way that encompasses but is not reducible to the traditional concepts of aesthetic experience and aesthetic action.

In the decades following the English Civil War, as the Anglophone world began transitioning to a social order structured by market and finance capitalism, the word cultivation, which earlier had referred exclusively to agricultural processes, acquired increasingly figurative meanings referring to the development of an individual's mind, faculties, and manners. This augmentation of meaning reflected the development of new conceptions of property as an essential feature of personhood that had begun to alter the definition of subjectivity. The circulation of such figurative meanings coincides with the rise of print culture, the development of a literary public sphere, and the professionalization of writing in the eighteenth century. These cultural developments suggest the relative ease with which the new conception of property expressed as literary personality coexisted alongside other forms of capital in Britain. Literary criticism of the last forty years, including the work of Raymond Williams, Clifford Siskin, Jerome Christensen, and Thomas Pfau, has accounted for the many ways in which possessing literary cultivation served the development of a middle-class economy and ideology in eighteenth-and-nineteenth century Britain. Though the figurative meaning of cultivation appears throughout American literature of the long nineteenth century, thus attesting to the concept's transatlantic migration and adaptation to the socio-political climates of the New World, no significant studies of American literature have considered the role literary cultivation itself plays in shaping American ideas of personality. My study begins to facilitate an understanding of how modern definitions of property affected and effected early American literary culture.

By placing American literature of the long nineteenth century in a transatlantic context, I show how five works by De Crevecoeur, Franklin, Equiano, Brockden Brown, and Margaret Fuller model the relationship between real and metaphorical cultivation at the level of both form and narrative content. I argue that within these works literary personality appears as a threat to the American character unless it directly facilitates the acquisition of real property. That in an American context figurative cultivation is at all times subordinated to real cultivation suggests a suspicion of intellectual development at the very foundations of American culture. I draw on new work in early American literature, eighteenth-century studies, British Romanticism, and on a tradition of Marxist critique to read American personality not as an exceptional and isolated development of the revolutionary era, but as a transatlantic migration of cultural forms and conceptions that adapt and mutate upon arriving on New World soil. To understand these migrations and mutations, I map the importation of European aesthetic concepts and literary sources within American productions. My readings make sense of the contradictions within the anti-literary American ideology often articulated in the content of works, whose forms nevertheless reveal a comprehensive engagement with literary history. Doing so allows me to demonstrate the complex ways in which early American authors depicted literary cultivation as either a means of acquiring real property or as a moral redress against the self interest of a speculative economic culture.

ABSTRACT

In this dissertation I examine Calvin's trinitarian theology as it intersects his theology of materiality in order to argue for a positive theological account of the liturgical arts. I do so believing that Calvin's theology of materiality not only offers itself as a rich resource for thinking about the nature of Christian worship, it also opens up a trinitarian grammar by which we might understand the theological purposes of the arts in public worship.

Using Calvin's commentary on musical instruments as a case study, generally representative of his thinking on all the liturgical arts, I identify four emphases: that the church's worship should be (i) devoid of the "figures and shadows" which marked Israel's praise and that it emphasize instead a (ii) "spiritual," (iii) "simple," and (iv) "articulate" worship suitable to a new covenantal era. A common feature of these emphases is an anxiety over the capacity of materiality to occlude or distort the public worship of God and to mislead the worship of the faithful in idolatrous or superstitious ways. While a more narrowly patrological argument dominates Calvin's thinking on the arts in worship, I contend that it is in his thinking on creation, the resurrected body of Christ, the material symbols of worship, and the material elements of the Lord's Supper, that a distinctly trinitarian pattern of thought becomes conspicuous. Here materiality discovers its telos in the economy of God by way of its participation in the dynamic activities of Christ and the Spirit.

Taking the first three emphases in turn, while setting aside his concern for "articulate" worship as an issue more directly related to the question of metaphor rather than materiality, I argue, sometimes against Calvin, sometimes with and beyond Calvin, for a more integral role for materiality in public worship, even if this means following the logic of Calvin's theology to conclusions which he himself did not imagine. I contend that just as the triune God appropriates these distinctive material things to form and feed the church, so he takes the liturgical arts, as material artifacts, to form and feed the church in their own way, even if not on their own terms.

The artists and writers of my dissertation -- Robert Smithson, Ed Roberson, Rodolfo Kusch, Alejandra Pizarnik, Nancy Holt, Lygia Clark, and Clarice Lispector -- teach us to feel the ground on which we stand as an earth that quakes, and this feeling implies a radical reconfiguration of our relation to the world, one which makes perception, language, art, and world otherwise. Against an aesthetics of representation, predicated on a regime of pleasurable feeling and form which neutralizes the world into an empty space filled with objects, and which I argue lingers as the hegemonic framework for the study of American literature, they offer an understanding art and literature as an embodied engagement with the weight of a world that presses in and pulls down. I call this feeling an aeisthesis of ground and offer it as a way to rethink the ethics of our relation to the world. From this trembling ground, these artists and writers struggle to make the world and our relation to it otherwise. In so doing, they contribute to the project of decolonizing the aesthetic imaginary of the Americas. They propose a different point of departure for the study of American literature, one which allows us to cultivate unlikely lines of kinship between authors and texts on both sides of the Rio Grande. Engaging the work of these authors and artists contributes to current work in the humanities which has turned to aesthetics as a way to rethink our human relation to the world in the face of our global ecological crisis. It, however, also radically departs from these efforts precisely in its point of departure, remaking this relation from the more unsteady ground of American art, letters, and life that these artists help us unfold.

Impure Cinema: Political Pedagogies in Film and Theory asks what are the ways that the politics of film theory have been conceptualized since the era now known as "70s film theory." In particular, it analyzes the writings on cinema, politics and art by contemporary French philosophers Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière in relation to the influential approaches of Louis Althusser and Gilles Deleuze and to theories of documentary cinema. I argue that unlike the political modernism of 70s film theory and the post-theory turn of 90s film studies, Badiou and Rancière offer an approach to film theory that neither assumes that all films are political, nor that politics underdetermine theory, but rather suggests that we analyze both theories and films in terms of how they construct connections between cinema and politics. Following Deleuze, I call these connections "pedagogical" not because they transmit knowledge but because they always involve a new kind of connection or relation that seeks to transform habitual ways of seeing, saying or doing. For Badiou and Rancière this is based on a conception of cinema as "impure." Cinema, they argue, is never free of elements from other arts or daily life, but it is this impurity that is the grounds for linking its artistic and political possibilities. I look at various film forms that highlight cinema's impurity, in particular the "actuality" and how it has been reappropriated in various forms of documentary and essayistic practices as a way of giving cinematic form to questions of political equality.

The dissertation examines the work contemporary artists, curators, and scholars who have, in the last two decades, addressed urgent political and economic questions by revisiting the legacies of the Yugoslav twentieth century: multinationalism, socialist self-management, non-alignment, and war. I conceptualize the work of contemporary artists as that of Yugoslavia’s “surviving generation,” and use it as a starting point for a reconstruction of what I argue is a decolonial twentieth-century Yugoslav aesthetics that has persisted into the present despite numerous and violent historical ruptures. I also seek analogies between this aesthetics and a number of theoretical frameworks, in particular those of Edmund Husserl, Frantz Fanon and Judith Butler, whose work similarly arose out of constellations of crisis, death, and survival. The worldwide strengthening of conservative and nationalist movements following the crisis of capitalism in 2008 reveals the violent break-up of socialist Yugoslavia in the 1990s as a precursor to global developments, rather than an exception, and my dissertation argues for a global import of the Yugoslav experience. From the anti-imperialist assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, the communist-led resistance during WW2, the anti-Stalinist socialist state and its prominent role in the Non-Aligned Movement, to the war-ridden, post-communist transition, the Yugoslav century is not only co-extensive with the dreams and disasters of the “short twentieth century” (1914-1991), but can be seen as this century’s metonymy, or even, synecdoche. The engagement of contemporary artists, scholars and curators with the aesthetic and political legacies of the Yugoslav century, the dissertation argues, opens up the possibility to read Yugoslavia both as a proper name, designating a particular history, and as a universally valid signifier for a number of unresolved and persisting questions of the past: the quest for social equality, ongoing forms of colonialism and decolonization, the return(s) of nationalism, and the crises of capitalism and democracy.

This thesis surveys the aesthetics mobilized by Yiyun Li’s Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life and Where Reasons End as well as Weike Wang’s Joan is Okay to accommodate and navigate the negative, non-cathartic, and untelegenic feelings that arise in Asian American and diasporic realities. This thesis adopts the theoretical framework of minor literature, minor feelings, and minor aesthetics, which prefigures a formal-affective-aesthetic approach. Pertaining to the specificities of Asian American and Asian diasporic affectivity, this thesis focuses on unfeeling as an example of minor feeling and examines the aesthetics of flatness and inscrutability. Li’s two works and Wang’s work are chosen for they exhibit different ways of representing and negotiating affective flatness and inscrutability. With two main body chapters respectively devoted to Li’s writing and Wang’s writing, this thesis theorizes the critical productivity, aesthetic sensibility, and political potential of unfeeling and inscrutability. With regard to the general field of Asian American literary studies, this thesis contributes to the pertinent questions of how to read superficiality and inscrutability as well as how to theorize negativity and ambivalence.

This dissertation uses Nietzsche's writings on truth and metaphor as a lens through which to reconsider the contribution that modernist art sought to make to both the understanding and, ultimately, the reconstruction of everyday life. It begins with a consideration of the sentiment, first articulated on a wide scale by the artists and philosophers of the romantic era, that something essential to the cohesion of individual and social experience has been lost during the turbulent transition to modernity. By situating Nietzsche's thought vis-à-vis the decline of nineteenth-century idealism in both its Continental and Victorian forms, I demonstrate how his principal texts brought to an advanced stage of philosophical expression a set of distinctly post-romantic concerns about the role of mind and language in the construction of reality that would soon come to define the practice of modernism in philosophy and the arts. Nietzsche's contribution to moral philosophy is typically regarded as a skeptical, and even wholly negative, one. Yet a central element of his thought is obscured, I argue, when we fail to account for its positive conviction that "higher moralities are, or ought to be, possible." Because his philosophy attempts to diagnose "genealogically" the concrete social, historical, and psychological conditions under which truth-relations are generated and maintained within a given cultural framework, it is in fact every bit as constructive as it is deconstructive, involving a sustained and ethically significant reflection on the character of normativity itself.

This initial confrontation with Nietzsche's philosophy sets the stage for the studies of individual artists--the American poets Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens, as well as the Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman--for whom these traditionally epistemological concerns about the nature of representation also shade naturally into the domain of ethics. In these chapters, I demonstrate how aesthetic modernism produces a range of sophisticated responses to the predicament of relativism that Nietzsche articulated while reaching sometimes radically different conclusions than Nietzsche about the nature and extent of human agency in the modern world. This enables us to see how modernism makes an essential contribution to what the philosopher Charles Taylor has characterized as the broader cultural effort to "overcome epistemology" by exploring the structures of intentionality and fostering in us a basic "awareness about the limits and conditions of our knowing"--a project to which modernist art and philosophy both make essential contributions.

What ideological dreams does music express? And how does it do so? In listening to three paradigmatic moments in American Jazz, this dissertation attempts to answer these two problems by illustrating how the modes of our production structure the range of our interpretive possibilities, and how music responds to and overcomes these dilemmas aesthetically.

Following World War II, the network emerged as both a major material structure and one of the most ubiquitous metaphors of the globalizing world. Over subsequent decades, scientists and social scientists increasingly applied the language of interconnection to such diverse collective forms as computer webs, terrorist networks, economic systems, and disease ecologies. The prehistory of network discourse can be traced back to descriptions of cellular formations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the invention of the electrical telegraph in the nineteenth century. Even so, it was not until the 1940s that researchers and writers began to rely on a more generalized network vocabulary to reflect fledgling material modes of interlinked organization and construct a new postwar vision of the world.

Since the 1970s, the field of network science has given rise to an even wider range of research on complexity, self-organization, sustainability, group interactions, and systemic resilience. Scientists such as Albert-Laszlo Barabasi have studied network design and new media critics such as Alexander Galloway have addressed network ontology. This dissertation contends that to grasp the effects of networks on globalization, we must also look at the fears, hopes, and affects that they generate. While network scientists have been less concerned with the cultural fears, political investments, and changes in human subjectivity signaled by networks, my study of American literature focuses on writers, filmmakers, and media innovators who have captured the deep transformations of the era of interconnection. These artists have achieved insights about networks not through scientific analysis, but through aesthetic, narrative, and media-specific experimentation.

Network Aesthetics examines how contemporary American literature, film, television, and new media dramatize the affects -- alternatively terrifying and thrilling -- of interconnection. This interdisciplinary project combines numerous methodologies, including literary analysis, media studies, cultural criticism, and political theory. Given the importance of networks to representation, communication, and computing, these structures serve as an ideal hinge for operating intermedia exchanges. Using varied tools, I analyze terrorist networks (Stephen Gaghan's Syriana), financial systems (Don DeLillo's Underworld), computer webs (Marge Piercy's He, She, and It), neoimperial networks (Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow), social networks (David Simon's The Wire), and interactive game networks (Persuasive Games' Killer Flu). In the end, I argue that obsessions with abstract network threats and solutions reveal a change in the most dramatic social protocols of our connected world. Understanding how networks have formally come to evoke fear can help us grow less susceptible to an American politics of terror and more able to act justly as we negotiate our interconnected world.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, historians in the United States described their work as an aesthetic practice. The romantic nationalist George Bancroft claimed that historical writing ought to provide readers with a series of beautiful images that would "secure the affections" of the American people for the U.S. Constitution. William H. Prescott, author of volumes on the age of conquest, introduced his most popular work by claiming that he wanted to present his readers with a "picture true in itself" and, through his vividly imaginative descriptions, "to surround them in the spirit of the times." For this generation of historians, their magisterial texts were not simply more or less true accounts of European experience in the New World or the story of the nation's revolutionary origins, they were paintings in words--expressionistic and romantic images that would make the passions, conflicts, and virtues of previous generations available to their readers as an imaginative experience.

Scholars have long understood the various forms of historical consciousness of the nineteenth-century as producing national, imperial, and racial orders in their imagination of the United States as the locus of a linear and progressive flowering of liberty in the New World. My project supplements these totalizing accounts by examining the central texts of nationalist history through the lens of literary analysis to demonstrate how their aesthetic dimensions both enabled and disrupted such a political and temporal imagination. Romantic history emerged in an era of pronounced temporal crisis for the United States. On the surface, these historians sought to provide readers with experiences of an otherwise inaccessible revolutionary past that would help bind a nation confronting fears about dissolution in exponential westward growth, immigration, and the sectional crisis over slavery. Yet, when we look closer at these texts, we realize that they contain covert recognitions of the vitality of struggles for freedom taking place elsewhere--in Haiti, Mexico, or West Indian abolition--that exceeded the terms of U.S. racial republicanism and claimed futures at odds with nationalism's sense of historical preeminence. Both compelled and horrified by the assertion of black freedom throughout the Atlantic world, the beautiful and haunted images of romantic history registered the irruptive force of transatlantic political movements nominally inadmissible within U.S. historical discourse.

While romantic historians developed aesthetic norms for confronting and disavowing alternatives to national orders of time and political progress, abolitionist writers held fast to these disruptions to construct an aesthetics of slave revolution. In the second half of my dissertation, I examine the trajectory of this black radical tradition from the abolitionist historians of the antebellum period to the twentieth-century thinkers who adapted and transformed these aesthetics into a comprehensive anti-imperialism. Considering writings by William C. Nell, Martin R. Delany, W.E.B. Du Bois and C.L.R. James I argue that this tradition did more than reconstruct histories of black political life that had been suppressed by white supremacist orders of knowledge. These writers vitalized history with alternate models of freedom as immediate, proliferating, and eruptive--even when they also sought for signs of racial progress in a linear model. In their vivid descriptions of an experience of freedom that was irreducible to linear models of progress, these texts produced what Walter Benjamin once described as "the constructive principle" in materialist history: "where thinking suddenly halts in a constellation overflowing with tensions, there it yields a shock to the same." This shock of overflowing tensions is the moment when history becomes aesthetic--when imaginative excess overturns the narrative form of history. I ultimately argue that the aesthetics of history can help us reconsider the political stakes of historical scholarship, allowing us to think about the writing of history as an ongoing encounter with freedom that always exceeds the limits of factual, analytical and discursive accounts of what has been.

Few symbols of 1950s-1960s America remain as central to our contemporary conception of Cold War culture as the iconic ranch-style suburban home. While the house took center stage in the Nixon/Khrushchev kitchen debates as a symbol of modern efficiency and capitalist values, its popularity depended largely upon its obvious appropriation of vernacular architecture from the 19th century, those California haciendas and Texas dogtrots that dotted the American west. Contractors like William Levitt modernized the historical common houses, hermetically sealing their porous construction, all while using the ranch-style roots of the dwelling to galvanize a myth of an indigenous American culture. At a moment of intense occupational bureaucracy, political uncertainty and atomized social life, the rancher gave a self-identifying white consumer base reason to believe they could master their own plot in the expansive frontier. Only one example of America’s mid-century love affair with commodified vernacular forms, the ranch-style home represents a broad effort on the part of corporate and governmental interest groups to transform the vernacular into a style that expresses a distinctly homogenous vision of American culture. “Other than a Citizen” begins with an anatomy of that transformation, and then turns to the work of four poets who sought to reclaim the vernacular from that process of standardization and use it to countermand the containment-era strategies of Cold War America.

In four chapters, I trace references to common speech and verbal expressivity in the poetry and poetic theory of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and Gwendolyn Brooks, against the historical backdrop of the Free-Speech Movement and the rise of mass-culture. When poets frame nonliterary speech within the literary page, they encounter the inability of writing to capture the vital ephemerality of verbal expression. Rather than treat this limitation as an impediment, the writers in my study use the poem to dramatize the fugitivity of speech, emphasizing it as a disruptive counterpoint to the technologies of capture. Where critics such as Houston Baker interpret the vernacular strictly in terms of resistance, I take a cue from the poets and argue that the vernacular, rooted etymologically at the intersection of domestic security and enslaved margin, represents a gestalt form, capable at once of establishing centralized power and sparking minor protest. My argument also expands upon Michael North’s exploration of the influence of minstrelsy and regionalism on the development of modernist literary technique in The Dialect of Modernism. As he focuses on writers from the early 20th century, I account for the next generation, whose America was not a culturally inferior collection of immigrants but an imperial power, replete with economic, political and artistic dominance. Instead of settling for an essentially American idiom, the poets in my study saw in the vernacular not phonetic misspellings, slang terminology and fragmented syntax, but the potential to provoke and thereby frame a more ethical mode of social life, straining against the regimentation of citizenship.

My attention to the vernacular argues for an alignment among writers who have been segregated by the assumption that race and aesthetics are mutually exclusive categories. In reading these writers alongside one another, “Other than a Citizen” shows how the avant-garde concepts of projective poetics and composition by field develop out of an interest in black expressivity. Conversely, I trace black radicalism and its emphasis on sociality back to the communalism practiced at the experimental arts college in Black Mountain, North Carolina, where Olson and Duncan taught. In pressing for this connection, my work reveals the racial politics embedded within the speech-based aesthetics of the postwar era, while foregrounding the aesthetic dimension of militant protest.

Not unlike today, the popular rhetoric of the Cold War insists that to be a citizen involves defending one’s status as a rightful member of an exclusionary nation. To be other than a citizen, as the poets in my study make clear, begins with eschewing the false certainty that accompanies categorical nominalization. In promoting a model of mutually dependent participation, these poets lay the groundwork for an alternative model of civic belonging, where volition and reciprocity replace compliance and self-sufficiency. In reading their lines, we become all the more aware of the cracks that run the length of our load-bearing walls.

This dissertation contends that sound and aurality ought to be more fully integrated into how gender and sexuality are thought. The dissertation’s title, “Partial Figures,” refers to its aims: not to exhaustively document the status of sound within discourses of sexual difference and dissidence, but rather to sketch how queer and feminist thought might draw on sound’s resources. The project is thus situated within the longer trajectory of visual approaches to power and gender. “Partial Figures” also describes what I suggest are sound and aurality’s specific erosion of the figure as a presumptive requirement of approaches to social life and aesthetic form. By partial, I mean both incomplete and nonunitary, subject to the decay and growth, the putative disfigurement, that Hortense Spillers describes under the rubric of flesh. Finally, the notion of being partial, as opposed to impartial, is also at play. Partiality -- having a weakness for something – describes an orientation that bridges affection and dependency or debility; it compromises aesthetics as a site for the exercise of judgement. To be partial to something or someone is to be rendered incomplete by that thing, a torsion or disfigurement that marks queer and feminist method. By considering notions of musical flavor and corporeality (Chapter 1), queer sound ecologies (Chapter 2), and gendered ontologies of frequency and vibration (Chapter 3), I revisit key conceptual knots within theories of gender and sexuality that require a more sustained attention to sound and aurality.

I focus on two fundamental preoccupations within queer and feminist scholarship that, I argue, are reconfigured by the methodological, material, and historical resources of sound: corporeality (Chapter 1) and ecology (Chapter 2). From this assessment of sound’s essential resources for theories of gender and sexuality, Chapter 3 then moves, through a consideration of sexual difference as noise, to suggest that sonic ontologies likewise cannot properly be thought without queer and feminist method.

The first chapter concerns corporeality as a principal site of feminist theory’s turn to questions of matter and affect in the 2000s. For some influential theorists, I argue, an ambiguous and overdetermined relationship between food, fatness, and “epidemic” debility became a cipher for the specifically causative or agential powers of matter and affect. I show, however, that these powers have already been thought otherwise in the overlapping contexts of black studies and musicology. I take up notions of musical flavor and culinary sound in the work of Fred Moten and Theodor Adorno, respectively, alongside Hortense Spillers’ account of ungendered flesh as resisting figuration in the sense of both embodiment and (ac)counting. Like fatness, musical flavor is felt as the distension and elaboration of form and enjoyment, its aesthetic and figural enrichments taken for a failure to budget and apportion pleasure, need, and dependency. Within feminism’s turn toward corporeal matter, I argue, fatness and food have been made to serve as both a hinge and an impasse. On the one hand, the purported links between eating, fatness, and debility have been taken as the very image of self-evident causation. On the other hand, however, fatness troubles etiology, generating endless (and to date, inconclusive) speculation about what causes it and how its alleged social pathology might be reversed. Its status as a site of commingled growth and purported decay, life and “premature” death or debility, has presented itself to some writers as an apparent conundrum. In addition to Moten, Adorno, and Spillers, I draw on critiques of causality by Denise Ferreira da Silva and Michel Foucault. The nonopposition of growth and decay, life and debility, enjoyment and dependency, emerges through music and artworks by Future, UGK, Anicka Yi, Alvin Lucier, and Constantina Zavitsanos, among others.

Chapter 2 concerns a second historically vexed site for thinking gender and sexuality: nature and ecology. I approach the relation between sex, ecology, and sound through one of queer theory’s founding preoccupations: “public,” outdoor, or undomestic sexual gathering. “Public sex” has been imagined as a question of sightlines and their obstruction, but I argue that its sociality is given form by acoustics and acute sensitivity to environmental sound in spaces where visual obscurity offers both protection and danger. I read the 1998 album Second nature: an electro-acoustic pastoral, produced from field recordings of a parkland cruising ground by the group Ultra-red, who develop an audio ecology of this queer sexual commons alongside a critique of the pastoral as a site of musical and ecological containment. Works by Samuel Delany, Simon Leung, June Jordan, Park McArthur, Lorraine O’Grady, TLC, and others situate Ultra-red’s Second nature within an understanding of a sexual commons that views need and dependency as forms of ecological wealth.

Chapter 3 considers noise as a figure for feminine sexual difference, suggesting that ontologies of sound must be conditioned by queer and feminist thought. My argument proceeds through an account of chatter, frequency, and perpetual motion, considering Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” chatbots, gifs, David Lynch’s 2006 film Inland Empire, consciousness-raising, and the work of artists Jessica Vaughn, Amber Hawk Swanson, and Pauline Oliveros. Questions of frequency and vibration have emerged as part of sonic ontologies in recent years; I trace the entry of vibration and “vibes” into U.S. popular discourse in the early 20th century through the theological and musicological writing of Sufi Inayat Khan. Among his areas of influence, I focus on the history of modern dance, particularly its Orientalist preoccupation with the animated wave-forms of loose fabric, which was demonstrably molded by Khan’s theories of vibration. This racially and sexually marked “signature” gesture was the subject of several intellectual property lawsuits that sustained legal ambiguity about the status of performance as property.