Browsing by Subject "American literature"

In 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.

This 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.

"Anthropomorphic Attachments" undertakes an examination of the human as a highly nebulous, fluid, multiple, and often contradictory concept, one that cannot be approached directly or in isolation, but only in its constitutive relationality with the world. Rather than trying to find a way outside of the dualism between human and not-human, I take up the concept of anthropomorphization as a way to hypersaturate the question of the human. Within this hypersaturated field of inquiry, I focus on the specific anthropomorphic relationalities between human and humanoid technology. Focusing primarily on contemporary U.S. technologies and cultural forms, my dissertation looks at artificial intelligence and robotics in conversation with their cultural imaginaries in contemporary literature, science fiction, film, performance art, and video games, and in conversation with contemporary philosophies of the human, the posthuman, and technology. In reading these discourses as shaping, informing, and amplifying each other and the multiple conceptions of the human they articulate, "Anthropomorphic Attachments" attends to these multiple humans and the multiple morphologies by which anthropomorphic relationalities imagine and inscribe both humanoid technologies and the human itself.

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.

In 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.

Bodily Trespass situates the fantastic as a discourse of spatial production in twentieth-century black American literature. Eruptions of the fantastic in realist and surrealist narratives index and ameliorate the spatial constriction that informs black American subjectivity from the Middle Passage up through to the contemporary carceral state. The black fantastic is a narrative response to a spatial crisis that is corporeal and ontological. As a literary mode, in the Todorovian sense, the fantastic identifies the real as a production of the "unreal" and calls attention to ideological and institutional apparatuses that sustain the dominant order. Taking Pauline Hopkins' turn of the twentieth-century serial Of One Blood, Or, The Hidden Self as a point of departure, this project examines the fantastic as a discourse of Pan-Africanism during a period Farah Griffin describes as the "nadir" of post-emancipation black life. Hopkins reaches outside of U.S. borders suturing Ethiopia to America in order to fashion a new and "rival" black geography that challenges the eradication of black legal, civic, and social space.

In the postwar years, the production of imaginative space extends to the task of recording and refuting the racial discourse that articulates urbanity. Chester Himes' The Real Cool Killers, Ann Petry's The Street, and Gwendolyn Brooks' Maud Martha depict racially encoded urban geographies as corporeally informed psychosocial "interfaces." These novels identify cartographic locution as a strategy for spatial occupation and psychic rehabilitation. James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" and Ralph Ellison's "The King of the Bingo Game locate in the sonic a blueprint for refashioning the space of the modern metropolis according to a logic of interiority. Baldwin and Ellison identify the fantastic as a discourse of aurality that alters the texture of space by channeling what I call "scalar consciousness," a heightened awareness of the ways in which one might manipulate scale in the service of spatial production. Meditations on belonging, displays of corporeal violence, discourses of Africanity, and the identification of the aural as a pathway for liberation illustrate, in all these works, the black fantastic's rootedness in spatial production, subject formation, and resistance to a dehumanizing social order.

This dissertation takes three crisis periods that have occurred throughout American history—times of war, times of disease, and times of apocalypse—and examines how such periods simultaneously provoke what can be called “traditional” masculine responses of toughness, independence, and executive action along with an alternative gender expression contemporary sociologists refer to as caring masculinity. Rather than consider caring masculinity a new phenomenon, Crisis: Masculinity and an Ethic of Care in American Literature seeks to establish the extended and underexplored history of manhood’s intersection with relational forms of care as expressed in popular literature. By analyzing literary works spanning from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century, Crisis argues that such patterns of practice have existed in many forms, across a variety of situation, and for a long time.

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.

The 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.

This 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.

This dissertation examines the way in which funk music, in the context of twentieth century African American literature, operates as a means of stimulating the sensorium. Funk, narrowly defined as a musical form, once carried negative connotations. Whether understood as depression, a genre of popular music, an odor, or as a euphemism for sex, the genre is concerned with attitude and visible emotions. Much work has been done in the field of African American literature regarding jazz and blues, and studies of hip-hop are gaining traction. Funk, however, has not fulfilled its potential for investigating its affect of musical performance or its connection to narratives. This project is an examination of the aesthetics of this musical form, which will generate more nuanced readings of musical and literary narratives of the 1960s and 1970s through an analysis of sound and its sensorial variants. I examine the function of music in a literary text as opposed to how it is described.

Funk operates as a link between the jazz- and blues-inspired poetry and novels of the early twentieth century on the one hand and the emergence of "urban," "street," or "hip-hop" narratives on the other. Its artistic intervention in social relationships brings the aesthetic and political into conversation. I argue against the binary differentiating "serious" and "popular" musical forms; funk bridges the gap between these two designations in an important context, which creates a sonic and social space to examine the idea of difference both in terms of the general and the specific. A misconception of "sameness" is the site of theoretical and ontological difference or disruption.

Funk's ability to disrupt resides in its paradoxical nature. Rhythmically, the musical genre departs from soul of the 1960s and is fundamental to the development of hip-hop in the late-1970s and early 1980s. Though rooted in distinct rhythmic patterns, Funk seeks to dismantle conceptions of rhythmic expectation and production common in popular music by pushing back against previously popular forms. Prior to Funk's popularity, most musical forms ranging from jazz to rock and roll emphasized the second and fourth beats in a measure. Funk compositions typically emphasize the first and third beats, which changes the momentum of the music. Though it is a genre geared towards dance and therefore rooted in the body and movement, Funk gravitates towards transcending the physical limits of the body by addressing discourses of sensorial perception. Funk (both as a musical genre and an aesthetic) is something of sensory ensemble--each sense a part of the whole, complex experience. The five senses are brought together in an all-out attack on what hegemony comes to represent. Each chapter presents a different mode of assault on the body's ability to process the sensorium. I demonstrate the way Funk disrupts through a fusion of ethnomusicology, socio-cultural analysis, and literary criticism in the act of reading, hearing, watching, smelling, and tasting musical performances, cultural events, and works of literature.

Genocide 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.

Through an analysis of contemporary films, novels, comics, and other popular texts, my dissertation argues that upward class mobility, as the progress narrative through which the American Dream has solidified itself in literary and cultural convention, is based on a false logic of "self-made" individualism. The texts I examine tell a new kind of mobility story: one that openly acknowledges the working-class community interdependence underpinning individuals' ability to rise to their accomplishments. My work spotlights distinctly un-rich communities invested in the welfare of their most vulnerable citizens. It also features goal-oriented individuals who recognize the personal impact of this investment as well as the dignity of poor and working-class people from "heartland" Texas to Lower East Side Manhattan. American-exceptionalist stories no longer ring true with popular audiences faced with diminishing access to economic resources and truly democratic political representation. The growing wealth gap between the corporate elite and everyone else has resulted in a healthy mass skepticism toward simplistic narratives of hard work guaranteeing the comforts of a middle-clas life. The archive I have identified displays a fundamental commitment to the social contract that is perhaps the greatest of U.S. working-class values, offering a hopeful vision of collective accountability to readers and viewers struggling to avoid immobilizing debt, foreclosure, and the unemployment line.

"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.

This 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.

This 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.

This paper examines the social question: is 19th century women's identity socially determined or do 19th century women have the liberty to forge their own identities as they see fit? In order to answer this question, this paper treats Henry James as ethnographer and "Daisy Miller" and The Portrait of a Lady as ethnographies of American women in Victorian Europe. The primary focus of this paper is Isabel Archer and how she is constructed from Henry James's Daisy Miller and George Eliot's Gwendolen Harleth, in order to demonstrate that while 19th century women were victimized by the tyranny of Victorian patriarchy, 19th century women were also capable of resisting and subverting normative Victorian social expectations for women.

This 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.

In 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.

There 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.