Browsing by Subject "Herman Melville"

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.

"The Uses of Literature: Gilles Deleuze's American Rhizome" puts four writers - Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, George Jackson and William S. Burroughs - in conjunction with four concepts - becoming-democratic, belief in the world, the line of flight, and finally, control societies. The aim of this study is to elaborate and expand on Gilles Deleuze's extensive use of American literature and to examine possible conjunctions of his philosophy with contemporary American literary criticism and American Studies. I argue that Deleuze's interest in American writing not only productively complicates recent historical accounts of "French Theory's" incursion into American academia, but also provides a compelling way think about the relationship between literature and history, language and experience, and the categories of minor and major that organize national literary traditions. Beginning with the concept of the "American rhizome" this dissertation approaches the question of rhizomatic thought as a constructivist methodology for engaging the relationship between literary texts and broader social movements. Following an introduction laying out the basic coordinates of such an approach, and their historical relevance with respect to the reception of "French Theory" in the United States, the subsequent chapters each take an experimental approach with respect to a single American writer invoked in Deleuze's work and a concept that resonantes with the literary text under consideration. In foregrounding the question of the use of literature this dissertation explores the ways literature has been appropriated, set to work, or dismissed in various historical and institutional arrangements, but also seeks to suggest the possibility of creating conditions in which literature can be said to take on a life of its own.