Browsing by Department "Literature"
Now showing items 1-20 of 81
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A Meta-Physics of Sexual Difference: The Quantum Gravity Matrix and Embryogenesis of Our Universe
(2021)This dissertation makes a case that sexual difference, to date, has been a deeply misconceptualized philosophical concept. Too often reduced to only one expression of itself—the difference between the sexes—critiques of ... -
Abolitionist Futures: Black Cultural Imagination at the End of the World
(2021)My dissertation, Abolitionist Futures: Black Cultural Imagination at the End of the World, examines abolitionist imagination in the cultural production of black American writers, creatives, activists, and thinkers. From ... -
Affect before Spinoza: Reformed Faith, Affectus, and Experience in Jean Calvin, John Donne, John Milton and Baruch Spinoza
(2009)Affects are not reducible to feelings or emotions. On the contrary, Affect Before Spinoza investigates the extent to which affects exceed, reconfigure and reorganize bodies and subjects. Affects are constitutive of and ... -
An Aesthetic Disposition: Art, Social Reproduction, and Feminist Critique
(2020)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 ... -
Anthropomorphic Attachments in U.S. Literature, Robotics, and Artificial Intelligence
(2010)"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 ... -
Art in the Interregnum: The Aesthetics of Transition, 1973-Present
(2021)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. ... -
Between Boys: Fantasy of Male Homosexuality in Boys’ Love, Mary Renault, and Marguerite Yourcenar
(2018)“Between Boys: Fantasy of Male Homosexuality in Boys’ Love, Mary Renault, and Marguerite Yourcenar” examines an unexpected kinship between Boys’ Love, a Japanese male-on-male romance genre, and literary works by Mary Renault ... -
Beyond Measure: Whiteness in the Twenty-First Century
(2014)In spite of a host of early twenty-first century claims regarding the dawn of a "post-racial" or "anti-racial" era, race remains an important problem for understanding contemporary power. This dissertation provides a genealogical ... -
Big House: Women, Prison, and the Domestic
(2019)Big House: Women, Prison, and the Domestic, addresses the development of the contemporary US carceral state, foregrounding the confinement and control of women and the evolving ideological frameworks and disciplinary techniques ... -
Border Images and Imaginaries: Spectral Aesthetics and Visual Medias of Americanity at the U.S.-Mexico Border
(2014)Border Images and Imaginaries: Spectral Aesthetics and Visual Media of Americanity at the U.S.-Mexico Border, proposes an emerging aesthetic of spectrality in visual media about the U.S.-Mexico border that challenges the ... -
Can't Go Home Again: Sovereign Entanglements and the Black Radical Tradition in the Twentieth Century
(2009)This dissertation investigates the relation between the formation of "Blackness" and the Western tradition of sovereignty through the works of late twentieth century Black Radical theorists. I most specifically examine the ... -
Child's Play: Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Clinic
(2017)In 1925, Sigmund Freud wrote a short preface for August Aichhorn’s forthcoming book, Wayward Youth. There, Freud hailed ‘the child’ as the future of psychoanalysis, declaring that “[o]f all the fields in which psychoanalysis ... -
“Chinese Whispers”? The “China” that Disappears from Lossy Communications
(2021)In 1949, Bell Lab mathematician Claude Shannon modeled telephone communication by assigning statistic regularity to the rather irregular usage of human language. His lab mate Warren Weaver took a step further, putting the ... -
Citizens of a Genre: Forms, Fields and Practices of Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Ethnographic Fiction
(2011)This dissertation examines French and Francophone texts, contexts and thematic problems that comprise a genre I call "ethnographic fiction," whose development we can trace throughout the twentieth century in several geographic ... -
Climate Impasse, Fossil Hegemony, and the Modern Crisis of Imagination
(2022)I argue in this dissertation that “climate impasse” — knowing much and doing little about climate change — has become a defining political, social, and cultural problem of the contemporary period (1980s to the present). ... -
Corporeal Resurfacings: Faustin Linyekula, Nick Cave and Thornton Dial
(2013)"Corporeal Resurfacings: Faustin Linyekula, Nick Cave and Thornton Dial," examines art and performance works by three contemporary black artists. My dissertation is opened by the analytic of black female flesh provided ... -
Demography of Literary Form: Probabilistic Models for Literary History
(2013)Digitization of library collections has made millions of books, newspapers, and academic journal articles accessible. These resources present an opportunity for historians interested in identifying patterns in cultural production ... -
Dena Ongi Dabil! ¡Todo Va Dabuten!: TensiÓN Y Heterogeneidad De La Cultura Radical Vasca En El LÍMite Del Estado DemocrÁTico (1978-...)
(2007-08-15)This dissertation examines the ways in which a youth radical culture developed in the Basque Country after the Spanish Transition from Francoism to a democratic state in the late seventies and early eighties. In the midst ... -
Devorational Cinema: Spectacle, Ritual, and the Senses in Cold War Latin American and Spanish Experimental Film
(2019)This dissertation revisits a neglected archive of avant-garde Cold War-era Latin American and Spanish films which use baroque, excessive aesthetic strategies inspired by popular religious ritual: the experimental documentaries ... -
Digital Environmental Metabolisms: An Ecocritical Project of the Digital Environmental Humanities
(2017)By combining literary, ecocritical, and media techniques with a mindfulness of the environment, “Digital Environmental Metabolisms: An Ecocritical Project of the Digital Environmental Humanities” contributes to the urgent ...
