Browsing by Subject "American literature"
Now showing items 1-20 of 37
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Against Compulsory Sexuality: Asexual Figures of Resistance
(2022)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 ... -
American Experiments: Science, Aesthetics, and Politics in Clinical Practices of Twentieth-Century American Literature
(2013)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 ... -
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. ... -
Bodily Trespass: An Ecology of the Fantastic in Twentieth-Century African American Literature
(2011)<italic>Bodily Trespass</italic> 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 ... -
Crisis: Masculinity and an Ethic of Care in American Literature
(2023)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 ... -
Defining Properties: Literary Cultivation and National Character in Early American Literature
(2013)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 ... -
Designing Community: Architecture, Race and Democracy in American Life Writing, 1900-‐‑1950
(2017)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. ... -
Diasporic Reasoning: The Idea of Africa and the Production of Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America
(2012)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 ... -
Football Wishes and Fashion Fair Dreams: Class and the Problem of Upward Mobility in Contemporary U.S. Literature and Culture
(2012)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 ... -
Ground Plans: Conceptualizing Ecology in the Antebellum United States
(2015)"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 ... -
Habitats of Abandonment: Subjectivity and the Aesthetics of Dispossession from the Industrial Revolution to the Great Depression
(2016)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 ... -
Haunted by the Other Life: Choice and Subjectivity in U.S. Economics and Fiction, 1870-1920
(2023)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 ... -
In Transit: Women, Photography, and The Consolidation of Race in Nineteenth-Century America
(2017)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 ... -
Laughter without Humor: Affective Passages through Post-War Culture
(2015)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 ... -
Manifesting Vertical Destiny: Geology, Reform, and the Stratified Earth in American Literature, Long Nineteenth Century
(2019)My project, Manifesting Vertical Destiny: Geology, Reform, and the Stratified Earth in American Literature, Long Nineteenth Century, excavates the cultural impact of the concept of the layered earth—or strata—in American ... -
Minor Moves: Growth, Fugitivity, and Children's Physical Movement
(2014)From tendencies to reduce the Underground Railroad to the imperative "follow the north star" to the iconic images of Ruby Bridges' 1960 "step forward" on the stairs of William Frantz Elementary School, America prefers to ... -
Modernism after Nietzsche: Art, Ethics, and the Forms of the Everyday
(2012)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 ... -
Modernist Form: On the Problem of Fragmentation
(2018)This dissertation explores formal fragmentation in the modernist novel. It shows that such fragmentation not only represents the historical conditions of modernism, but also posits the potential for new forms of human relation. ... -
Network Aesthetics: American Fictions in the Culture of Interconnection
(2010)<p>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 ... -
"No More Shall Be a Dull Book": The Aesthetics of History in Antebellum America
(2014)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 ...
