| dc.description.abstract |
<p>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. </p><p>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. </p><p>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.</p>
|
|
