Browsing by Subject "American literature"
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Item American callings : humanitarian selfhood in American literature from Reconstruction to the American century(2010-12) Warren, Kathryn Hamilton; Murphy, Gretchen, 1971-; Barrish, Phillip; Kevorkian, Martin; Walker, Jeffrey; Robbins, SarahIn "American Callings" I argue that late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century American literature dealing with cross-cultural humanitarianism contains a strand that sought to rectify the potentially oppressive shortcomings of humanitarian practice. The authors whose work I examine--novelists William Dean Howells and Albion Tourgeé, reformer Jane Addams, humorist George Ade, and memoirists Mary Fee and George Freer--grappled in their writing with two reciprocal questions. First, they meditated on how humanitarianism shapes, changes, and constitutes the self. Second, they theorized how increased self-awareness and self-criticism might help the humanitarian actor avoid the pitfalls of humanitarian practice that critics, in their time and ours, have seized upon. "American Callings" thus challenges three critiques that have been instrumental to American literary studies for decades: critiques of sentimental humanitarianism's complicity in projects of cultural domination, realism's investment in the status quo, and reform's role in maintaining social discipline through surveillance. The dissertation disputes the prevalent assertion that literature dealing with cross-cultural humanitarianism constitutes a sentimental, imperialistic, and ultimately violent discourse. I accomplish this by looking to instances of what Gregory Eiselein (1996) has called "eccentric" reform, efforts articulated from within a culture but in opposition to certain aspects of it. Drawing on narratives of what I call "humanitarian selfhood" in three historical contexts--industrializing urban centers in the North, the South during Reconstruction, and the Philippines during the U.S. occupation--"American Callings" traces an "eccentric" literary genealogy, one that offers up the humanitarian dynamic as a heuristic wherein the humanitarian agent arrives at a new kind of self-understanding by way of wrestling with the questions raised by service to others. The literature written by and about these humanitarians, I suggest, then provides an opportunity for readers to be transformed, as well.Item Apposition, displacement : an ethics of abstraction in postwar American fiction(2013-05) Heard, Frederick Coye; Kevorkian, Martin, 1968-The decades following two world wars, the European Holocaust and the threat of nuclear annihilation presented American authors with an occupational dilemma: catastrophic histories call out for recognition, but any representation of them risks adding violence to violence by falsifying the account or conflating historical acts of violence with their artificial doubles. This project reimagines the political aesthetics of postmodern American fiction through two major interventions. First, I identify an aesthetic structure of apposition--a parallel relationship between abstract works of art and the everyday world that I take from William Carlos Williams--that allows me to productively resolve a tension in the aesthetics of Hannah Arendt: because representation takes mimesis as a particular end, Arendt disqualifies representational art from politics, which she defines as open-ended action between human beings and not as end-centered state-craft. At the same time, Arendt claims that art is a product of thought, the cognitive activity she associates with political action over and against fabrication. My heterodox reading of Arendt shows that appositional narratives, like political actors, perform their own self-disclosure, beginning the open-ended chain of actions and reactions that Arendt identifies as the substantial form of politics and ethics. Second, I use my revision of Arendt to demonstrate that appositional narratives act politically through the very same metafictional tropes that critics often label as escapist or solipsistic. Rather than copy historical experience, appositional narratives reject illusionary representation and present themselves as actors, inciting their readers to respond with pluralistic, provisional judgment. Taking Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth and Toni Morrison--three central but rarely-juxtaposed postmodern novelists--as case studies, I show that we cannot properly assess the political implications of postmodern fiction without understanding the specific mechanisms of narrative apposition. Appositional works stand temporarily and self-consciously in the place of the world, displacing it in the experience of their readers. This narrative strategy provides a political alternative for novelists facing the ethical crises of postmodernity. Appositional narratives displace their readers' settled beliefs and press them to exercise their human capacity for judgment. They embrace their responsibility for the world by refusing to represent it.Item Arguing in utopia : Edward Bellamy, nineteenth century utopian fiction, and American rhetorical culture(2009-05) Wolfe, Ivan Angus; Walker, Jeffrey, 1949-As Aristotle wrote, rhetoric is an art or faculty of finding the available means of persuasion in a given circumstance, and the late nineteenth century was a time in American history when many authors used utopian fiction as the best available means of persuasion. For a few years, the utopian novel became a widespread, versatile and common rhetorical trope. Edward Bellamy was the most popular of these writers. Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward was not only the third best-selling book of nineteenth century America, it inspired over a hundred other utopian novels and helped create a mass movement of “Bellamy clubs” along with a political party (Nationalism). During the latter part of the nineteenth century, American public discourse underwent a general shift from a focus on communal values to a focus on individuals as the source of truth. Utopian fiction of the era helps illuminate why and how this shift occurred. In nineteenth century America, literature was generally not considered to be rhetorical. At most, critics treated fiction as a form of epideictic rhetoric, aiming only to delight, educate, or create discussion. When fiction was used to promote legislative agendas and thus entered into the realm of deliberative rhetoric, critics argued that its transgression of rhetorical boundaries supposedly ruined its appeal. Utopian literature came the closest to breaking down the barriers between literature and rhetoric, as hundreds of utopian novels were published, most of them in response to Edward Bellamy. A close rhetorical reading of Looking Backward details its rhetorical nature and helps account for its rhetorical success. I treat each of the novels as participants in the larger cultural conversation, and detail the ways in which they address Bellamy, each other, and issues such as the temperance movement and the decline of classical languages in higher education. In modern times, though Bellamy has faded from the public memory, he has proven useful in a variety of contexts, from a political punching bag to a way to lend an air of erudition to various types of popular fiction.Item The Canon Revisited: An Ethnographic Study on the Teaching of American Literature to U.S.-Mexican Students at Macario García High School(2001) Rodríguez, Rodrigo JosephThe overall purpose of this study is to explore sociocultural phenomena that surround the program and teaching of American literature at Macario García High School. Guiding this project are the following specific research questions: 1. How can one describe the sociocultural community in MGHS: history, physical setting, economic, political and aesthetic contexts, relations, beliefs, etc.? 2. What are eleventh grade English teacher participants’ perceptions of their U.S.-Mexican students and the American literature curriculum? a. What factors influence their perceptions? b. How do participants perceive themselves as teachers of American literature? 3. How can the process of curriculum selection of American literature for the eleventh grade be described? a. Are there specific selection criteria? b. Do criteria differ from the ones mandated by the school district? 4. How do teacher participants perceive intermediality in the schooling process related to literary study? How do students perceive it? 5. What theoretical explanation emerges in the findings of this study?Item "A certain zest to his own enjoyment" : homoerotic competition, race, and the rise of a Southern middle class in The marrow of tradition(2010-05) Wise, Rachel Ann; Barrish, Phillip; Hutchison, ColemanThis essay contends that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's "between men" thesis (1985) provides a particularly apt methodology for engaging The marrow of tradition (1901), a post-bellum novel concerned with the structure of the New South in the United States. While the novel contains myriad "between men" pairs, reading the homosocial bond between Lee Ellis and Tom Delamere has the potential to change the way we think about the novel's interest in the complex relationships among class, social mobility, race, whiteness, and the erotics of power. If "the political and the erotic necessarily obscure and misrepresent each other... in ways that offer important and shifting affordances to all parties in historical gender and class struggles," then we can read the Ellis/Tom/Clara erotic triangle as dramatizing the rise of a white middle class whose professional capital encroaches upon and supersedes the central role of a plantation based aristocracy without significantly challenging either the essential hierarchy of white over black or the bloody lynch law that helps enforce that hierarchy (Sedgwick 15). Sedgwick's broad definition of desire as "the affective or social force, the glue, even when its manifestation is hostility or hatred, that shapes an important relationship" can usefully be applied to the rivalry between Lee Ellis and Tom Delamere, a rivalry that epitomizes the Girardian theory that "the bond between rivals in an erotic triangle [is] stronger [and] more heavily determinant of actions and choices, than anything in the bond between either of the lovers and the beloved" (Sedgwick 21). An examination of the erotic triangle and the function of the courtship plot enable us to theorize the implications of this expropriation of the aristocrat by the white southern middle class and this ascendant class's role in remaking a whiteness that at the novel's end still reigns supreme.Item "Choosing our own metaphors" : genre and method in contemporary Chicana/o life narratives(2011-05) Kurzen, Crystal Marie; Perez, Domino Renee, 1967-; Cox, James H.; Cvetkovich, Ann; Gonz�lez, John M.; Menchaca, MarthaWhile Mexican Americans have put their lives to paper prior to the years of el movimiento, in this project, I begin my analysis with authors who voice their selves immediately before and after the Chicano Movement. Authors like José Antonio Villarreal in Pocho (1959), Ernesto Galarza in Barrio Boy: The Story of a Boy’s Acculturation (1971), and Richard Rodriguez in Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982), in their efforts to represent self and narrative multiple selves, wrote what many see as the foundational texts that speak to or enliven Mexican American experiences during this formative period. Upon closer consideration, we see the ways in which these early texts initiate and create on-going conversations about form, fiction, identity, and truth. Rather than establishing a kind of literary nationalism, at the time, that rejected Anglo literary conventions, particularly in the field of autobiography, Villarreal, Galarza, and Rodriguez mirror many of the Western, male, heteronormative, autobiographical conventions in their texts, ones they read and admired while growing up as Mexican Americans in the 1950s and 1960s. In contrast to these earlier Mexican American writers, Chicanas such as Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Norma Elia Cantú, offer alternative, multi-generic models of life narrative. In my project, I consider the ways in which Chicano self-writing carves out a space of racial representation and how that form, originated and altered by the Chicana/os mentioned above, has evolved to accommodate and even embrace such forms as dichos, myths, recipes, photographs, letters, poems, among others. Chicana authors Sheila Ortiz Taylor, Sandra Ortiz Taylor, Pat Mora, and Michele Serros employ various autobiographical strategies to establish a self-narrated tradition that differs from the works of early Chicano writers. Following in the footsteps of his Chicana predecessors, Luis Alberto Urrea, too, challenges form to tell the story of his life. These writers do not simply “modify” or “adapt” existing genres; rather, they make and remake an entire corpus of related autobiographical genres in order to participate in the larger literary tradition of life narrative.Item "A dame to kill for" or "a slut-- worth dying for" : women in the noir of Frank Miller(2011-05) Lamfers, Jordan Scott; Bremen, Brian A.; Kornhaber, DonnaThe depictions of women in film noir and neo-noir have long been objects of interest for feminist scholars. In this report, I extend this scholarship to examine Frank Miller's Sin city graphic novel series as a version of neo-noir that is both intimately connected to noir tradition and innovative in its approach, specifically in terms of his representation of women. Miller depicts his female characters in a variety of ways that reflect both the positive and negative imagery of women in classic noir and neo-noir; in doing so, he creates a new and complex vision of women in noir. This report uses three different characterizations of women in film noir--the spider woman, the femme moderne, and the angel--to explore the ways in which Miller's female characters can be understood to simultaneously uphold and challenge these conventions.Item Ethnic passing across the Jewish literary diaspora(2011-12) Katsnelson, Anna; Wolitz, Seth L.; Richmond-Garza, Elizabeth; Hoberman, John; Lindstrom, Naomi; Roncador, SoniaIn my dissertation, I examine the works of six writers (George S. Kaufman, Moss Hart, Clarice and Elisa Lispector, Evgenia Ginzburg and Vasilii Aksyonov) who did not explore their Jewish identity in their texts and were subsequently left out of the canons of Jewish literature in their respective countries. My goal is to recalibrate the concept of the Jewish canon from the charged notion of identity to a theory of shared thematic material in which the works of hyphenated Jewish writers will be considered under the category of ‘Jewish American, Brazilian, or Russian’ if they share definite attributes. This was a transnational study showing that similar forces were at work not only in one country, but across continents, affecting the sensibilities of Jewish writers in remarkably similar ways. On a larger scale their de-thematized narratives share thematic tropes and belong to a ‘minor, liminal, marginal narrative,’ a narrative which attempted to work within the scope of the master narratives produced by the hegemonic culture. I have claimed that even though these six writers did not thematize identity in their texts, because of the negative political and social situation for the Jew in the first half of the twentieth century in western civilization, this situation and the writers’ own alterity produced similar and overlapping narratives.Item “Fotos y recuerdos” : decolonial ephemera strategies in twenty-first century Latina literature(2021-04-09) Allison, Alexandrea Noel Pérez; González, John Morán; Minich, Julie A; Perez, Domino R; Alvarez, MariolaThis project theorizes how Latina authors mobilize alternative archives by insisting on the centrality of the ephemeral in their texts and the communities they represent. In what I call “decolonial ephemera strategies,” the authors I study—including Norma Cantú, Denise Chávez, and Nelly Rosario—represent and incorporate different kinds of ephemeral materials throughout their works, varying from paper dolls to family photographs to shopping lists. Whether depicted visually on the page or included through narrative plot, these authors build alternative archives from racialized and gendered ephemera, thereby elevating the intimate—and often precarious—everyday lives of U.S. Latinas. The archive as a literary device couples the ephemerality of Latina histories with the permanence of the traditional archive, and in doing so disrupts the binary between precarity and permanence that often defines how we interpret knowledges as illegitimate or legitimate. Thus subverting this relationship through an accessible vehicle like literature, these authors combat the continued violence against Latinx bodies by critiquing three harmful narrative constructions surrounding Latinidad in a twenty-first century political climate: documentation as a measure of cultural citizenship, the disparate effects of climate change on Latinx communities, and the persistent objectification of Latinx bodies through exoticization and commodification. Through these narrative strategies, Latina authors push the boundary between literary and archival storytelling, demonstrating how literary works can become more portable, accessible, and community-centered archives.Item A game of confidence : literary dialect, linguistics, and authenticity(2011-08) Leigh, Philip John; Barrish, PhillipA Game of Confidence: Literary Dialect, Linguistics, and Authenticity builds a bridge between literary-critical and linguistic approaches to representations of nonstandard speech in literature. Important scholarship both in linguistics and in literary criticism has sought to develop rigorous inquiry into deviations from standard written language to represent features of nonstandard spoken language in literature. I argue that neither field, however, has fully embraced the idea that, by definition, 'literary dialect' necessitates an interdisciplinary approach. Furthermore, neither has successfully integrated the other's very different theories and methods. As a result, 'literary dialect' provides an exciting opportunity for new scholarship connecting recent developments in literary history, sociolinguistics, and digital humanities. The goals of my project are two-fold: First, to analyze within their own cultural and historical contexts previous attempts by authors, readers, and scholars to fix the supposedly empirical accuracy of literary dialect representations; second, to model what I take to be an empirically more valid use of linguistics for analyzing literary artists' representations of nonstandard speech. My work provides a necessary intervention for literary dialect criticism, particularly for the many arguments that have sought a degree of objectivity for assertions about the artistic or socio-political merits of a dialect text based on vague linguistic generalizations. My dissertation's primary focus is on the period that has served historically as the locus classicus for scholarship on American dialect literature: The second half of the nineteenth century when local colorists, regionalists, and realists used 'real' American voices as the foundation for a realistic American literature. By analyzing the production and historical reception of literary dialect texts from this period I show how assessments of 'authenticity' have been a constant in the critical response to these texts for nearly a century and a half. Having underscored the critical problems inherent in linking artistic and political evaluations of dialect texts to the 'authenticity' of their literary dialects, I then draw on recent developments in the digital humanities, computational linguistics, and sociolinguistics to employ a methodology for generating and interpreting literary-linguistic data on literary dialects.Item The heart-shaped cookie knife : Miss Lonelyhearts as accelerated Bergsonian comedy(2015-05) Sheridan, Mark Timothy; Kornhaber, Donna, 1979-; Houser, HeatherThis report provides a new examination of the nature and function of laughter in Nathanael West's novel Miss Lonelyhearts, using Bergson's theory of comedy as a critical lens. This approach allows us to understand the close connection between mechanization and comedy in West's novel, and also to recognize the text's hitherto untold significance for post-industrial American literature. Building on Bergson in original ways, and incorporating the work of twentieth-century theorists such as Fredric Jameson, I argue that Miss Lonelyhearts illuminates a proto-postmodern cityscape where comedy is governed by the mechanizing logic of capital and media. West's characters, figured as comedic machines, are pushed to their biological, psychological and mechanical limits in this world, and laughter marks the moments of their breakage. Synthesizing several disparate strands of criticism on comedy, irony and media, my reading accounts for the ways in which laughter functions and malfunctions in this text, and the means by which West produces comedy from such profound tragedy.Item “I never once thought of them” : retail workers in American department store fiction(2015-08) Palmer, Ashley Elizabeth; Barrish, Phillip; Cohen, Matt; Hutchison, Coleman; Lesser, Wayne; Murphy, GretchenThis dissertation focuses on an understudied category of turn-of-the-century American literature: texts that feature department stores and primarily highlight the position of the service workers who staffed them. In composing narratives situated mostly on the workers’ side of the sales counter, I argue, authors attempted to address perceived problems with consumer culture. Drawing upon the historical contexts of Progressive politics and women’s rights movements, this dissertation seeks a fuller understanding of how turn-of-the-century writers depicted the retail worker, responded to injustices of capitalism, and shaped popular opinions about consumer culture. Chapter 1 analyzes popular fiction by Lurana Sheldon and Rupert Hughes to investigate the ways both authors depict hardships of department store labor and envision different possibilities for reform at these sites of consumption. I show that despite both authors’ sympathy for the plight of the shopgirl, they look to business owners and consumers rather than the suffering shopgirls themselves to mend the problems of capitalism. Chapter 2 turns to works of fiction that portray the shopgirl’s hard-won ascent to professionalism (in the position of buyer) as an ambivalent climb to middle management. Readings of realist writer Edna Ferber and popular fiction author Charles Klein suggest that, whereas a work of realism takes a more pragmatic approach to the limits of professional success, popular fiction often employs an idealized marriage plot to complete the protagonist’s ascent. Moving away from the realm of popular fiction, Chapter 3 examines two ambitious literary undertakings: Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) and David Graham Phillips’ Susan Lenox (1917). Reading Carrie from the perspective of the shopgirl (and in comparison with Phillips’ Susan), I argue, can help us better appreciate the elisions and evasions that complicate the relationship Dreiser imagines between work and consumption. Moving briefly beyond 1920, a Coda considers Mary McCarthy’s The Group (1963) and Steve Martin’s Shopgirl (2000) to ask how we might better understand intersections of labor and consumption in our own moment. Finally, an Appendix provides an annotated bibliography that lists works of American department store fiction published between 1880-1920 as a resource for future scholarship.Item Imagined Intimacies : women's writing, community, and affiliation in eighteenth-century North America(2010-05) Wigginton, Caroline Hopkins; Moore, Lisa L. (Lisa Lynne); Scheick, William J.; Brooks, Joanna M.; Cox, James H.; Eastman, Carolyn; Wilks, Jennifer M.My dissertation argues for a fundamental reorientation of our approach to public intimacy and identifies a lushly pragmatic rhetorical schema via which black, white, and Native women enter colonial American public life. I contend that these early American women employ the language of personal intimacy -- familial, spiritual, domestic -- to craft wide-ranging public interventions. Through references to their private affiliations, they associate themselves with others who share their religious, economic, political, and social concerns and thereby forge semi-public communities. I demonstrate that because such language retains women's often un-egalitarian and un-affective experiences of quotidian intimacy and therefore appears "natural" for women, it masks the radicalism, formal and substantive, of their interventions. Thus, in making public issues intimate, these women discreetly authorize and advance their interests. They use the same techniques whether they are preaching religious principles, positing alternative political models, or promoting preferred agricultural commodities. I rely upon an interdisciplinary body of scholarship, including studies of anthropology, religion, and economic, political, and regional history, to produce dense local studies. Yet, since I interrogate an array of authors and genres -- published and manuscript poetry, diplomatic and legal documents, commonplace books, spiritual diaries, autobiographies, and letters -- my project synthesizes those studies into a history that is multi-denominational, multi-racial, multi-class, and multi-regional.Item The legal life of objects : speaking evidence and mute subjects in Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson(2014-05) Henry, Valerie Anne; Cohen, Matt, 1970-In this paper, I argue that legal authorities assign speaking power to objects and evidence in the courtroom in order to deny speaking power to racialized subjects and police racial identities. Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) demonstrates how the law transverses the human/object boundary in order to regulate legal definitions of identity. I examine the legal animation of the textual document, as exemplified by the last will and testament; the knife, a material object that as a murder weapon is responsible for condemning the accused; and the fingerprint, a unique form of bodily evidence that merges the textual and the material, in order to understand how these objects blur the line between the living and the deceased, between human and nonhuman agency, and between body and text. My methodology brings object studies into conversation with a literature and the law approach in order to show not only how the nineteenth-century American literary imagination was concerned with testing and regulating racial boundaries, but also how fictions employed by the law produce subjects and objects. My investigation reminds us that when evidence appears to “speak for itself,” this speech act has been carefully orchestrated by human legal authorities who determine what the evidence can be understood to mean and for whom it speaks.Item Losing Appalachia : genre and local color's out-of-place objects, 1870-1920(2014-08) Wise, Rachel Ann; Hutchison, Coleman, 1977-; Barrish, Phillip; Cohen, Matt; Engelhardt, Elizabeth S.D.; Murphy, Gretchen“Losing Appalachia” offers an alternative literary history of local color writing by touting a historically, culturally, and rhetorically situated Appalachia, one of the most perplexing of American regions. Most local color criticism takes the New England village as its starting point. Critics interested in material culture then interpret the sentimental folk objects found in the village as indicative of the genre’s middle-class investments and pastoral qualities. The project considers what it would look like to entertain the idea of a literature that is not written by—or concerned with elaborating on—the urban middle class. It proposes one way to make this intervention, which requires an attention to canon (texts) and things (material culture). In reading local color through Appalachia—a region long associated with aberrant cultural and material practices—“Losing Appalachia” argues for the importance of a ubiquitous though understudied form of material culture in local color texts: the cast off, repurposed, and inferior mass-produced product. Such material culture is out-of-place in local color texts, especially when it appears in ways that undercut dominant middle-class norms and expectations. Applying the theories of Michel de Certeau, the project focuses on how women writers like Rebecca Harding Davis, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Mary Hunter Austin, Grace MacGowan Cooke, and Mary Wilkins Freeman used material culture to maneuver within the gendered constraints of generic form, cultural imperialism, and capitalist systems. They are, what I term, meta-localists who, through intentional formal practices, think about how literature aestheticizes the local. These writers are interested in what local color can tell us about the local as steadfastly local rather than as an extension of urban middle-class subjectivity. The following chapters examine show how diverse objects and ideologies are always pushing up against one another, destabilizing binaries that have been key to critical narratives about local color: modern and primitive, urban and rural, and center and margin. “Losing Appalachia” stresses the rhizomatic qualities of the genre and its uses, thus taking issue with historicist and feminist critics who argue that local color only performs one kind of cultural work.Item “The most popular humorist who ever lived” : Mark Twain and the transformation of American culture(2011-05) Wuster, Tracy Allen; Davis, Janet M.; Bremen, Brian A.; Barrish, Phillip; Engelhardt, Elizabeth; Fisher Fishkin, Shelley; Thompson, ShirleyThis dissertation examines Mark Twain’s literary-critical reputation from the years 1865 to 1882, as he transformed from the regional “wild humorist of the Pacific Slope” to a national and international celebrity who William Dean Howells called “the most popular humorist who ever lived.” This dissertation considers “Mark Twain” not as the name of a literary author, but as a fictional creation who was narrator and implied author of both fictional and non-fiction texts, a performer who played his role on lecture platforms and other public venues, and a celebrity whose fame spread from the American west through America and the world. The key question of this dissertation is the historical position of the “humorist,” a hierarchical cultural category that included high culture literary figures, such as James Russell Lowell and Bret Harte; literary comedians, such as Artemus Ward and Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby; and clowns and minstrels, who were placed at the bottom of the hierarchy. I argue that Mark Twain muddied the hierarchical distinctions between class-appropriate leisure and burgeoning forms of mass entertainment, between uplifting humor and debased laughter, and between the canonical literature of high culture and the passing whim of the merely popular. Through the success of The Innocents Abroad (1869) and the promotion of William Dean Howells, Mark Twain was elevated into critical discussions of literary value, and in the 1870s he entered into venues of higher prestige: so-called “quality” magazines such as the Galaxy and the Atlantic Monthly, lecture stages on the lyceum circuit and in England, and the personal realm of friendship with other authors. While Twain was accepted into some literary cultures, other critics attempted to consign him to literary oblivion, or simply ignored him, while Twain himself betrayed keen anxiety about his role as “stripèd humorist” in respectable literary realms. This dissertation thus focuses on written works, critical interpretations, and performative instances in which “Mark Twain,” as both agent and subject, brought debates over “American Humor,” “American Literature,” and “American Culture” to the fore.Item Other gods, other powers : numinous horror in American literature(2018-04-27) Omidsalar, Alejandro; Houser, Heather; Cohen, Matt, 1970-; Richmond-Garza, Elizabeth; Kevorkian, Martin; Taylor, Matthew A.The Gothic has literary criticism in an interpretive stranglehold. Despite their wide cultural and temporal sweep, studies of the Gothic mode depend almost uniformly on suspicious reading practices, frequently overlooking the supernatural ideas that initially animated the Gothic and other, lesser-known modes of horror. At the same time, the Gothic mode—especially in its American context—is entwined with Judeo-Christian moral positions and political-historical anxieties, ensuring a human-centered ontological outlook that maintains narrow parameters for what sorts of dark fiction are considered worthy of academic consideration. My dissertation, “Other Gods, Other Powers,” broadens the scholarly conversation about the literary macabre by mapping the evolution of numinous horror, a strain of American supernatural horror writing that imagines the divine in non-anthropocentric and non-anthropomorphic ways, prioritizing pessimism, entropy, and negation over conventionally accepted, Judeo-Christian-influenced understandings of the divine. The numinous, a term denoting the experience of the divine as awesome or terrifying, is the aesthetic category that unifies the transhistorical scope of my dissertation, which runs from 1798 through 1988, covering works by Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Ben Hecht, Fred Chappell, and Thomas Ligotti. An alternative, markedly pessimistic tradition comes to the fore across these readings, contradicting popular understandings of American literature’s supposedly inherent optimism and humanism. Numinous horror narratives depict gods as malevolent, inscrutable, and alien; they re-imagine godhood as a state of omnipotent idiocy only accessible to people at the cost of their humanity. The horror in these works comes from the divine’s absolute inscrutability; the narration of each text must contend with an irremediable lack of knowledge, clarity, and certainty. My dissertation models a kind of reading that approaches a text’s underlying supernatural and metaphysical premises on their own terms, instead of reading them allegorically, symptomatically, or otherwise superstitiously. Pulling from philosophical, theological, and new materialist theoretical conversations, “Other Gods, Other Powers” opens up an oft-overlooked, philosophically rich body of writing to interdisciplinary inquiry by contributing to current conversations about alternative reading practices and genre fiction’s place in literary scholarshipItem "The primacy of discourse" : language lessons in Samuel Delany's Hogg(2011-05) Dechavez, Yvette Marie; Richardson, Matt, 1969-; Pritchard, Eric D.In this Master’s Report, I examine Samuel R. Delany’s use of language in his pornographic novel, Hogg. Through a postcolonial lens, I investigate the ways Delany employs white colonizers’ language to subvert white dominant patriarchal and heteronormative ideologies. As theorists Frantz Fanon and Hortense J. Spillers posit, language is essential to black identity. The arrival of Europeans on the African continent and the subsequent enslavement of blacks resulted in the loss of an indigenous African name. For blacks, the loss of this name serves as a larger metaphor by which one can uncover various wrongdoings committed by white colonizers, such as forcing Africans to learn a foreign language, refusing to acknowledge and respect an established African culture, and the physical violence enacted upon black bodies during slavery. In Hogg, the eleven-year-old black narrator negotiates his existence as a voiceless object and sex slave. I argue that through this narrator, one can see the devastating effects of colonization. Further, by creating a fictional world--the Pornotopia--Delany temporarily creates a space in which patriarchal boundaries no longer exist. Thus, the narrator challenges patriarchal, heteronormative discourse by taking advantage of the assumption that the narrator lacks the ability to master language.Item “Quality is everything” : rhetoric of the transatlantic birth control movement in interwar women’s literature of England, Ireland and the United States(2009-12) Craig, Allison Layne; Moore, Lisa L. (Lisa Lynne); Cullingford, Elizabeth; Cloud, Dana; Carter, Mia; Roberts-Miller, Patricia; Wilks, Jennifer MThis dissertation suggests that burgeoning public discourse on contraception in Britain and the United States between 1915 and 1940 created a paradigm shift in perceptions of women’s sexuality that altered the ways that women could be represented in literary texts. It offers readings of texts by women on both sides of the Atlantic who responded to birth control discourse not only by referencing contraceptive techniques, but also by incorporating arguments and dilemmas used by birth control advocates into their writing. The introductory chapter, which frames the later literary analysis chapters, examines similarities in the tropes Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes, the British and American “Mothers of Birth Control” used in their advocacy. These include images such as mothers dying in childbirth, younger children in large families weakened by their mothers’ ill-health, and sexual dysfunction in traditional marriages. In addition to this chapter on birth control advocates’ texts, the dissertation includes four chapters meant to demonstrate how literary authors used and adapted the tropes and language of the birth control movement to their own narratives and perspectives. The first of these chapters focuses on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, a 1915 political allegory about a nation populated only by women who have gained the ability to reproduce asexually. Gilman adopted pro-birth control language, but rejected the politically radical ideas of the early birth control movement. In addition to radical politics, the birth control movement was associated with racist eugenicist ideas, an association that the third chapter, on Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel Quicksand examines in detail by comparing birth control and African-American racial uplift rhetoric. Crossing the Atlantic, the fourth chapter looks at the influence of the English birth control movement on Irish novelist Kate O’Brien’s 1931 Without My Cloak, a novel that challenges Catholic narratives as well as the heteronormative assumptions of birth control discourse itself. The final chapter analyzes Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Three Guineas (1938), illuminating Woolf’s connections between feminist reproductive politics and conservative pro-eugenics agendas. Acknowledging the complexity of these writers’ engagements with the birth control movement, the project explores not simply the effects of the movement’s discourse on writers’ depictions of sexuality, reproduction, and race, but also the dialogue between literary writers and the birth control establishment, which comprises a previously overlooked part of the formation of both the reproductive rights movement and the Modernist political project.Item Queer novelty: reading publics and canon formation in 20th century US fiction(2016-08) Wallace, Laura Knowles; Bremen, Brian A.; Wilks, Jennifer; Cvetkovich, Ann; Bennett, Chad; Staiger, JanetQueer Novelty investigates the reception histories of four mid-twentieth-century novels that are now read as LGBTQ+ fiction in order to demonstrate how popular reading contributes to and complicates the constitution of gay and lesbian literature as a category in the academy and how early- to mid-twentieth-century print networks provided a framework for today’s digitally networked LGBTQ+ culture. Queer Novelty tracks the reception histories of four novels: Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles, and Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin. The archive for these histories encompasses scholarly analyses; reviews from newspapers and magazines; and online discussions on Goodreads and Amazon. Queer Novelty argues that reception studies demonstrate the force and effects of literary texts more fully than close reading, literary theory, or historical context alone, because reception study includes and accounts for shifts and variations in public reading practices and literary circulation. Queer Novelty brings together the investments of queer theory and affect theory, the methods of reception studies, and the writing practices of feminist criticism to demonstrate the possibilities of fiction reading in contemporary US culture. Chapter 1, “Thinking We Know Them, What Do We Know?” establishes the methodological framework for the project, focused on my theory of reading as public. Chapter 1 examines arguments for LGBTQ+ literature as a category, from Donald Webster Cory’s The Homosexual in America to discussions on Twitter and Tumblr in the 2010s. Chapter 2 reveals the feedback loop between popular and academic reception through the history of Nightwood, a canonical modernist text and a central text for queer female counterpublics. In Chapter 3, my analysis of Two Serious Ladies’ publication and reception histories is an investigation into the changing horizons of expectation that make yesterday’s odd novel today’s cult classic. In Chapter 4, I analyze the reception history of Giovanni’s Room and of Baldwin as a public intellectual to demonstrate how expectations about “gay literature” as a category have changed. Queer Novelty demonstrates that mid-20th century public cultures around books performed the groundwork necessary to keep them circulating, so that canons could be expanded when LGBTQ+ studies reached universities.