CRISIS, FORMULATION AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL INTIMACY IN 1950s AMERICA
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Crisis, Formulation, and Autobiographical Intimacy in 1950s America explores how critical circumstances of historical and personal significance can inspire and direct autobiographical production. I concentrate on Alfred Kazin's A Walker in the City (1951), Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory (1967), and Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1959), three American autobiographies whose first or final versions were produced in the nineteen fifties, decade marked by a surge of autobiographical texts and genres in the United States and the emergence of autobiographical theory in France. Engaging with Robert Jay Lifton's theory of trauma, namely the concept of formulation, I investigate how the relationship between the self and the world is fostered in the wake of a crisis as reflected in autobiographical performance unfolding through drafting, meta-writing, revision, publication, and republication.
National Physiology: Literature, Medicine, and the Invention of the American Body, 1789-1860
Year of Dissertation:
2012
"National Physiology" investigates the intertwined discourses of literature and medicine in the proto-disciplinary early American world. It makes three interventions. First, in contrast to existing scholarship that has actively neglected it, I bring to light an important history of early American medicine. Second, I show how American writers produced medical models of their own. Literary figures did not simply reflect medicine in their texts, but used fiction to craft medical philosophies, which they believed directly promoted the health of the nation. Finally, I argue these histories were not separate, but intimately connected: doctors and writers worked together to craft an American body that was metonymically linked to the healthy nation. In mining the relationship between medicine and literature in the early republic, my project is the first to offer a genealogy of the Medical Humanities in America; it also suggests that by looking at this history, we will find promising new models for interdisciplinary scholarship.
Brokering Literacies: An Ethnographic Study of Languages and Literacies in Mexican Immigrant Families
Year of Dissertation:
2012
This dissertation studies how English language acquisition and literacy transformed family relations and structured educational ambitions within a specific Spanish-dominant urban immigrant community. Ten first-generation Mexican-origin immigrant families living in New York City were the focus, all members of a small, under-funded, self-sustained educational mentoring program, whose core of eleven dedicated volunteers were also participants in this qualitative study. The grassroots organization offered free after-school tutoring services while also promoting active family involvement in schooling and positive views toward ethnic and linguistic identities. The organization also helped to mediate and bridge the linguistic miscommunications between schools and language minority parents. In addition, the program cultivated a sense of community and academic participation closely allied to ethnic identity, encouraging a sense of value for bilingualism as a political tool for--and the everyday reality of--immigrant children. Finally, the program also sponsored and reinforced the notion of standard English acquisition as valuable for academic success, while offering a space where standard and nonstandard languages and literacies freely mixed and where bilingual exchanges between individuals openly nurtured, critiqued, and, ultimately, defended the distinctive, monolingual spoken and written standard English language of schooling.
The Transnational Body in American Literature, 1798-1846
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Post-revolutionary American authors, living under a relatively stable government and economy, turned their attention simultaneously inward and outward: inward to understand the strange workings of the human body, and outward to comprehend and control new territory. Focusing on the period between the Quasi-War with France and the U.S. War with Mexico, conflicts in which the United States asserted its international power, I identify several novels that dramatize the outward gaze toward new territory through an inward gaze toward the body. The Transnational Body puts embodiment into conversation with early American politics, not only because the body is a conventional symbol for the political sphere, but also because early U.S. policies, both domestic and international, were predicated on notions of race and sex, distinctions thought to be identifiable on the body. Flouting the expectation that embodiment is largely a personal, highly localized matter, this dissertation seeks a new route through early American literature by interrogating what extraordinary fictional bodies express about early U.S. politics, particularly the politics of expansion and borders.
As Film is, so goes the Novel: The Image, Film Ekphrasis, and History in the Contemporary Novel
Year of Dissertation:
2010
My dissertation studies the use of the verbal representation of analog film in the novels of contemporary writers Paul Auster, Adam Thorpe, and Orhan Pamuk. I look at these authors' use of the moving image in relation to the existing poetics of the ekphrasis of still images and art objects. Film, understood as the "temporalization of space," informs the way in which I interpret film ekphrasis different from the ekphrasis of still objects that "spatialize temporality." In trying to emulate this temporal art form with words, these authors create a poetics of film ekphrasis, which constitutes a representation of the past in the present continuous. Their allusion to the analog image enables them to find creative means of constructing history and memory. My study also addresses the "digital" image and explains how its construction of time differs from the analog image. In order to grasp the tension between the analog and digital, and to reveal how visual artists are responding to emerging technologies, I turn to the films of Jean-Luc Godard, Michel Gondry, and Wim Wenders, as well as to JoAnn Verburg's photographs and Sam Taylor Wood's mixed media art. Understanding current practices in the visual arts, I suggest, can produce interpretive strategies for the ekphrasis of digital films.
Queer Environmentality: Thoreau, Melville, Cather, and Barnes
Year of Dissertation:
2009
My chief objective in this project is to draw some connections between queer studies and environmental studies within the more general context of literary studies. I will propose an alternative understanding of literary environmentalism, rich in tropological abundance, poetic complexity, and hermeneutic indeterminacy, and I will magnify a queer sensibility, present in varying degrees, in this history, or what I call "queer environmentality." In order to develop this queer-environmental literary theory, I perform careful exegeses of four key figures in the American tradition: Thoreau, Melville, Cather, and Djuna Barnes. Each writer problematizes conventional notions of the strange matrix between the human, the natural, and the sexual, and thus challenges the assumption that the subject of American environmental literature is essentially and consubstantially heterosexual. Each brilliantly demonstrates the ways in which the queer project and the environmental project are always already connected, that is to say, in which the questions and politics of human sexuality are always entwined with the questions and politics of the other-than-human world.
Aesthetic Autobiography and The Poetics of Despair in Post-War American Literature
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Advisor:
Wayne Koestenbaum
This dissertation repositions "aesthetic" in its ancient Greek context, meaning to apprehend by the senses. The project is framed around my idea of the aesthetic autobiography, a creative work that phenomenologically conveys the embodied experience of its author. I do not use "aesthetic" as a transcendentalist term of critical assessment, as defined by Kant; instead, the term denotes the immanent realm of the senses. This move allows me to connect the aesthetic to affect, whose etymology I trace from the mid 18th Century to contemporary affect theory. I theorize the aesthetic as a dynamic and relational biophysical force. I aim to extend the boundaries of autobiographical "truth" in order to accommodate the feeling body, which exists in excess and often beyond the reach of conceptual language.
Counterfeiting in American Literature
Year of Dissertation:
2010
This dissertation provides an analysis of representations of counterfeiting in American literature across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One of the oldest crimes in America and until the Civil War one of the most prevalent, counterfeiting appealed to the literary imagination not merely because it was so common, but because, as a fundamentally ambiguous activity, it seemed to expose significant fault lines in American life. The ambiguity of counterfeiting arose from the fact that its performance, and especially its successful performance, explicitly challenged the stability of the concepts, such as monetary value and sovereign authority, that were necessary to define it as a crime. Counterfeiting thus probed the shifting and often permeable boundaries between what was considered legitimate and illegitimate, legal and illegal, moral and immoral, natural and artificial, valuable and valueless, real and imaginary.
Neverending Stories: Unauthorized Continuations, Fictional Realities, and the Long-Form Narrative from 1590 - 2011
Year of Dissertation:
2013
In reader-response theory, the open text demands that its readers collaborate in its construction. Such participation requires that these readers invest in the text's narrative universe, an investment made more possible when a fiction exhibits the properties of selvage: a firm, detailed, and consistent framework shot through with unfinished edges (termed fractures) that invite and support the reader's response in the form of continuation. These unauthorized extensions literally transform active reading into writing, while their presence recursively solidifies the fictional universe's imaginary space, further buttressing its autonomous existence. Such narrative reinforcement troubles many critics because an independent fictional reality not owned solely by a primary creator has disruptive implications for textual properties and copyrights. Nevertheless, these unauthorized continuations are the tangible artifacts of invested, pleasurable, and embodied reading, a type of reading and pleasure that is itself a revelatory form of literary criticism. Classifying texts in terms of their readers' desire to enter into and extend the narrative world encourages an understanding of these texts as evolving objects that must be categorized and described not just statically, but also dynamically, in terms of their capacity to generate. Three distinct (though occasionally intersecting) kinds of source-texts are identified here; the first locates the source's imaginary space as a narrative of place, the second as a narrative of society, character, and people, and the third as a narrative of interstices. Narratives of place such as Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia evoke fantasies of exploration and colonization; narratives of society like Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice call forth fantasies of unveiling; and narratives of interstices such as J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, as well as various long-running television programs, endorse fantasies of dimensionality and dialogue. An examination of these fantasies of continuation from 1590 to 2011 reveals a cyclical pattern in the reception of derivations and continuations. After the Romantic privileging of originality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the postmodern conception of creativity once more begins to resemble the more collaborative vision of the early modern period, a perspective which produces a queer, non-normative, multiplicitous, and post-canonical understanding of literature and fiction.
Pedagogies of Happiness: What and How Self-Help, Positive Psychology, and Positive Education Teach about Well-Being
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Pedagogies of Happiness: What and How Self-Help, Positive Psychology, and Positive Education Teach about Well-Being introduces humanities scholars to the rapidly expanding discipline of positive psychology, and argues that literary scholars, cultural theorists, rhetoricians, and educators must learn about and play a role in shaping the important political and social consequences of positive psychology's research on subjective well-being. The project first explores key rhetorical sites of the self-help genre and positive psychology discipline, and parses their pedagogy, potentiality, promises, and problems. While these movements claim to benefit not only individuals but also society, they are based on a number of unacknowledged--and often overlapping--values that suggest otherwise: they are individualistic, instrumentalized, decontextualized, non-dialogic, non-reflexive, politically conservative, and remedial. Therefore, self-help and positive psychology's versions of happiness, well-being, and flourishing preserve and serve the status quo.