Ghostly Language and Liminal Experience: William Blake, Romantic Discourse on the Sublime, and American Punk Sound
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Two modes of inquiry compel and gird this study. The first addresses the aesthetic and philosophical question of the Romantics' experimentation with sound and musical valuation. I observe a move away from a privileging of Lockean sight, and the fixed non-negotiable reality that it implies, in favor of a Romantic emphasis on sound, with its ability to incorporate the ineffable and the unknowable. The second line of inquiry concerns William Blake's influence on New York underground culture, first on Allen Ginsberg, and then on punk performer Patti Smith. Via his deployment of an obscure sublime soundscape coupled with dissenting politics, Blake has had an enormous effect, through Ginsberg, on the sonic experimentations of Smith.
Independent Women: Black Women as Consumers in Literature Written from Slavery to the Harlem Renaissance
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Advisor:
Robert Reid-Pharr
This dissertation explores the role of consumerism in literature written by African-American women between 1861 and 1928. It consists of three chapters. Chapter One examines the birth of consumer culture in America and Benjamin Franklin's emergence as an exemplary American as it relates to the same. In this chapter I posit that Franklin was a model not only for European-Americans but also for African-Americans, as seen in the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. I argue that as an enslaved black woman, Harriet Jacobs reflected and revised the Franklin model and her revision of this model influenced the black female writers who followed her. Chapter Two is concerned with the emergence of Booker T. Washington as the prime mediator between American consumer culture and newly freed African-Americans. This chapter looks at how two black female writers, Ida B. Wells and Pauline Hopkins, responded to Washington, even as they reconfigured the Jacobs template. The final chapter places Nella Larsen's Quicksand within the context of America's blossoming consumer culture in the twentieth century and I argue that her rewriting of the Jacobs paradigm represents a breakthrough in depictions of black women's financial and relational autonomy.
New York City Built by Words: Representation of Urban Space in New York City Novels, 1900-1945
Year of Dissertation:
2011
New York City Built by Words explores the lesser-examined role of the built environment in representing urban spaces in modern New York City novels. This project reevaluates the often overlooked importance of the centrality of urban architecture in the genre by revisiting the "rag-to-riches" stories from the city's period of growth and by focusing on their use of skyscrapers as literary settings. This peculiar centrality is represented as a synthesis of the physical and non-material environment, and its development is traced from the turn of the century to the end of the World War II.
Recollecting Turbulence: Catastrophe and Sacrifice in the History of My Life by Henry Darger
Year of Dissertation:
2012
This study of "The History of My Life" the 5,086 page autobiographical text by the outsider artist/author Henry Darger, uses non-linear modes of analysis, such as chaos and complexity theory, to explore the meaning of Darger's epic narrative. Beginning with the idea that turbulence, seemingly chaotic, actually comes about as a compensatory restructuring of inadequate or unstable system dynamics, this study goes on to show that, as both influence and effect, turbulence is found at every level of Darger's life and art, both in theme and structure. "My Life" is a prime example: an extended narrative describing a cataclysmic tornado, in which the text itself manifests turbulent properties of the storm it describes. Darger's particular narrative "madness" is, in fact, an attempt to put turbulence into service as an alternative system of meaning, in contrast to failed social and religious systems of which he was the product. Henry Darger's work provides us with the challenge of exploring new ways of finding meaning in narrative. This study uses traditional literary criticism coupled with a pattern analysis of redundancy to explore some of Darger's primary themes.
Genealogies of Abortion: On the Limits of Life and Choice in Modern America
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Genealogies of Abortion focuses on early twentieth-century fiction and primary sources to construct a genealogy of abortion politics that challenges the current binary of "life" and "choice." The project argues that both choice and rights are implicated in a liberal discourse that emphasizes individual autonomy and responsibility. In connection to this argument, the project demonstrates how the anti-abortion position on "life" assumes an individuated personhood and reinforces what Hannah Arendt identifies as modern society's foundation in the recurring cycles of reproduction, which place more importance on ensuring that accumulation is continuous than on valuing the end product. The project thus critiques the foundations of current abortion discourses in individualism and privacy by contending that the liberal construction of subjectivity presumes an already self-determining and privileged citizen. Additionally, the project shows how abortion discourses are rooted in early twentieth-century attempts to maintain a majority white and Protestant citizenry in the face of significant social changes, such as the end of slavery and the dramatic rise in immigration from Catholic countries. Through tracing the emergence of references to abortion in American fiction, it examines how this new interest in abortion politics coincided with an anxiety about whiteness in the United States and a renewed emphasis on the autonomous liberal citizen. Some of the key texts that concern rhetorics of choice and rights are Anthony Comstock's anti-abortion polemics; F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned, which fictionalizes Comstock's interests; Margaret Sanger's pro-birth-control and anti-abortion writings, particularly in The Birth Control Review; and selected popular novels from the early twentieth century that represent abortion. The second half of the dissertation focuses on the rhetoric of life in abortion politics and examines Edith Wharton's Summer in the context of World War I, William Faulkner's The Wild Palms, and Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition. Through these texts, Genealogies of Abortion questions how abortion came to be framed in its present terms by examining how abortion discourses were circulated through novels, periodicals, law, and public rhetoric in the early twentieth century, and how those conversations lead to our contemporary understanding of abortion rhetoric.
The Sounds of War: Radio, the Aural Experience and National Consensus in World War II
Year of Dissertation:
2011
This dissertation examines how the unique creative characteristics of radio contributed to furthering American war goals in World War II. I explore how the imaginative use of sound and the experiential environment of wartime radio in the 1940s influenced audiences in a moment in history when it was possible to create a national consensus through mass communications. My research shows that war messages were colored by the quality of the medium -by sound itself, through what I call the sonic palette, to engage the imagination of listeners and to influence audience reception. Part I of the dissertation discusses the industrial conditions that fostered the development of this repertoire of aural expression, which developed organically over time to compensate for radio's "blind" broadcasting. Radio strove to create an image in the mind's eye, using sound alone, to provide information, atmosphere and emotional character to programs which would be readily understood by listeners. Writers and directors mediated texts with music, sound effects, voice characteristics, and many forms of sonic coloration such as rhythm, pace, dynamics, tone and timbre. Counter intuitively, audience members found the listening experience personal and intimate, despite its broadcast source. In consequence, they were receptive on an emotional level to the nuances of the vocabulary of sound. Part II illustrates how this sonic palette was intentionally used to support intervention before the war and war goals during the conflict, despite the fact that radio was barred by law from advocating political positions. While recognizing the impact of radio on wartime audiences, previous scholarship has concentrated on text, rather than the mediating power of expressive sound. My dissertation exposes that power through the analysis of influential works and performances in entertainment, news and documentary programming. I discuss the contributions of such iconic figures as Paul Robeson and Edward R. Murrow, as well as artists of the sonic palette, Norman Corwin, William Robson, Arch Oboler and others.
"Rememory": Memoir and Testimony on Women's Human Rights in the Global South
Year of Dissertation:
2012
When the life writer has experienced violence, injustice, and political unrest within her region, memoir and testimonial writing requires a process involving the writer as victim and as witness and the reader, who also becomes a witness. This multi-layered process is further complicated by patriarchal structures that manipulate cultural values and place the quality of women's lives in jeopardy, which often leads to trauma that the victim revisits throughout her lifetime. Incorporating Toni Morrison's concept of "rememory" as illustrated in the novel Beloved based on Margaret Garner's true-life experience of slavery, I explore trauma not as an isolated event, but as part of one's existence throughout a lifetime. Through the memoir Across Boundaries and through other writings by Mamphela Ramphele, I explore the author's writing process with attention to the ways she approaches injustice, violence, and loss. I preface an analysis of Ramphele's memoir with a contextualization of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission's hearings, the testimonies of which powerfully represent the extent of injustices suffered by the South African people during the apartheid regime. Ramphele makes the effects of apartheid realistic and relevant in the anthropological research she conducts in the work hostels in Cape Town, and she reveals that the memories she is forced to revisit during the writing process continue to traumatize her. Nawal El Saadawi, a medical doctor in her early career as is Ramphele, also explores violence against women as a form of injustice within the context of dominant cultural norms in her native Egypt and throughout North Africa and the Middle East. Her essays and works of fiction reiterate the recurring theme in her memoir Walking Through Fire that rape, domestic violence, and inadequate health care must decrease if women are to be active participants within a new, democratic society.
Black Bodies Black Fields(s): 20th Century and Contemporary Poetics of the Black Body in African American Poetry and Visual Culture
Year of Dissertation:
2009
This dissertation is a contribution to the growing field of black poetics, exploring the obliterated black body and its juncture with poetry and visual art. It examines the black body<&rsquo>s construction through a conceptual field that reveals both its violent fragmentation and its difficult repair, leading to a larger exploration of the poetics of the black body in 20th century and contemporary African American Poetry and Visual Culture, primarily, through the work of the poet Gwendolyn Brooks and the artist Ellen Gallagher.
Inheritors of Progress: Glaspell, the University, and Liberal Culture in the United States
Year of Dissertation:
2011
This dissertation illuminates the ethics of a liberal culture in the United States as reflected in the plays and fiction of Susan Glaspell (1876 - 1948). Liberal culture flourishes in colleges and universities, and it also has a social geography associated with places such as New York and Massachusetts as well as Chicago and Iowa.
Power-lines: Electricity, Landscape, and the American Mind
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Power-lines examines the intersections between electricity (power-) and landscape (-lines) as they were manifest in American art, literature, science, technology, religion, and philosophy throughout the nineteenth century and into the first part of the twentieth. It alternates between two parallel trajectories. The first line follows "electricity" and "landscape" as defined and circulated by writers such as Samuel Morse, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, and Nikola Tesla. I argue that the science of electricity, the aesthetics of the electric, and the understanding of electric technologies provided models for thinking about the perception of nature and landscape. The telegraph particularly influenced popular ideas about communication and the environment, and what I call "the Line" became a popular way to think about, and with, electricity. The telegraph was not only a metaphor but a physical artifact inserted into the environment. Thus, the second trajectory traces poles and wires as described in American fiction, poetry, landscape painting, and film. Overhead grids were crucial to the development of industries and politics that spanned the nation. The Line framed the way Americans looked at themselves and their environment. For example, Henry David Thoreau, who famously rebuked the need for a telegraph line between Maine and Texas, sat beneath the wires and documented the sounds emitted by what he called "the telegraph harp." The wire's sounds were a sign of a supernatural infrastructure that could offer its listeners access to a higher plane of existence. Later in the nineteenth century, the wires stemming from Niagara Falls' power plant seemed to provide a substitute for the frontier lines which historian Frederick Jackson Turner said had disappeared from the American landscape. Such coincidences suggest that the theories and language of electricity--especially terms like shocks, waves, and currents--and electrical infrastructures had a collective influence on popular attitudes about politics, communication, progress, and technology. Although new grids and nation-spanning networks seemed to unite landscape and electricity in a pastoral equipoise, power-lines have signified the increasingly potent and ambiguous effects of lining our environment (and minds) with wires.