The Affective Uses of Dogs: Pet-Keeping in Nineteenth-Century England and America
Year of Dissertation:
2012
By focusing on the human-dog bond, The Affective Uses of Dogs: Pet-Keeping in Nineteenth-Century England and America studies how gendered subjectivities are formed through the management of the interspecies intimacies. In the course of the nineteenth century, petted animals became, particularly for the middle-classes, deeply important for their affective uses, reflecting a new ethos of "humaneness" that earned the dog a central place in the affective economies of the family. In their relationships with humans, dogs elicited love, terror, and loathing, and the regulation of these powerful interspecies affects produced bourgeois Anglo-American masculinities and femininities and transformed the dynamics of domesticity itself.
Woolf Play: The Art of Science in Between the Acts
Year of Dissertation:
2009
In recent decades much has been written about Virginia Woolf and science. It is my contention that Between the Acts, what was to be Woolf's final novel, is her most subtle, most fully nuanced expression of scientific theory. Her interweaving of ideas concerning the primordial, history, the role of the observer, space, matter and time all come together to make this book her most radical and innovative. While extensive studies have been done involving Woolf's entire oeuvre, no in-depth reading has focused exclusively on Between the Acts as it reflects the theories of Charles Darwin, Sir James Jeans, Sir Arthur Eddington, Albert Einstein, and quantum mechanics.
The Long Education: Instruction and Interpretation in Milton's Major Works
Year of Dissertation:
2012
This dissertation examines the development of John Milton's views on teaching and learning and argues that each of Milton's major works contains within it a search for an effective pedagogical model. By performing close readings of key primary texts and grounding those readings within the historical context of shifting educational theory in the seventeenth century, this work attempts to demonstrate the ways in which Milton's texts foreground literature's pedagogical function while simultaneously questioning the ability of texts to engender spiritual and moral impacts on their readers. This study also attempts to trace the growth and maturation of Milton's views on education from the early works--especially Of Education and Areopagitica--in which Milton stresses the importance of the teacher, whether it is an individual or a text, to Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, works in which the authoritative, educative voices of the texts are often unreliable and, in many cases, misguided. Milton's commitment to a pedagogy that is capable of producing reformed readers, both in a spiritual and a civic sense, is in many ways incompatible with the pervasive concept in his works that the true source of learning is the expression of internal self-sufficiency brought about by external trials. This work argues that this incompatibility leads to conflicting attitudes toward teaching and learning in Milton's life and in his texts. The work concludes with a thorough exploration of Samson Agonistes, in which the text's unrelenting refusal to provide decisive valuations of the moral and spiritual justifications of its characters actions constitutes a pedagogy of uncertainty that is directed squarely at the reader.
"The Einstein of English Fiction": James Joyce, the New Physics, and Modernist Print Culture
Year of Dissertation:
2010
There is a substantial field of scholarship addressing the incorporation of Albert Einstein's relativity theories into the structural and thematic aspects of James Joyce's later work. Those studies tend to be based on the assumption that the theories were "in the air" after their publication in 1905 and 1916. In contrast, this dissertation examines the continuity of thought about the novel and science before and after Einstein's emergence in the periodical cultures where Joyce's work appeared. Chapter 1 surveys the discourse of science and the novel in The Egoist and The Little Review from 1914 to 1918, tracing the rise in importance given to the novel in avant-garde circles due to its supposedly scientific nature. Parallel to that rise is the development of camps of thought about "non-materialist" science, which was perceived to restore individualism and self-determination to humanity. Chapter 2 examines the serialization of Ulysses alongside various source texts that are found to have been used in its pre-publication materials. In that way, ideas that directly affected the development of the "Wandering Rocks" and "Ithaca" episodes are shown to merge with a burgeoning awareness of relativity, including a series of mid-1918 articles by Dora Marsden in The Egoist that predate Einstein's popularization at the end of 1919. These two episodes, as well as the mythic method of Ulysses, bear structural relationships in accord with aspects of Einstein's theories that were discussed in the periodicals to which Joyce contributed and in other materials that he read. Chapter 3 recontextualizes Finnegans Wake in both the mainstream popular science culture and the inter-war avant-garde, elucidating relationships between the two that have not hitherto been discussed in Joyce scholarship. The conversation among Joyce, his colleagues at transition, and Wyndham Lewis in The Enemy arises specifically in response to the British popular science industry and influences several core episodes of Finnegans Wake. In examining the relationships between Joyce's later work and popular science, we can fill in a piece of the puzzle that is modernism's relationship to the new physics and, simultaneously, the history of the novel.
The Bend Back: Modernity, Sensation, and Vision in Bowen, Rhys, Woolf, and Lehmann
Year of Dissertation:
2011
In this study, I take as my point of departure the idea that the shifts in women's social roles which occurred after the Great War and throughout the 1920s coincided with, and indeed made possible, formal shifts in women's writing. A change in social perspective occasions a change in literary perspective. However, these shifts did not result in an unhinged feeling of freedom and liberation for women. On the contrary these writers attest to a double bind of propriety and permissiveness, of freedom and constraint, that comes through in their texts on a formal, thematic, and affective level. The late modernist novels I examine testify to the fact that in order to “rise to the occasion,” as Elizabeth Bowen describes the central challenge of modern social life, one must be attuned to what is expected of one, to how one is viewed, to how one is judged, to how one feels, to learn how one is to love, and how one is to live. The essential function of perception, according, to Merleau–Ponty, is to “to lay foundations of, or inaugurate, knowledge” (19). Through readings of the work of Elizabeth Bowen, Jean Rhys, Rosamund Lehmann and Virginia Woolf, I argue that the senses become a tool for understanding how to navigate this constantly shifting social context. Each chapter concentrates on a way in which the authors considered navigate the tensions between the self and society through an attentive activation of the physical as well as knowledge-based senses. A major narrative strategy adopted by these writers, I argue, is the bend back— rather than proceeding teleologically, their texts bend backward in a therapeutic attempt to revalue the present, or to understand how it came to be so, in a larger attempt to make sense of their moment and their role within it.
Specter and Scrim: Partition and Postcoloniality in the Literature of Northern Ireland
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Advisor:
Wayne Koestenbaum
This dissertation concerns the political history of Northern Ireland, its literature and its "Troubles." My project recognizes the paradigmatic weight of partition, the theoretical gap it represents, and the need to fully explicate this key political structure of modernity. It utilizes a cross-disciplinary methodology that allies postcolonial and poststructural theory, Irish and Partition Studies, in developing a theory of the ways Irish cultural production has been disturbed by the partition on which decolonization was predicated and the Northern territory created. The project is structured in two parts: Part I is a theoretical piece outlining, in two chapters, outlining theory of partition in Ireland and the poetics of historical literature from the North. Part II, including three additional chapters, provides illustrations of these ideas through analysis of recent Northern Irish literary work in multiple genres: drama, poetry and fiction.
A SEMESTER IN PURGATORY: AT THE INTERSECTIONS OF PEDAGOGY, INTERPELLATION, QUEERNESS, AND MOURNING
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Advisor:
Wayne Koestenbaum
A Semester in Purgatory: At the Intersections of Pedagogy, Interpellation, Queerness, and Mourning records an unusual project--one often attempted mid-career, rather than as a dissertation. It traces the process of developing pedagogy--from work gleaned in an academic practicum to experiences in the classroom--while incorporating the perspective of a generalist who is teaching three distinct periods in that semester being recorded (classics, medieval/early modern, composition). Concomitant to the research concerns in the project is the subjectivity of mourning, as my teaching and writing occur in the literal aftermath of my mother's sudden death, which necessarily becomes part of the project as it spectrally descends on my classroom, and my life. The dissertation thus considers a selection of important articles on the development of teaching (Elbow, Bartholomae, Perl, et al), while considering concerns of truth in autobiography (using Coetzee as a platform to works by Althusser, Williams, and Sontag) and the effects of mourning (both in narrative form, with writers such as Didion and Kincaid, and in psychological form, a rumination on the works of Melanie Klein and Silvan Tomkins). This dissertation emphasizes the development of an authentic personal voice--in writing and teaching--while also considering the identity politics and possible spaces for interpellation that complicate the classroom and personal pedagogy.
Forget Burial: Illness, Narrative, and the Reclamation of Disease
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Advisor:
Robert Reid-Pharr
Through a theoretical and archival analysis of HIV/AIDS literature, this dissertation argues that the AIDS crisis is not an isolated incident that is now "over," but a striking culmination of a long history of understanding illness through narratives of queer sexual decline and national outsiderhood. Literary representations of HIV/AIDS can be read as a means of resistance to the stigmatization of people of color, women, immigrants, and queers, debunking the narratives that vilify these subjects as threats to national security and health. In drawing connections between illness, history, and the African diaspora, my work adopts a queer theoretical approach to illuminate how boundaries around sexual and gender identities are often intertwined with representations of nationality and race. Through a feminist analysis of novels by Sarah Schulman, Rebecca Brown, Jamaica Kincaid, Patricia Powell and Octavia Butler, this project demonstrates how discourses of HIV/AIDS have been metaphorically and linguistically connected to symbols ranging from national borders to capitalist commodities, and even gothic vampires. In conjunction with these fictional texts, I concurrently undertake an archival study of writing by community leaders from the first decade of the pandemic whose work successfully countered and reinscribed harmful narratives of HIV/AIDS. By integrating transnational literature with archival materials by New York City-based writers including Iris De La Cruz, Katrina Haslip, and Bradley Ball, my work communicates the urgency of transcending national borders and narrative genres to effectively confront the HIV/AIDS pandemic on a global scale.
Pop Poetics: Between Lyric and Language
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Advisor:
Wayne Koestenbaum
Pop artists (painters and poets) often get praised or censured for their inclusion of low-brow commercial iconography. Such appraisals, positive or negative, obscure the epistemic rigors of Pop serial-design. Pop-inflected poetic projects by Joe Brainard, James Schulyer, Eileen Myles, and David Trinidad rarely receive attention, for instance, as exemplary experimental texts. This dissertation thus introduces the concept of "Pop poetics" as a metacritical third-term by which to problematize reductive distinctions between "lyric" and "language-based," "representational" and "abstract," "confessional" and "constraint-generated," postwar poetry. It probes the constructive, yet constrictive, schema by which critics such as Marjorie Perloff, Joseph Conte, and David Lehman have sought to canonize "radical poetry," "serial poetry," and "New York School" poetry in recent decades. It tracks a perspective-based, serial-realist poetic strain inherited from Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and John Cage, even as it posits a direct relation between Pop poetics and the modernist grid, the mixed-media assemblage, the serialized gallery display, and the serialized art manifesto.
A Lexicon of American Vernaculars
Author:
George Fragopoulos
Year of Dissertation:
2012
A Lexicon of American Vernaculars is an interdisciplinary project that combines poetics, social and aesthetic history and literary theory. It brings together American history, poetry/poetics and questions of language, with a particular focus on ethnic, transnational and Diasporic contexts, and on the political implications of such writings. My central thesis is that we cannot understand what makes an American literature "American" without looking at the international contexts that have shaped our country and our citizens--all very pertinent questions to ask in a our new "Global Village," where English often plays the role of Lingua Franca. What I call "American Vernaculars," therefore, are poetic approaches by writers from marginalized groups that are normally not represented in our national literature(s): African-Americans, Latin@s, Asian-, and Greek-American poets. Within the American context, and historically speaking, I also examine the ways in which the lyric has been often (mis)read in a highly depoliticized manner, something my dissertation seeks to address and correct.