Hearing Cinematic Modernism: Sound, Film, and Modernist Women's Prose
Year of Dissertation:
2011
This dissertation focuses on the relationship between sound cinema and literary modernism in the interwar period. Recent scholarship on cinema and literature has provided important grounds of comparison between these two media. However, scholars have defined cinema as a visual medium when, in fact, perceptions and valuations of the cinematic medium were historically shaped by sounds as much as images. In this project, I read aural and visual representations in the literary texts of the British writers Vernon Lee, Dorothy Richardson, and Virginia Woolf in the context of contentious debates on the meaning of sound cinema in the 1910s and 1920s. Exploring the sounds of cinema in women's writing, I argue, asserts the importance of this medium to interwar prose without reverting to visual concepts (like the gaze) that claim a subject and object dichotomy along gendered lines. I conclude by focusing on two early women filmmakers, Alice Guy-Blaché and Germaine Dulac, showing how their development of film sound resonates with the literary texts of Lee, Richardson, and Woolf. My central aims in this project are to explain the value of cinema for women writers in the interwar period and to establish a new means of conducting intermedial research between literature and film through a focus on the audiovisual as well as the visual elements of cinema.
"You've Got to Be Modernistic": American Vernacular Modernism, 1910-1937
Year of Dissertation:
2009
This study interrogates the commonly held assumption that literary modernism--broadly conceived--was an exclusively international, cosmopolitan, and elite movement violently opposed to the commercial marketplace. The thesis of this project argues that modernist literary experimentation appeared in many popular contexts in American literature of the early twentieth century. I call this aesthetically experimental popular writing "vernacular modernism," a reference to its reliance on American slang and to its anti-elitist position in the cultural hierarchy. This "vernacular modernism" drew its inspiration from H.L. Mencken's study The American Language, a work that implicitly allies the American vernacular with both formal and linguistic innovation as well as a harsh critique of the same nineteenth-century bourgeois gentility that canonical modernist writers rejected.
Endless Assents: John Dewey, Aesthetic Experience and the Promise of American Poetry
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Endless Assents makes the argument that John Dewey's theory of art (articulated in such texts as Experience and Nature and Art as Experience) offers a new and fruitful way of better appreciating and understanding the uniquely generative and transformative value of aesthetic experience in American poetry (specifically in the works of Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, and A.R. Ammons).
Notes Toward a Super Fiction: Revision, Temporality, and the Superhero Genre
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Notes Toward a Super Fiction argues for the recognition of the superhero as a distinct narrative genre that offers provocative ways of conceptualizing the process of revision. This recognition involves an exploration of the idiosyncratic narrative temporality of the genre, as well as the manner in which perpetual revision has evolved as a negotiation of that temporality. Particular emphasis is placed on the parallels to issues concerning revision within the field of composition studies. Chapter One situates the superhero within the emerging discourse of comics studies by examining the contested definitions and histories of three key terms: comics; comic book; and superhero. Chapter Two explores how shifting ideas of the nature and purpose of revision have emerged from and contributed to the temporal ambiguity characteristic of the superhero genre throughout its history, a narrative condition that Eco describes as oneiric. Chapter Three links these shifts to historical transformations regarding revision within composition studies, emphasizing the recent tendency of the field to view revision as embedded in the politics of cultural and institutional authority rather than the practice of textual production. Chapter Four explores potential alternative paradigms of revision as a textual practice through close readings of three superhero narratives that can be described as metarevisionary: Kurt Busiek's "The Nearness of You;" Warren Ellis Planetary; and Alan Moore's Supreme: The Story of the Year. The dissertation concludes by suggesting parallels between the revision strategies explored in the previous chapter and Fredric Jameson's framing of the utopian as irreducible multiplicity, which in turn echoes Deleuze's reading of Nietzschean difference as an alternative to Hegelian dialectics.
Deployments of Whiteness: Affect, Materiality, and the Social in Late Medieval English Literature
Year of Dissertation:
2010
This dissertation examines select medieval discourses of whiteness, both somatic and non-somatic, and their imbrications with the affective, the material, and the social registers of late medieval culture. Contemporary critical whiteness studies remains heavily invested in whiteness as a dermal phenomenon and as a racial marker. But medieval deployments of whiteness, in the absence of a rigid association between racial discourses and color, do not simply denote or connote skin tone. Rather, whiteness as a representational trope makes visible normative cultural ideals such as courtly beauty, Christian salvation, chivalric prowess, or European identity. At the same time, however, whiteness marks the limits of ruling ideologies by registering specific ruptures and ambiguities within the values it signifies. Affectively, as in The Book of the Duchess and in Pearl, whiteness is a figuration of the state of mourning and the workings of desire; it signifies not only the lost body of a feminine Lady but also an international, continental-inspired culture of courtliness in which Chaucer and the Pearl-poet actively participate. Materially, whiteness is an embodiment of cultural refinement and salvific value. Thus, in Pearl, the representation of whiteness as a valuable object highlights its function as a commodity fetish that simultaneously inscribes and erases its history of material labor. Or in late medieval representations of the Passion in Piers Plowman and in mystery plays, the white leather body suit worn by actors playing Christ is literally the material skin of an animal but nonetheless represents the humanity of God, whose suffering flesh stands for the entire body politic of Christendom. Socially, in the cross-cultural encounters between Mongol East and European West, whiteness is a sign of the West's anxious appropriations of the Mongol Khan's superior chivalric prowess and courtliness; the Khan frequently appears white and European in medieval travelogues and in visual art. However much it may be in the nature of whiteness to disguise its working as a universalizing agent in such examples, whiteness is always in play with the affective, material, and social modalities of cultural values in the late Middle Ages. And in the act of play, affective markers of white do become discourses of Whiteness, technologies of performative social negotiations with real material effects.
"Keywords" for Post-Imperial Britain: (African-)American Routes to Black British Cultural Studies
Author:
Demetrios Kapetanakos
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Advisor:
Robert Reid-Pharr
Over the past three decades, Black British theorists Stuart Hall, Hazel Carby, and Paul Gilroy have made major contributions to the field of African-American Studies. Their readings of the intersection of race, culture, power, and identity were extremely important. This intellectual dialogue has flowed mostly from Britain to the United States. My dissertation reverses the trajectory and explores how the United States and the African-American experience has shaped Black British Cultural Studies, a term coined in a collection of essays by these figures. I locate the field in the 1970's and 1980's with the rise of Thatcherism. This moment is important because it marks the twilight of British imperialism, as defined by direct colonial rule, and the rise of American Empire, as exemplified through its global dominance in the economic, political, and cultural spheres. As the world order shifted from Britain to America after World War II, the structure of British society transformed from one focused on a rooted way of life to a new identity in this changing global order. British society with its localized culture and working-class camaraderie was replaced by an individualistic, winner-takes-all system embodied in neoliberal ideology. When immigrants from Britain's colonies arrived after the Second World War demanding their own stake in British society, this shift would go on to shape how ideas of identity and belonging that had seemed fixed would now have to be rethought. For these Black British Cultural Studies scholars, the experience of the immigrants from the colonies and their offspring needed a completely new understanding of terms such as empire, nation, culture, migration, and multiculturalism. The narrative of people arriving from the Africa, South Asia, and particularly the Caribbean could not be defined as traditionally British. In each chapter, I explore how the United States and the African-American experience have shaped the development of these concepts in the writings of Hall, Carby, and Gilroy. These figures have challenged the definitions of seemingly definitive terms like nation, culture, and society and have called for new models and narratives to reconceive them and apply them to the contemporary conditions.
Deorientation Acts: The Middle East in the African American Imagination, 1827-1928
Year of Dissertation:
2011
This dissertation attempts to unravel the way in which racial identities are constructed, articulated, mobilized, and re-constructed through an excavation of the complex web of significance the Middle East played in the formation of African American identities during the long nineteenth century. It does so by building upon two accepted critical notions: first, that the Middle East has carried great ideological weight in the construction of an American identity from the earliest moments at which such an identity was coming into being; and, second, that the anticolonial and civil rights movements from 1955-1972 amplified this weight for African Americans in particular. My study, however, amends both to suggest that the second process began long before 1955, and advances these studies to propose that early African American authors utilized the Middle East - which they knew as "the Orient" - to strategically deform the genres in which they wrote, thus destabilizing the understandings of racial, sexual, and national identities within these genres. This was achieved most often through what I term "deorientation acts" - processes by which African American authors critically defamiliarized assumptions and expectations within the forms in which they wrote to and, in the process, de- and re-constructed not only of African American identities, but what it means to be an American altogether.
Pioneering the Profession: Crises in English Studies and the Nontenured PhD
Year of Dissertation:
2010
This dissertation addresses contemporary nontenured PhDs in English, who face a number of disciplinary crises: (1) tenure is steadily declining, (2) it's increasingly difficult to publish, (3) the general relevancy of the field has become dubious, and (4) the number of English majors is shrinking. This confluence of crises makes competition for fewer jobs fiercer and begs the question of what the backlog of nontenured English PhDs will produce as scholarship, and how and why they will do this. The growing number of individuals in this position is just as qualified as their tenured colleagues are to do legitimate scholarship, but if tenure is not likely or not possible for them, then their motivation and means to do scholarship may likely be quite different. So, then, might their methods be different.
Matters of Taste: Eating, Aesthetics, and American Identity, 1720-1865
Year of Dissertation:
2011
"Matters of Taste" demonstrates how leading cultural, political, and literary figures from the late colonial era through the Civil War viewed the cultivation of the American palate, like the cultivation of aesthetic taste, as essential to shaping a democratic citizenry. Reading texts ranging from Thomas Jefferson's emancipation agreement with his personal chef, James Hemings, to Nathaniel Hawthorne's metaphorical presentation of The House of the Seven Gables as a "dish offered to the Public," I document the emergence of a distinctly American sense of taste, one that is composed of practical and political, as well as aesthetic criteria. I argue that this composite sense of taste expresses the republican ideals associated with the nation's formation, and at the same time, incorporates its enduring contradictions of race, gender, and class. By offering a cultural history of American taste that originates in the act of eating, I hope to expand the narrative of the nation's founding to acknowledge the influence of foods such as Indian corn and figures such as Hemings, as well as written works that reveal the relation of good taste to good citizenship. In so doing, I also hope to open American aesthetic discourse to a more inviting--and flavorful--form of cultural inquiry.
READING FOR (THE) REAL: BETWEEN JACQUES LACAN AND NARRATIVE PLOT
Year of Dissertation:
2009
This dissertation uses Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to dialogue with narrative theory: it investigates, on the global level, the raison d'être of narrative and questions, in particular, the existing narratological framework wherein the workings of plot have been discussed and apprehended. Inspired by Peter Brooks' classic Reading for the Plot (1984), this dissertation continues to forge an interconnection between human psychical dynamics and literary textual dynamics. More, it aims at reopening such a discussion of plot apropos of narrative meaning, naming gaps therein, and proposing some possible alternative terms with which to further along narrative/plot studies.