The Serial Autobiographies of Mary McCarthy, Kate Millett, Julia Alvarez, and Jamaica Kincaid
Year of Dissertation:
2011
The Serial Autobiographies of Mary McCarthy, Kate Millett, Julia Alvarez, and Jamaica Kincaid explores the writings of four authors, each of whom wrote multiple autobiographical works. It argues that the serial autobiographer depends on her relationship with her reading audience and that the reader is an essential component of the long-term autobiographical project. In each case, the autobiographer uses her audience as a mirror in which to view herself as who she is changes over time.
Twentieth-Century Catalogs: The Poetics of Listing, Enumeration, and Copiousness in Joyce, Schuyler, McCourt, Pynchon, and Perec
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Advisor:
Wayne Koestenbaum
This dissertation examines the occurrence of catalogs and lists in the literary works of several twentieth-century authors, including James Joyce, poet James Schuyler, novelist and cultural historian James McCourt, the postmodern fabulist Thomas Pynchon, and the French experimental prose author Georges Perec. The dissertation seeks to trace how each author makes use of catalogs in his work, how catalogs form a central part of his style and subject matter, and how his use of catalogs can be read against the biographical, historical, and social contexts surrounding his life and work. A theoretical introduction situates my work among theorists of epistemology, narrative, objectification, and desire, theorists such as Foucault (order and classification), Deleuze and Guattari (rhizome vs. root systems), and Susan Stewart (the impulse toward collecting, the gigantic). Catalogs and lists are shown to be modes of literary representation with a millennial past, dating all the way back to Homer, and with strikingly contemporary resonances, especially for twentieth-first-century readers and critics living in the wake of Modernism and postmodernism.
Witness to the Mad City Asylums: Composing the Self in Early Cold War Madhouse Literature
Year of Dissertation:
2011
“Witness to the Mad City Asylums” examines a wide range of autobiographical and biographical texts--fictional, nonfictional, and poetic--written by and about women and men who were institutionalized as “mad” in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. Placing emphasis on contemporary discourses of sex/uality, marriage, family, and psychiatry, the project closely considers the generic, institutional, and cultural forms within which new kinds of literature take shape. It focuses, for instance, on the appearance of several new subgenres of “madhouse literature” in the texts of mostly noncanonical writers, including Mary Jane Ward, Fritz Peters, Paul and Marie Hackett, Carl Solomon, and Allen Ginsberg. These writers adopt a variety of literary strategies in order to resist the notion of identity as self-contained, a resistance that is particularly evident in their in/ability to form interpersonal bonds, blur the worlds inside and outside the madhouse, and incorporate or exclude the perspectives of their fellow patients, family members, and hospital staff. They also evade the demands of linguistic and literary conventions and prevailing scientific and popular psychiatric discourses by creating a distance between their “sane” and “mad” selves which enables them to write with the authority of a (former) mental patient without being regarded as an unreliable “madman.” By destabilizing binaries such as in/sanity, writer/subject, self/other, and inside/outside the mental institution, multiplications of the self in these texts suggest productive new readings of categories of identity and difference in and beyond madhouse literature. In closely examining this body of texts, it becomes possible to recuperate an important chapter in the history of twentieth-century literature and culture.
Beautiful Bootstraps: The Uneven Climb of Four Basic Writers In An Urban College
Year of Dissertation:
2010
BEAUTIFUL BOOTSTRAPS: THE UNEVEN CLIMB OF FOUR BASIC WRITERS IN AN URBAN COLLEGE
Exceptional Conversations: Classical Music and the Historical Imagination of Narrative Cinema
Year of Dissertation:
2011
"Exceptional Conversations: Classical Music and the Historical Imagination of Narrative Cinema" examines the ways in which film and music are bound together in their histories, forms, and meanings. More specifically it describes and interprets how music figures in some of the most singular directors' films and it traces the various appearances of equally singular composers' works in film. Thus, my dissertation includes chapters on Richard Wagner, Stanley Kubrick, Jean-Luc Godard, and Michael Haneke as well as sustained interpretations of music's role in films by Charlie Chaplin, Francis Ford Coppola and several documentaries by Werner Herzog, among others. My thesis is that the cinema is a contested realization of Wagner's idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Cinema is "the art work of the future," but not the one Wagner imagined. I thus argue for a definition of cinema form and history that reserves a more pivotal role for classical music in cinema than has been previously proposed.
Drawing Conclusions: Visual Literacy in Ficition
Year of Dissertation:
2010
In "Drawing Conclusions," I engage in an interdisciplinary examination of the words and pictures in four Victorian masterpieces of the illustrated novel, arguing that the unique publishing situation of each of these texts and the very different interactions between the authors and illustrators of each have resulted in four distinct examples of the functions illustrations in fiction can fulfill.
A Pedagogy of Faith: The Theological Dimension of Paulo Freire's Educational Theory and Practice
Year of Dissertation:
2011
This dissertation examines the theological framework of Paulo Freire's radical-democratic pedagogy. Since the English-language publication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed in 1970, this Brazilian educator, activist, theorist, and public intellectual has been most commonly viewed in North America and Western Europe as a revolutionary Marxist, as a radical social democrat, or as a humanist educator. There has been a widespread among many of his readers to overlook the religious elements of his pedagogical system. This dissertation contends that a full account of Freire's lifelong work requires an exploration of its roots in mid-twentieth century Catholic thought, from the Christian humanism of Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier to the "prophetic" radicalism of Latin American liberation theology. It traces the evolution of Freire's thought from his immersion in middle-class Catholic activism before Brazil's April 1964 coup to his widely-acknowledged status as the most prominent and influential pedagogical thinker of his generation. It highlights the extent to which Freire's progressive Catholicism shaped such central aspects of his work as "conscientization," social justice, historical possibility, revolutionary socialism, and human nature, thus demonstrating the extent to which Freire's faith informed his pedagogical and political project.
Familiar Estrangements: Reading Family in Middle English Romance
Year of Dissertation:
2009
This dissertation, Familiar Estrangements: Reading Family in Middle English Romance, explores the varied representations of marriage and family in Middle English romance. While Middle English romances often act with disciplinary force to cultivate and popularize ideals about the family, many romances also stand in ambivalent relationship to this disciplinary function. Even if they end up valorizing the nuclear family, they do so through circuitous routes—such as depicting surrogate father–child relationships, inter-racial marriages, the loss of family members, and adultery—as they imagine alternatives means by which families cohere. The chapters take up each of these themes in turn, through readings that are historicized against political and social realities, and informed by psychoanalytic theory. The dissertation begins with a discussion of how three popular romances—Sir Tryamour, Sir Cleges, and Sir Isumbras—idealize the nuclear family so as to advance the interests of their likely audience, the bourgeois-gentry class. Chapter two shows how this idealization is problematized, tracing the alternatives to nuclear families by examining the presence of surrogate fathers in Havelok the Dane, King Horn, and Bevis of Hampton, contextualizing this against the practice of wardship in the thirteenth century. The next chapter reads the inter-religious marriages of The King of Tars, The Sultan of Babylon, and Richard Coer de Lyon, arguing that the anxieties over inter-religious marriage and miscegenation reflect England's evolving attitudes towards its French heritage over the course of the Hundred Years War. Chapter four focuses on a single romance—Gower's "Apollonius of Tyre"—arguing that how the loss of family members is memorialized creates a 'virtual' family that is turned towards political ends. Chapter five examines how adultery is related to the conception of the family in Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, contextualizing the work against the dynastic strife created by the Wars of the Roses. In general, the thesis argues that while ecclesiastical ideas about the family in the high and late Middle Ages began to produce what we would now recognize as nuclear families, the Middle English romance remained a vigorous site where alternatives to doctrinal ideals about the family were imagined.
Camp, the Canon, and a Performative Burlesque: Paula Vogel's Plays as Literary and Cultural Revision
Year of Dissertation:
2010
This dissertation examines the ways in which Paula Vogel's plays respond to and rewrite canonical texts, while simultaneously addressing contemporary concerns, such as domestic violence, pornography, pedophilia, and AIDS. Vogel's dialectical writing strategy encourages the audience to look at these cultural issues from a defamiliarized, historical perspective, so that they are seen less as sensationalized "issues" and more as historical questions that have accumulated meanings over time. In addition, since many of her plays rewrite texts by such canonical giants as Shakespeare, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, and David Mamet, to engage with Vogel is to engage with the canon of theatre and literary studies, as it is restaged in a different historical context and recast with women at the center of the action. Responding to a predominantly male canon, Vogel shifts the focus away from an often universalized, truth-seeking male protagonist, placing women center stage, not as valorized heroines, but as conflicted characters who both enact and resist the discourses that constitute their bodies and identities. Thus, the overarching goal of this study is to examine the ways in which the dialectical structure and dramaturgical strategies of Vogel's plays offer another way of looking at the literary canon, social history, and contemporary American culture.
Reading for the Pause: The Uses of Suspension in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Reading for the Pause investigates the relationship among ethics, epistemology, and form in nineteenth-century poetry. Although they represent a number of different genres, the central texts--Coleridge's Christabel, Shelley's "Mont Blanc," Tennyson's Maud, Robert Browning's "An Epistle...of Karshish," and The Prince's Progress by Christina Rossetti--employ paradigmatic techniques, forms, and images of suspension, unsettling habitual patterns of language and knowledge. The pause of suspension, as distinct from the delays of narrative suspense, both marks the site of epistemological crisis and functions as a potentially powerful response to uncertainty that offers alternatives to skeptical detachment.