Waste Matters: Expenditure and Waste Management in 20th- and 21st-Century Poetics
Author:
Christopher Schmidt
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Advisor:
Wayne Koestenbaum
This dissertation examines how waste, in its various literal and metaphorical manifestations, has influenced 20th- and 21st-century arts and letters. In our current moment of environmental crisis, the urgency of this inquiry is pressing. "Waste Matters," however, is guided by a belief that before we demonize waste in the current millennium, we need first to understand its decisive influence on the art and life practices of the previous century. In chapters devoted to Gertrude Stein, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Andy Warhol, and conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith, I examine how these artists resist and reflect the pressures of consumer capitalism, with its conflicting emphases on efficiency and disposability, as well as the anal sublimations that typically govern artistic creation.
Violation and Volition: Representations of the Molested Boy in the Post-War Gay Novel
Author:
Jason Schneiderman
Year of Dissertation:
2013
Advisor:
Wayne Koestenbaum
This dissertation considers representations of molested boys in the postwar American gay novel. It argues that gay novelists between the end of World War II and the early 2000s created a new genre, a kind of anti-bildungsroman of the molested boy. In this genre, the molested boy is presented as being on a trajectory toward an adult subjectivity that is withheld, missing, or incoherent. The genre arose as a narrative strategy to resist a dominant discourse of homophobia that conflated child molesting with gay adulthood.. Gay authors disrupted that conflation by refusing adult portrayal of the molested boys. The narrative emphasis of these novels is on the boys rather than on their future selves. In refusing the eschatology of adulthood, these novels insist on the boys as full and imminent beings, rather than proto-adults. The logic of recovery and healing is rejected as obscuring and devaluing the boyhood experience.
Genetic Revolutionaries: American Socialism, the Russian Revolution, and the Invention of the Radical Immigrant, 1886-1920.
Year of Dissertation:
2012
This dissertation examines the American response to socialist politics in general and the Russian Revolution in particular during the titular period. I argue that Gilded-Age anti-radicalism followed by Progressive-Era anti-communism act as a discursive crucible that irrevocably links the two figures of the radical and the immigrant, manufacturing a forced association between particular ethnicities and specific political forms. While immigrants to the US had long been blamed as carriers of biological contagions, socialism in the late nineteenth century would soon be characterized as a social disease in the American imaginary, one that "naturally" infected lesser minds from Central and Eastern Europe, and could then be transmitted to "native" constitutions that betrayed their own weakness simply by the act of adopting radical views. Through readings of contemporaneous literature from authors such as William Dean Howells, Jack London, and John Reed, as well as analyses of concordant reportage and jurisprudential decisions, this study argues that conceptions of a "politics in the blood" not only offered ballast to harsh anti-immigration policies but also generated a contradictory population of "indigenous foreigners" alongside the immigrants themselves, a "counterpublic" rendered un-American purely for their political views. Aided by post-bellum racial categories, new forms of political representation, unprecedented waves of immigration, and the helixing of legislation with the new sciences of anthropometrics, the frightening figure of this "radical immigrant" would abet an increasingly centralized American government in the transition from a discourse of empire in the late nineteenth century to one of anti-communism in the early twentieth, producing contours of contact that still obtain.
In the Butcher Shop of Subjectivity: Autobiographical Works from the Black Liberation Movement, 1970-1987
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Advisor:
Robert Reid-Pharr
Through an examination of autobiographical works by imprisoned members of the Black Liberation Movement who were targeted by illegal government counterintelligence campaigns, "In the Butcher Shop of Subjectivity" argues for a realignment of the field of contemporary American literature. This realignment must incorporate the massive expansion of the American prison regime, perhaps the most nation's most critical historical development of the past fifty years. In exploring the qualities that the autobiographies examined herein share with developments in the field of critical theory and avant-garde poetry, this study suggests that critiques of the prison regime offered in Black Liberationist works provide crucial analyses otherwise missing from contemporaneous and more well-known works of American writing. In particular, the political claims made by the "language regime" in American letters--language-based schools of critical theory and language-focused movements within experimental American poetry and prose--are examined as prototypes for a culture of ignorance that has aided and abetted the widespread imprisonment of America's most vulnerable citizens.
Divided Men: The Masculinity/Marriage Dilemma in the Novels of George Eliot
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Studies of Victorian masculinities have been primarily concerned with how men defined and were defined within the public sphere. This limited focus has ignored their private and domestic lives, itself an exemplification of the separate sphere theory. This dissertation explores what I called the masculinity/ marriage dilemma, a situation in which men feel that they must choose between a public life and a private one. George Eliot's male characters are divided, feeling themselves pulled in what they perceived as two different routes towards manhood. Related to this predicament are issues of power, particularly between men and women, men and other men, and within men themselves.
Common Sense: The Rise of Narrative in the Age of Self-Evidence
Year of Dissertation:
2011
This dissertation describes the role that eighteenth-century British popular fiction played in the development of "common sense" rhetoric as an appeal to a normative, imagined community. The transformation of common sense from its classical sense, as an internal faculty that organizes sensory perception into cognition, into a normative rhetorical device occurred across a period of time in which the destabilizing effects of social upheaval during the seventeenth century gave way to the normative pressure of the rise of the public sphere in the form of a burgeoning print culture.
The Rhetoric of Future Harm: Representations and Figurations of the Child in Contemporary American Discourses of Catastrophe
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Advisor:
Robert Reid-Pharr
My objective in this project is to draw attention to the frequency with which the figure of the child appears in representations of catastrophe and to map out the causes and consequences of that association. The Rhetoric of Future Harm is thus a rhetorical and tropological study of the child as a figure in contemporary discourse. In what follows, I will propose that the child-figure condenses fears about the human future. A longstanding figure in American culture, the child in contemporary representations of catastrophe, I contend, captures and contains the energies of change, transforming them into anxious fantasies of harm. In particular, I look at representations and rhetorics that bring the child's economy of meanings to bear on the threatened human future. I argue that the deep and pervasive anxiety about the future of the human discloses the apprehension of complexity. I find in this apprehension the nascent recognition of further futures and new forms for a post-humanity and a post-humanism. The child-figure is thus a deeply ambivalent attempt to harness, capture and control, the movements of the future and the meanings of life-itself.
Repetition and Remediation in Richard Powers, Shelley Jackson, and Oshii Mamoru
Year of Dissertation:
2011
In Remediation (1999), Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin maintain that the novelty of new media results from its simulation of the formal characteristics found in older media. While this concept envisions divergent historical pathways for media, it risks falling into solipsism without drawing clear chronological borders. Moreover, the logical self-reproduction found in the rhetoric of new media is similar to postmodernism's predicament in challenging History and Modernity, which places new media in the broader context of postmodernist interrogations of origin, rupture, and genealogy. If, as with Modernity, new media at its core questions its own foundation as constituted by the opposition of old and new and rupture versus continuity, what is the value of remediation as the foremost theory of new media in conceptualizing Modernity's contradictions and imagining its exterior? Interrogating the assumption of remediation, this dissertation investigates the transformation of one medium through its appropriation of another medium's formal aesthetics, illustrated in Richard Powers's novel Plowing the Dark (2000), Shelley Jackson's hypertext fiction Patchwork Girl (1995), and Oshii Mamoru's digital animation Ghost in the Shell (1995). I argue that these authors' explorations of the representational limits of their chosen medium through remediation give rise to the value of repetition and renewal, differing from the solipsism demonstrated by new media discourse. I also suggest that the "origins" of art forms--novel, hypertext, and animation--can be obscured through their complex relationships with earlier genres and forms. This dissertation examines Powers's juxtaposition of poetry and virtual reality, facilitation of the printed novel's reformation through conjuring a digital environment, and adoption of the unusual second-person singular point of view to induce readers' immersion into the text. My study of Jackson's hypertext rewriting of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) reveals how the original novel's use of the epistolary format prefigures the interactive storytelling in Jackson's work. Finally, I delve into Oshii's use of nonperspectival vision simulating Japanese graphic novel, cinema, and Eastern landscape painting, demonstrating alternative spatiotemporal relations to those of Renaissance optics and perspectival realism.
The Paradox of Holocaust Humor: Comedy That Illuminates Tragedy
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Abstract
Good God but You Smart! A Study of Language Legitimacy in Cajun Louisiana
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Advisor:
Rebecca Mlynarczyk
Good God but You Smart! is the first dissertation-length examination of the educational/linguistic assimilation of Cajuns, a minority ethnic group in Southwest Louisiana. The Louisiana constitution of 1921 banned Cajun French in schools, bringing the language to near-extinction today. Like other internally colonized groups, such as Mexican Americans and Hawaiian Americans, many Cajuns have been "Americanized" but still speak a mixed English that makes it possible for them to both participate in the U.S. economy and maintain a linguistic cultural identity. This newly emergent Cajun Vernacular English (CVE) has been the subject of much recent linguistics research, but studies show that Cajuns abandon CVE in relation to their attempts at upward mobility. In this study, I ask and seek to answer the question, "Why do upwardly mobile Cajuns comply with the disappearance of CVE?"