English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item Insurrection in Black: Reading Race and Revolt in the Long Nineteenth Century(2019) Bruno, Timothy William; Levine, Robert S; Wong, Edlie L; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Insurrection in Black: Reading Race and Revolt in the Long Nineteenth Century” examines depictions of black rebellion in American and African American literature spanning from the 1830s to the early 1900s. From enslaved uprisings and black armies to worker strikes and insurgent plots, black rebellion appeared as a recurring image across the antebellum and postbellum periods. “Insurrection in Black” argues that these images of rebellious violence functioned speculatively, imagining for readers new identities, social movements, and communities. The dissertation explores black rebellion’s cultural work in novels, speeches, newspapers, autobiographies, and polemics by Robert Montgomery Bird, Richard Hildreth, Jabez Delano Hammond, Gerrit Smith, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lucy Parsons, Sutton E. Griggs, Thomas Dixon, and Pauline Hopkins. A comparative approach to these texts reveals that, far from representing a stable or straightforward politics, black rebellion in print often served competing ends not necessarily aligned with black freedom struggles. Ultimately, this dissertation does more than reveal the speculative power inhering in depictions of rebellious violence: “Insurrection in Black” brings black militancy to the center of the long nineteenth century’s literary and cultural life.Item The Favor of Another: Labor and Precarity in Contemporary Fiction(2019) Macintosh, John A.; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Favor of Another: Labor and Precarity in Contemporary Fiction examines how fiction since 1980 responds to changes to the composition of labor and of work itself. In particular, it is interested in the representation of service sector work in the novels of Stephanie Danler, Don DeLillo, Helen DeWitt, Mohsin Hamid, Jamaica Kincaid, Chang-rae Lee, Imbolo Mbue, Dinaw Mengestu, Bharati Mukherjee, Stewart O’Nan, and Merritt Tierce. The dissertation argues that these novelists develop aesthetic strategies to respond to issues including globalization, immaterial labor, entrepreneurial subjectivity, and financialization. Novels about domestic work register a push-pull dynamic of labor migration from the Global South and in doing so ascribe alternately too much or too little agency to domestic worker characters. The challenge of representing restaurant work leads to a strategy of formal and affective repetition to mimic the routine of interactive service. Novels critical of entrepreneurship either expose cliché as the underlying trope of innovation or reflect the failure of entrepreneurial discourse to account for workers at the bottom of the labor market. Although literary criticism about finance tends to insist on abstraction, reading financial novels for labor reveals the contradiction between that representation and reality. While the labor novel seems to have waned, the dissertation reconceives the genre by examining a range of formal responses to work in novels not often read together. Its analysis concludes that reading for labor not only reveals how fiction registers changes in political economy, but also revises our understanding of the contemporary novel more broadly. The novels studied also provide insight into interdisciplinary debates about social and economic precarity since the mid-1970s. Often defined in terms of degraded work and the retrenchment of the welfare state, theorists emphasize a neoliberal restructuring of the economy as the cause of precarity. The dissertation argues instead that precarity is inherent in capitalist economies and its reemergence is symptomatic of prolonged economic stagnation. Taking seriously the etymological overtones of precarious—the dependence on the favor of another—it argues that the end of precarity requires not nostalgia for a previous arrangement of labor, but a challenge to the wage system itself.Item Henry Dumas: Prophet of the Afrosurreal Renaissance(2019) Jackson, Jeremy Alexander; Nunes, Zita; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This literary biography locates the life and work of Henry Dumas – one of the most unique and under-studied writers of the Black Arts Movement – as a radical, revolutionary nexus of Afrosurrealist thought. Afrosurrealism, a term popularized by scholar D. Scot Miller, is a genre of Black American writing wherein Black artists mobilize the aesthetic techniques of surrealism to express the particular experience of being Black in America. Through his “skill at creating an entirely different world organically connected to this one,” to quote Amiri Baraka, Henry Dumas serves as a vital connecting point between the previous era of Black surrealism and our current Afrosurreal Renaissance. Thus, this literary and critical biography advances a twofold goal: to grant Dumas his rightful place as a central figure in African American literary history, and to recognize the expansive and important scope of the modern Afrosurrealist tradition.Item The Invented Indian: Race, Empire, and National Identity in Twentieth-Century US Literature(2018) Humud, Sarah Bonnie; Nunes, Zita; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines representations of ‘Indians’ to expose how these fictions underpin white male hegemony and US imperialism. As team mascots, Western sidekicks, or Thanksgiving staples, ‘Indians’ permeate US culture in the twentieth century, though scholars have largely focused on the nineteenth. In the era of US expansion, representations of savage and vanishing Indians justified Native genocide. Scholars have highlighted the role these nineteenth-century ‘Indians’ played in maintaining white male dominance, but this focus on early American literature has obscured the Indian’s ongoing role in maintaining white hegemony. Fictions of Indian incompetence have led to continued abuses and assaults on sovereignty, and despite the social justice gains of the last century, Native land, water, and human rights are still under attack. By analyzing a range of writers including authors of color, women, and white men, my project intervenes in earlier scholarship to reveal an enduring, though often unconscious, commitment to colonial ideologies in twentieth-century US literature. Americans of all races and genders participate in a culture steeped in Indian characters, costumes, and literary tropes. Race and racism are part of the fabric of US culture and language, and US authors reiterate race issues in literature, even if they do so unintentionally. In both canonical and activist literatures, the ‘Indian’ sustains white supremacy by propagating as neutral, if not invisible. In its normalcy, it resists critical inquiry. This dissertation makes three interventions in American literature and Native American studies. First, it highlights the continued colonial mindset in the twentieth century and its consequences for Native peoples. Second, it reveals how the invented Indian in US fiction helps maintain white hegemony. Finally, it underscores that even activist literatures rely on the figure of the ‘Indian,’ meaning they, too, often unconsciously support white male hegemony. As Americans use Indian caricatures to better understand themselves, these metaphors ultimately displace Native peoples and their realities, further obscuring and normalizing their colonization. By examining dominant and resistant literatures side-by-side, my analysis reveals that colonial ideologies remain mostly unquestioned and intact in US culture.Item Sacred Spaces, Secular Fictions: Nineteenth-Century American Domestic Literature(2018) Underland, Susanna Compton; Levine, Robert S; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Sacred Spaces, Secular Fictions puts the feminist study of domestic literature in conversation with the study of religion and literature in order to better understand the place of secularity in nineteenth-century American domestic literature. Authors such as Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Herman Melville, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper represented the space of the home, among other sacred spaces, as a place to navigate a dynamic relationship between religious and secular realms. While we often think of domestic literature as a didactic mode employed to promote Christian doctrine, a significant strand of this literature encouraged readers to consider how certain secular discourses shaped and was shaped by religious belief. A novel like Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), for example, stages debates about African American national belonging that incorporate religious, legal, political, and domestic discourses. Attending to the (sometimes unruly) reciprocity of these discourses is crucial for better understanding the Christian faith that Harper was known for, and which often characterizes Iola Leroy’s moral ethos. As the title of Sacred Spaces, Secular Fictions suggests, this project asserts the importance of space to domestic literature, as well as the impact of fiction on nineteenth-century religious culture. Domestic spaces, including but not limited to the home, were crucial for representing and negotiating conflicts between religion and such secular issues as sexuality, racial hierarchies, science and medicine, and political citizenship. From Sedgwick’s Puritan homestead to Phelps’s imagined houses in heaven or Harper’s living-room salon, these sacred spaces merged the religious and the secular in ways that modeled a secularist morality for nineteenth-century readers. Domestic fiction, I show, could instruct readers on moral issues without proposing a single (presumably Christian) doctrine or viewpoint. While the authors in this study believed in the importance of literature for cultivating moral readers, they did not necessarily believe that Christian faith was the only worthy mode of morality. Instead, readers could take in different sources—religious and secular—in order to best navigate a modern world.Item REPRESENTATIONS OF THE MILITARY IN 20TH CENTURY ETHNIC AMERICAN LITERATURE(2017) Fontenot, Kara Parks; Nunes, Zita C; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In 20th century ethnic American literature, writers deploy representations of the US military to expose the operations of American hegemony, articulate relations of power, reveal how they are maintained, identify contradictions in the rhetoric of American nationalism and imagine not yet manifest possibilities for social justice coalitions that cross racial, ethnic, and national lines. As a national institution controlled by the US government and consuming labor in the form of military service from citizens of all classes, races and ethnicities in ways that reflect existing relations of power in American society at large, the US military presents a unique and powerful site for articulation of relationships between nation, race, and class. As evidence, this dissertation explores six American novels, all published in the 20th century and taking as their subject matter US military involvement in declared and undeclared military conflicts of that era. Close readings of these novels bring our attention to three specific examples of political projects for which representations of the US military in literature have been deployed: to question constructions of American nationalism by highlighting contradictions and inconsistencies, to consider the military’s institutionalized labor practices in order to explore relationships between race and class as well as imagine means of struggling for social justice, and to critique US foreign policy and military operations overseas. These writers individually and collectively refuse to examine race and/or ethnicity in isolation but instead consider these aspects of subjectivity in the context of national identity, class relations, immigration, globalization, and other social forces. While the relationship between ethnicity and military service has been addressed in other disciplines, such as history, political science, and social science, I argue that literature is a medium especially well-suited for this exploration as it not only allows for the articulation of existing social relations but also for the imagination of not yet manifest possibilities for social justice coalitions that cross racial, ethnic, and national lines.Item Worlding Race in Minority U.S. Fiction(2017) Perez, Emily Yoon; Nunes, Zita; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Worlding Race in Minority U.S. Fiction reads encounters with foreignness as a definitive mode of representation deployed in minority U.S. literature. “Foreign” may mark a character’s actual encounter with a foreigner but could also suggest the presence of something unfamiliar, dangerous, and prohibited at home and abroad. Lisa Lowe’s expansive theorization of various forms of intimacies that arise across four continents has been crucial to thinking about race globally. My project shifts the scale of these intimacies by focusing on personal relationships forged between minority subjects: the “little intimacies” that arise from globalization. I argue that when minority subjects interact with each other, what emerges is an opportunity for a more expansive, global understanding of race and minority subjectivity while also paying close attention to the particular ways an individual uses those understandings to imaginatively navigate their various worlds and the people who inhabit those worlds, an ongoing process that I call a worlding of race. My dissertation engages and expands transnational American literary studies by examining various minority characters’ encounters with the foreign. In exploring the myriad ways in which discomfort transforms a literary character’s understanding of the foreign from one of difference to one of solidarity, I show how these characters discover the need to forge alliances across race, class, gender, sexuality and nationality. In particular, literature provides an ideal avenue for such moments through its capacity for expanding the imagination, a worlding of how we understand minority identity. Worlding race entails being more inclusive—taking into account other axes of identity such as gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity—but also looking beyond the U.S. and to the world, both as a geographical space expanding outward from the nation and also as the imaginative potential of those at the margins. My project of worlding race makes two gestures: the first is to bring other marginalized identities inward to the center as a means of recognizing how they intersect with understandings of race and the second is to expand our understanding outward by considering how racial formations are constituted, altered, and challenged when we begin thinking beyond the nation.Item Resisting Reproductive Regulation in Early Twentieth Century American Women's Fiction(2017) DePriest, Elizabeth Ann; Mallios, Peter L; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Resisting Reproductive Regulation contributes to a growing body of criticism about how women participated in early twentieth century debates about reproduction in the United States. While the mainstream American birth control movement led to the legalization of contraception, it gained popular support by prioritizing the desires of married white women who were able-bodied, born in the United States, and members of the middle and upper classes. Because birth control advocates embraced eugenics and condemned abortion, their campaigns resulted in greater reproductive regulation for many women deemed “unfit” for reproduction by eugenicists, including unmarried, poor, non-white, immigrant, and disabled women. Resisting Reproductive Regulation examines the fiction written by American women during this period that challenges this limited agenda. These writers insist that women should be able to control the reproductive potential of their own bodies, regardless of their circumstances or forms of embodiment, and they examine the negative consequences that reproductive regulation enacts in American women’s lives. As a result, their texts depict women’s reproductive struggles in ways that anticipate late twentieth and early twenty-first century intersectional campaigns for reproductive justice. Though Mary Hunter Austin, Josephine Herbst, and Katherine Anne Porter each enjoyed relative privilege as white, American-born, and generally able-bodied women, each experienced reproductive difficulties in her own life. Each subsequently challenged mainstream birth control advocacy from this period in her fiction by grappling with those difficulties and examining the conditions that caused them. In so doing, these writers expose the prejudices encoded in the arguments upon which early twentieth century American eugenicists and birth control advocates relied. Resisting Reproductive Regulation argues that their fiction reveals inextricable relationships between the reproductive regulations American women faced and American prejudices about (dis)ability, sexuality, class, race, and/or country of origin. By addressing these connections, these writers explore the ways that reproductive regulations secure and perpetuate existing patriarchal, nationalist, white supremacist, heteronormative, capitalistic, and ableist systems of power. By advocating for women to be able to control the reproductive potential of their own bodies, these writers also attempt to interrupt the reproduction of these systems of power. Further, American women writing about contraception, abortion, and reproduction in the early decades of the twentieth century knew their depictions of these topics were subject to censorship, suppression, and marginalization. This dissertation argues that these writers resisted this form of reproductive regulation as well, developing innovative narrative and aesthetic techniques in order to communicate with readers about reproductive issues. While some of their concerns and experiences were successfully suppressed and marginalized during their lives, Austin, Herbst, and Porter each preserved illuminating materials in their personal archives. This dissertation recovers many of those materials, which provide new context within which to examine their published fiction and to recognize their literary and feminist contributions.Item Instituting Violence: Spaces of Exception in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century American Fiction(2017) Slaughter, Nicholas Allen; Wyatt, David; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since the War on Terror’s onset, American studies have popularized philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s argument in the treatises Homo Sacer (1995) and State of Exception (2003) that modern governments have come to operate in a permanent state of emergency. Agamben terms this phenomenon a “state of exception” in which law may be set aside at any time. Critics have productively applied this theory to post-9/11 U.S. government actions like surveillance programs, torture, and military interventions. Scholarship treats the Guantanamo detention center as the epitome of a localized, perpetual suspension of legal and ethical norms. Yet insufficient attention has been paid to other spaces of a similarly exceptional nature throughout American history. In “Instituting Violence,” I examine twentieth- and twenty-first century fictional representations of institutionalized sites home to unregulated violence while also engaging in current critical conversations about political and economic violence. Preceding Agamben’s political theory, much American literature depicts this exceptionalism across a wide array of sites. I explore four categories of spaces of exception represented across a range of genres, considering their interconnections and histories. In each text, a space that appears to operate as an exception to American legal and moral norms proves to reveal the normal but obscured relationships of power between the privileged and exploited. In addition to how these texts explore longer histories of such violent spaces, I consider how American writers self-reflexively examine the efficacy of their art for meaningfully engaging audiences in ethical discourses about history and justice.Item Engagements with Tolstoy: Representations of Crisis in Hemingway, Wharton, Pasternak, and Grossman(2017) Pratsovyta, Nataliya; Richardson, Brian E.; Papazian, Elizabeth A.; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project examines the problem of historical representation in literary fiction, taking as its subject the twentieth-century novel. As a project in comparative literature, it brings together literary works of American and Russian authors of the twentieth century with works of critical theory and philosophy to analyze artistic representations of crisis, understood as moments of social and cultural transition and change, across cultures. Looking at literary works from the USA and the Soviet Union reveals the points of contact between two countries that both presented claims for cultural domination at the beginning of the twentieth century. The representation of crisis in works of literature that have become canonical from both countries allows us to trace the rich cross-cultural exchange between them. One way in which such cultural exchange was realized was through the cultural uses of Leo Tolstoy’s nineteenth-century novel War and Peace (1869). This dissertation argues that Tolstoy’s novel served as a model for twentieth-century writing in both countries. Through the close examination of two American novels, Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920), and of two Russian novels, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (1957) and Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (1959), this dissertation uncovers the specific Tolstoyan techniques that each of these authors appropriated and readapted for his or her own purposes. The philosophical concept of the I-other relationship as elaborated by Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) and the theories of the dialogic representation of reality in the novel by Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) are used as lenses for reading these literary texts. The dissertation argues that applying the Levinasian model of the I-other relationship to the above-mentioned works of fiction allows for a deconstruction of the totalizing vision of history, a feature which comes to define the historical writing in these major literary works in the twentieth century. The novelty of the present work consists in asking the question of what can be learned about literary representations of crisis by looking at intertextual literary contacts between Russian and American literature from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The Russian and American authors considered in this dissertation all seek to respond to their own historical moment and work out models of historical representation in the context of social change.