English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item "I Shall Tell A Double Tale": Empedoclean Materialism and Idealism in the English Renaissance(2022) Libhart, Garth; Passannante, Gerard; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles (ca. 484–ca. 424 BCE) is remembered both as an enraged fool who leapt into a volcano to prove he was a god, and as a philosopher who radically suggested everything is made of matter (DK107). In the fragments of his poetry, he admits to telling a “double tale,” potentially nodding to the indistinct ontological vision embedded in his work and underscoring the way his poetry shifts between materialist and idealist frames of reference (DK17.1). I argue that Empedocles’ perspectival relativism is an alternative entry point into the problem of materialism for early modern thinkers, freeing them from the burden of strict philosophical commitment and enabling them to think in materialist terms with less anxiety about succumbing to physical determinism. For scholars of early modern literature, the Empedoclean double tale helps root the period’s tendency for perspectival indeterminacy within a specific humanistic tradition. This dissertation is organized as three long chapters, each offering a unique moment in the reception of Empedocles’ blurry ontology. In Chapter One, I argue that Philemon Holland’s 1603 translation of Plutarch’s Moralia represents a watershed moment for Empedoclean influence in English literary history. My analysis demonstrates that, while the discredited story of Empedocles jumping into a volcano to prove he was a god continues to be an attention-grabbing part of the philosopher’s legacy in the Renaissance, the seventeenth century witnesses an increasing interest in his actual philosophy. Specifically, early modern writers draw inspiration from Empedocles’ theory of effluence—the idea that the four elements emanate tiny particles of a similar composition—as they contemplate monist possibility (DK89). Illustrating this, in Chapter Two, I read Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (1607) as an exploration of the world in flux, showing how one of Shakespeare’s likely sources for the play, Plutarch’s treatise on Isis and Osiris in the Moralia, uses the idea of effluence to negotiate between the myth’s dualistic and monistic aspects. This enables me to propose that, in Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare undergirds moments like Cleopatra’s elementally framed suicide with the dynamic “double tale” of Empedoclean ontology, portraying her immortal aspiration in simultaneously materialist and transcendent terms. Finally, in Chapter Three, I turn to John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), which directly alludes to Empedocles’ volcanic suicide when Satan encounters the ghost of Empedocles, floating in Limbo, during his journey from hell to earth. Showing how Milton draws on key ideas from Empedocles’ philosophy in the process of critiquing his immortal longing, I argue that the episode is underwritten by the philosopher’s perspectival relativism. The chapter then reconsiders the monist materialism of Paradise Lost through an Empedoclean lens, suggesting that the Pre-Socratic philosopher’s unusual blend of dualistic and monistic ideation can help negotiate between divergent critical responses to Milton’s idiosyncratic materialism. Ultimately, the dissertation reveals how early modern writers take inspiration from Empedocles’ fluid movement between materialism and idealism, freed from the limitations of rigid philosophical commitment and binary choice.Item The Development of Theater in Post-Revolutionary Iran from 1979 to 1997(2022) Ahmadian , Nahid; Keshavarz-Karamustafa, Fatemeh; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This research studies the development of Iranian dramatic literature and theater in post-revolutionary Iran. In a historical survey from the 1979 revolution to the beginning of the Reform Era, it explores the connection of the dramatic literature and their productions to their cultural contexts and studies the ways these contexts impact the function and formation of Iranian theater. In a chronological survey, this research examines the ways Iranian theater developed new theatrical forms to meet and reflect on the political, social, and cultural demands of an important phase in Iranian history. This research benefits from the methods of postpositivist theater historiography to advance a revisionist historical narrative based on the dynamic dialectics between Iranian theater and its cultural setting. This is summative, analytical, and archival research. Based on archival research grounded in nearly 2000 documents, and 200 plays it also provides resources on Iranian theater history and historiography. By bringing together the list of scholarship, theatrical productions, and historical documents of the 1980s and 1990s, it provides a resource on Iranian post-revolutionary history in one of the most transformative periods in Iranian contemporary history.Item SURVIVING ROMANTICISM: DISASTER AND SURVIVAL IN LATE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY AND EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY TRANSATLANTIC LITERATURE(2022) Pozoukidis, Konstantinos; Wang, Orrin N. C. O.C.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Surviving Romanticism” argues that fictional and historical representations of disaster and survival in the Romantic period bear the potential to establish radically new ways of social and political organization that do not reproduce or replicate the pre-catastrophic world. I locate my project at the intersection of studies on disaster in Romanticism, on the one hand, and queer theories of non-reproductivity, on the other. Extending but also complicating recent Romanticist scholarship by Jacques Khalip, Anahid Nerssessian, Sara Guyer and others, “Surviving Romanticism” asserts that queer survival, a form of surviving based on an existential discontinuity that does not reproduce materially or ideologically the pre-catastrophic world, constitutes the only possibility for radical worldmaking. “Surviving Romanticism” asserts that disaster is omnipresent in the writings of the Romantic period affecting both the content of these texts as well as their structure, with disaster materializing formally as fragmentation, repetition and the lack of narrative climax and conclusion. “Surviving Romanticism” points out that in the texts this project studies survival fiercely opposes recuperation. This opposition forces us to think that for fundamental change to happen we need to move away from repairing the damaged world of the past and envision instead new ideologies and social relations that do not focus on usefulness, exchangeability and marketability. The four main chapters of “Surviving Romanticism” bring together a variety of prose, poetry and non-fiction where both real and fictional disaster takes place: Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” and William Wordsworth’s “Simon Lee” and “The Last of the Flock,” all three poems from the Lyrical Ballads of 1798, Jane Austen’s Emma and the freedom narrative of Mary Prince. Even though most of these texts have been discussed in the critical tradition, “Surviving Romanticism” interrogates the ideology of previous critical approaches that have read texts like The Last Man as cautionary tales that force us to improve our present. Instead, in “Surviving Romanticism” I suggest that survival and worldmaking take place when fictional characters, such as Lionel Verney, and historical actors, such as Mary Prince, decide to stop reproducing the world around them one that has forced them to dwell in disaster. Instead, they start to behave as if they are inhabiting a world beyond productivity, usefulness, marketability, exchangeability, racial subjection and racial capitalism that our current world practices, with these concepts constituting some of the key ideas this project discussesItem Atmospheric Media: Computation and the Environmental Imagination(2022) Moro, Jeffrey; Kirschenbaum, Matthew G; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Atmospheric media are techniques and technologies for the rationalization of air. They take many forms, from the meteorological media of weather maps and satellites, to the infrastructural media of ventilation and climate control, to the embodied media of the breath. This dissertation explores these atmospheric media as fundamental conduits for the cultural work of managing the air, and in turn, for managing climatological catastrophe. Through readings of diverse media objects, from electronic literature and science fiction to 3D printers to air conditioning in data centers, “Atmospheric Media: Computation and the Environmental Imagination” argues that scientists, artists, and laypeople alike have come to imagine the air as a computer, one that they might program as a way out of environmental crisis. Braiding interdisciplinary insights from environmental media studies, literary studies, and the digital humanities, this dissertation explores how computation smooths over atmospheric difference with the standardization of data, and in doing so, further imperils our shared skies.Item Attend Me: Attention and Animation in Early Modern Drama(2021) DeCamillis, Justine Marie; Bailey, Amanda; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)What does it mean to pay attention and what is the cost? This dissertation explores these questions in the context of a historical shift in the value and purpose of the act of attending. In the late sixteenth century attention which was understood as the foundation of devotional practice, was widely recognized as the most important currency of the commercial and court theaters. Playwrights throughout the beginning of the seventeenth century began to experiment with attention as a form of creative labor and means of animating, transforming, or subjugating bodies in performance. I trace these moments of transformative attention in the works of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Fletcher, Richard Brome and others to examine how a new form attention in performance redrew the boundaries of an increasingly secularized and commodified self. I engage a wide array of primary sources including popular news pamphlets, recipe books, political treatises, and travel narratives that theorize and debate the biopolitics of attention. In our own moment, attention is critical to the latest stage of surveillance capitalism. Corporations monetize and governmental entities monitor what we attend to as they pay close attention to us. Rather than a recent development, I assert that the stakes of and competition for attention, and concomitantly the price of distraction, gained traction on the early modern stage.Item AT HOME IN THE WORLD: TRANSNATIONALISM IN THE WORKS OF EUROPEAN WOMEN WRITERS IN THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY(2021) Ehrlich, Manon; Eades, Caroline; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In Europe during the long nineteenth century, despite being relegated to the private sphere and excluded from the realms of national and international politics, women were increasingly exposed to the effects of global movements. Novels written by women, while generally dismissed because of their narrative emphasis on domestic matters, constitute important literary tools to reevaluate the historical processes of globalization through a female lens. In connecting the texts of English novelist Jane Austen, French author George Sand, and French-speaking writer Isabelle Eberhardt to contemporary global dynamics, this dissertation registers expressions of transnational mobility in their writings and argues for the formation of a cosmopolitan consciousness in nineteenth-century women’s literature. By adopting a transnational and comparatist approach that fosters interdisciplinarity and multiculturalism, this project proposes an out-scaled reading strategy to understand past female experiences in a new light. In thus challenging the boundaries of knowledge for works produced during the long nineteenth-century that have been previously read mostly as national products, this study charts the gradual re-orientation of these novels’ focus from the home to the world. Given the (geo)political and archival value of those texts as relates to the development of a global culture in the nineteenth century, this dissertation proposes a method of interpreting that helps to recover international history in the context of women’s writing. In order to capture the shifting relationship between the authors’ viewing of the world, but also their being-in-the-world, this study is divided along two sections: the formation of a transnational textual space (1) and the authors’ engagement with political matters and their subversive contribution to international history-making (2). In learning to feel at home in the world, but also to navigate the tension between the social pull of the domestic sphere and the centrifugal desire to transcend the limits to their gendered experience, these writers show us that nineteenth-century literature is more relevant than ever. Indeed, in offering us keys to negotiate in-between spaces and conflicting orientations, women writers in the long nineteenth century can help us cope with the complexities and challenges of living between the national and the global in the twenty-first century.Item An Editor in Israel: The Periodicals of Ahad Ha'am in the Development of Modern Hebrew Literature(2021) Fabricant, Noah L; Zakim, Eric; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation argues for a reevaluation of the significance of Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginsberg) in the development of modern Hebrew literature on the basis of his work as an editor of periodicals. Critics commonly portray Ahad Ha’am as rigid and didactic, enforcing his own literary norms while excluding aesthetic and humanistic literature in favor of literature with explicit Jewish themes. Reading the periodicals edited by Ahad Ha’am shows that this reputation is exaggerated; his work is in fact characterized by significant heterogeneity and flexibility.This dissertation introduces the critical perspective and methodology of periodical studies to Hebrew literature. The first chapter shows how Ahad Ha’am as an editor brings diverse ideologies and Hebrew styles together in an organic whole, the “Odessa nusach,” in the literary collection Kaveret (1890). The second chapter argues that Yehoshua Ḥana Ravnitsky, editor of Pardes (1892-1896), lacks the editorial skill and vision of Ahad Ha’am, and as a result Pardes is divisive and lacks the unity of Ahad Ha’am’s periodicals. The final two chapters are devoted to Ha-Shiloah, the most prestigious outlet for Hebrew literature of its era, founded and edited by Ahad Ha’am from 1896 to 1903. Chapter Three traces the history of the critical reception of Ahad Ha’am’s controversy with Micha Yosef Berdichevsky over the boundaries of Hebrew literature, showing the development of a polarized standard account of the dispute that discredits Ahad Ha’am. Reading the original essays of the dispute in context shows that Ahad Ha’am’s resistance to belles lettres and humanistic literature is far from absolute, and in a sense Ahad Ha’am authors the entire controversy by collaborating with and publishing Berdichevsky and his supporters. Finally, the dissertation uses the belletristic literature published by Ahad Ha’am in Ha-Shiloah to show that his selections as an editor were not as narrow as critics claim or even as Ahad Ha’am himself prescribes in his essays. As a periodical editor, Ahad Ha’am fostered diversity and dialogue, and this should be accounted for in evaluating his influence on the development of Hebrew literature.Item Books as Archives: Archival Poetics in Post-1980 Experimental Writing and Book Design(2020) Davis, Brian Neil; Kirschenbaum, Matthew; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In “Books as Archives: Archival Poetics in Post-1980 Experimental Writing and Book Design,” I develop a formal and historical poetics of what I call multimodal book-archives, an experimental mode of contemporary writing that tells stories through the collection and representation of reproduced texts and other artifacts. In forgoing any conventional concept of a narrator, the narratives and textual networks that book-archives construct are created through the interaction between texts that characters make, collect and transmit to others, ranging from handwritten letters and documents produced by word processors, to drawings, maps and photographs. Because book-archives combine verbal and pictorial modes, as well as different types of nonnarrative discourse like catalogues, exposition and argumentation, requiring a number of arduous and often nontraditional interpretive strategies such as the collation of verbal and pictorial elements, they pose important challenges to current theories of narrative and narrativity as well as to established approaches to reading and interpretation. Responding to these challenges, “Books as Archives” develops an archival poetics—a poetics of documentation and preservation, of curation and transmission—that examines a range of techniques presented in different types of book-archives. I offer readings of book-archives produced by contemporary authors such as Bill Bly, Mark Z. Danielewski, Anne Carson, and Warren Lehrer, modeling how each of these authors construct different types of book-archives for different audiences and effects. Building on research in multimodal narrative theory (Herman, Ryan, Gibbons, et al) as well as digital media studies (Hayles, Pressman, Starre, et al), I contextualize the emergence of book-archives within different literary genealogies (e.g., the epistolary novel, encyclopedic fiction, artists’ books, electronic hypertext, and graphic narratives) to explain why and how so many contemporary books have taken this form. I argue that by including collections of textual material inside their covers, contemporary authors draw attention to how subjectivity, knowledge and cultural memory are increasingly configured through distributed networks of people and artifacts in different social and institutional spaces. They explore these dynamics by experimenting with the material resources and expressive possibilities of the book—distinctly not “dead,” as so many thought—as an expressive and affective artifact.Item THE POSSIBILITY OF HOPE: MEMORY AND AFFECT IN CONTEMPORARY ASIAN AMERICAN AND U.S. LATINX LITERATURE(2020) Auvil, Elise Marie; Ontiveros, Randy; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since the 1980s, contemporary U.S. minority writers have returned to the 1960s in their texts. Through memory, aesthetic form, and setting, writers like Maxine Hong Kingston and Cherríe Moraga continue to evoke the era of the 1960s, synonymous with its social and political movements. In short, the literature of our neoliberal present is colored by the spirit of the 1960s. In this moment, why are so many contemporary authors returning to the 1960s in their fiction? How does this return to the past either foreclose or enable possibility in the present? In "The Possibility of Hope: Memory and Affect in Contemporary Asian American and U.S. Latinx Literature," I argue that these writers attempt to garner past moments of possibility to create a strong affective hope in the present. In examining the texts of Asian American and U.S. Latinx writers specifically, I also uncover how minority groups that have been rendered "alien" in the U.S. social and cultural imaginary seek to re-inscribe themselves in the historical moment of the 1960s in order to open up the potential for hope. My dissertation examines several ways in which writers use space to evoke the spirit of the 1960s: through psychological spaces, physical spaces, and embodied spaces. By considering the turn to the 1960s, I uncover how writing about the past enables hope for the future.Item RACE, GENDER, AND CLOSURE IN LATE VICTORIAN FICTION(2020) Butler, Virginia Lynn; Richardson, Brian; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)While the study of closure in Victorian fiction has been marked by astute interventions in gender theory, these insights often fail to take an intersectional approach, particularly when it comes to the racial dynamics of the expanding British Empire. Race, Gender, and Closure in Late Victorian Fiction studies how ethnicity, foreignness, and race complicate our preconceived notions of gendered closure that often posit the narrative options for women as a moralistic system that rewards with marriage or punishes with death. With the expansion of the Empire, the Victorian Novel expanded its ability to depict foreign space; however, our understanding of gendered closure has not taken a sufficient correlative leap to include women of color or ethnic bodies that exist outside of the purview of the British domestic sphere. By analyzing the closural ends for English characters in foreign space, the conclusions of hybrid characters and hybridized space, and the fates of characters and spaces subject to imperial control, this project aims to further develop our understanding of narrative closure for Victorian fiction, ultimately demonstrating the limitations of the marriage/death binary for female characters. Race, Gender, and Closure in Late Victorian Fiction shows the rhetorical violence of being forgotten within the text yet reveals the ways in which these lapses express how the line between Victorian and Modernist genre expectations blur, ultimately demonstrating the ideological instabilities of what we perceive as Victorian narrative mainstays of closure themselves.