English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item Speculative Citizenship: Race, National Belonging, and the Counterfactual Imagination in the Literature of the Long Reconstruction(2024) Ewing, Annemarie Mott; Levine, Robert S.; Wong, Edlie; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Speculative Citizenship: Race, National Belonging, and the Counterfactual Imagination in the Literature of the Long Reconstruction” explores how key Reconstruction writers addressed citizenship as a guiding concept. Writers such as Charles Chesnutt, Albion Tourgée, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Ohiyesa (Charles Eastman), and Edward A. Johnson revealed the malleable, unstable, and speculative nature of US citizenship and the Reconstruction era itself. Even as the 14th Amendment formally defined citizenship for the first time in 1868, its interpretations varied, causing citizenship to remain a contested concept with actively negotiated legal inclusions and exclusions. Debates and uncertainties about citizenship provided an opportunity for Reconstruction writers to delineate more capacious concepts of citizenship than its evolving legal definitions. This dissertation examines Reconstruction authors’ use of what I am calling the “counterfactual imaginary,” a mode characterized by dislocating, retrospective, or utopian speculation that works to represent the fluid boundaries of national belonging. The counterfactual, often signaled by conditional tenses, considers what could have been and what might be. Conditional tenses best express the expansive, utopian possibility of Reconstruction while depicting its present injustices. The authors discussed in my dissertation focus not only on citizenship’s legal definitions in their writings, but also on citizenship as it was performed and practiced. They speculate, sometimes wildly in experimental fiction, about what sort of world could still be created. They forecast a nation in which citizenship and national belonging were defined more inclusively than in the courts or Congress. Collectively, “Speculative Citizenship” illuminates inclusions and exclusions afforded by the 14th amendment. The first and fourth chapters examine literary portrayals of the ways the 14th amendment expanded citizenship in two ways—intentionally to African American men and inadvertently to corporations through the establishment of the concept of corporate personhood. The 14th amendment, Albion Tourgée and Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton suggest, established corporate personhood in ways that aided Westward expansion and the dispossession and exclusion from full citizenship of Mexican Americans and Indigenous peoples. The second and third chapters explore two exclusions of the amendment–the brief exclusion of former Confederates from the rights of full US citizenship and the ongoing exclusion of Indigenous people both in terms of a refusal to grant citizenship and a parallel refusal to recognize Indigenous sovereignty. Foregrounding the perspectives of authors like Ohiyesa (Charles Eastman) and student writers publishing in Indigenous boarding school newspapers offers new ways of looking at how citizenship and national belonging were conceptualized in the literature of the long Reconstruction era and beyond.Item Racing Imaginaries: Limit and Resistance in Contemporary Black Women's Speculative Fiction(2023) Nunn, Alexandria Jochebed; Konstantinou, Lee; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Speculative fiction is sometimes described as a genre of the future—a genre that celebrates technological and scientific progress and that envisions limitless possibilities. However, for persons already estranged by the reality manufactured for them, the apparent strangeness of dystopian futures, state surveillance, or reproductive and genetic engineering is not so distant nor so fictional. In this dissertation, Alexandria Nunn elucidates the consequences of writing and reading science fiction for authors of color at the intersection between realism and speculative modes. In this exploration of contemporary science fiction by Black women authors, Nunn examines the speculative literature of Nalo Hopkinson, Octavia Butler, and N.K. Jemisin as they challenge generic assumptions and reframe the stakes of science fiction and Black literary theory. “Racing Imaginaries: Limit and Resistance in Contemporary Black Women’s Speculative Fiction” specifically attends to a conversation between Black realist thought and history’s continuance into the present and future, which foregrounds histories of anti-blackness, alongside speculative fiction by Black imaginative authors which negotiates with the language of possibility even in repressive spaces where opportunity and expression are being silenced. Nunn maps a dialectic between Black realism and Black speculation in major works by Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and N. K. Jemisin, three of the foremost authors of the late 20th and early 21st century in the realm of American science fiction. Each author showcases the limitations of perceiving futures apart from race, while likewise suggesting alternative possibilities for growth and thriving. The conversation between these writers provides a template for understanding how speculative forms uniquely impact writers and authors of color operating with and against real-world phenomena so outlandish and often horrifying one would think them fantastic. Ultimately, Nunn suggests that Black creators frame science fiction not as a "literature of the possible” but rather as a "literature of the limit,” reminding readers both of the limits of contemporary lived reality and of the opportunities that already exist at their fingertips.Item From Censors to Shouts: Ecologies of Abortion in American Fiction(2023) Schollaert, Jeannette; Walter, Christina; Smith, Martha Nell; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“From Censors to Shouts: Ecologies of Abortion in American Fiction” registers the urgent need to revisit the literary methods of abortion storytelling in multiethnic American women’s fiction with a close attention to one of its most significant tropes: the herbal abortifacients that signify as both code and medicine, recalling the Victorian “language of flowers” as well as essentialist metaphorical connections between femininity, reproduction, and the natural world. This project traces the literary history of herbal abortifacients from abortion’s censorship and criminalization in the nineteenth century to present-day movements to reclaim or “shout” one’s abortion. The fictional mentions of plants known to be abortifacients demonstrate how literature can communicate reproductive and plant knowledge. “From Censors to Shouts” also offers a window into how the practice of domestic herbalism (a gendered and often racialized practice) evolves over the course of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries by pairing a cultural historical analysis of the herbs themselves alongside considerations of how authors’ fictional deployments of these herbs work towards visions of reproductive and environmental justice. “From Censors to Shouts” considers fiction from multiethnic American women writers including Sarah Orne Jewett, Edith Summers Kelley, Josephine Herbst, Marge Piercy, Octavia Butler, Ntozake Shange, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, Ana Castillo, and Kali Fajardo-Anstine. The fictional depiction of herbal abortifacients reveals our continued attention to plant knowledge and self-managed herbal abortion. Understanding how these plant names and knowledges have remained crucial rhetorical, cultural, and visual signifiers of abortion access is vital to understanding the reclamation of these knowledges as we re-commit to the fight for abortion rights and reproductive justice amidst a new legal landscape.Item Translating Grace: Postsecularity in Twentieth-Century American Fiction(2021) Gonch, William; Mallios, Peter; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The early twentieth century saw the rise of new, secular ways of imagining and understanding religion, especially through social sciences such as psychology and anthropology. TRANSLATING GRACE: POSTSECULARITY IN TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN FICTION investigates creative responses to this secular imaginary by novelists invested in religion’s continuing power. For the four primary subjects of this study—Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, and Marilynne Robinson—secular ways of imagining religion were at once challenges and opportunities. They foreclosed conventional expressions of religious ideas, experiences, and narratives, but they could be used creatively to reimagine religious stories and symbols, giving them fresh life and applying them to new challenges. I propose the metaphor of translation to understand the creative exchange between secular and religious writing. Literary translation is a creative activity that stretches the boundaries of a target language so that it may mean things that it has never meant before; similarly, writing of religion in this period is a translational attempt to stretch secular categories. Novelists jettison conventional religious narratives and symbols and invent new literary forms to make religious experiences and beliefs register for new readers. In doing so, they create new ways of experiencing and reckoning with religion. Translating Grace reassesses accounts of religion and literature by emphasizing the creative potential of religious writing. Previous studies of this period theorize a crucial break around 1960. Before that point, literature secularizes; artists look to art as a substitute for religion and treat religion’s fading as inevitable. After 1960 there is renewed interest in religious narratives, symbols, and practices, but it is “weak” religion, shorn of doctrinal and metaphysical claims. In contrast, I propose that “strong” religion persists as an important creative presence in 20th century literature. Whether strong or weak, religion becomes more self-conscious about its need to make itself comprehensible. Writers engage, sometimes subversively, sometimes playfully, with secular imaginaries. In this way, fiction drives a wider transformation of life within religious communities as they reimagine their place within a now-more-secular culture and world.Item Laughing to Keep Human: Disruptions of Racist Logic in African American Humor(2021) Morgan, Abbey A.; Washington, Mary Helen; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project examines black humorists who challenge the Eurocentric, racist logics delimiting what it means to be human while demarcating blackness as inferior. While many scholars in black humor centralize humor as a means of resistance, a source of comic rage or redress, this project suggests that black humor offers a space to celebrate black humanity as it broadens representations of blackness. By turning to the staged parodies of Frederick Douglass in the 19th century, the stand-up routines of Jackie "Moms" Mabley and Richard Pryor in the 20th century, and the satire of novelist Paul Beatty, the project uses this unlikely assemblage to reveal a lineage of black humor that has effectively and cogently disrupted white supremacist logics while enacting a type of self-actualization of a fuller sense of humanity.Item The Art of Unemployment: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and the Search for Work(2021) Roegelein, Hillary; Levine, Robert S; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Art of Unemployment narrates the twin development of professional women’s authorship and the category of unemployment in nineteenth-century America, shedding new light on the former and first light on the latter. Scholars of American literary history have established the nineteenth century as a pivotal period of professionalization for women’s authorship in which women like Louisa May Alcott, Fanny Fern, and others of import to this study achieved great popularity and financial success in their careers. But in our attentiveness to the art of working as a woman writer in this period, we have missed the efforts these same writers invested in giving expression to unemployment in the nineteenth century. This period in American history witnessed dynamic booms and busts, financial panics, and influential developments in unemployment policy, yet it remains overshadowed by the 1930s in studies on American unemployment. My project narrates the emerging concept of unemployment in nineteenth-century America—as it was imagined in women’s fiction and poetry and as it actually existed in the period. Combining economic and literary history, The Art of Unemployment provides a new understanding of the conflict between success and failure in models of nineteenth-century women’s authorship and prompts a larger reconsideration of what it means to be unemployed.The specter of unemployment looms large in the novels and poems nineteenth-century American women wrote about their chosen work, even and especially when those women experienced professional success. Authors Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Fanny Fern, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Frances E.W. Harper were some of the most profitable and popular writers of their time, yet their accounts of authorship force us to dwell in the crises of unemployment that attend professional literary pursuits—crises they describe as financial, emotional, social, and aesthetic. Unemployment gave successful women writers a language to critique the aspirational models of work that readers both past and present regularly ascribe to their professional biographies. That this subject causes some of the most successful nineteenth-century American women writers to question why and what they write warrants asking what unemployment does to the stories we tell ourselves about professional development and success.Item UNDOCUMENTARY POETICS: TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY HEMISPHERIC AMERICAN POETRY BY WOMEN AND NON-BINARY POETS(2021) Knowles, Andrea; Long, Ryan; Ontiveros, Randy J; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Undocumentary Poetics elucidates how poets from across the Americas use poetry’s form to interrogate the bounded nature of form itself, including the forms of the poem, the canon, the nation, and of recounting and knowing history. This project challenges the writing of a hemispheric canon of American poetry that, by largely overlooking women and non-binary poets, especially and including those of color, continues to leave dominant, white hetero-patriarchal forms intact—despite the hemispheric framework’s inherent potential to uncover minor literary networks across borders and destabilize those deep-rooted systems of control. The contemporary poetry I examine confronts those systemic erasures by tackling the constraints of genre and form. The project’s focus on form and historical power brings it into conversation with recent discussions of historical and documentary poetry. The term “documentary” has been applied to a range of poems, from lyrics documenting personal experience to mixed-media experimental writing that pushes on the genre-categories of documentary and poetry. I ask how poetry itself can be “documentary.” How do poems become “documents” that substantiate official or State versions of culture and history? Do poetry’s canons, histories, and formal and generic expectations also play this documentary role? I propose that undocumentary poetry engages in and undermines poetic documentation in multiple senses. On the one hand, the poems I analyze make visible events, lived realities, or histories that are hidden within ‘official’ versions of history and culture, and they also make visible the forms that have enabled and perpetuated such erasures. On the other, the poems undermine the boundaries of that documentation, ultimately making even themselves provisional. I highlight the ways that poetry’s condensation of forms and language, and its resulting paradoxes and ambiguities, specifically enables such undocumentation. Rather than creating a new category or form of poetry with Undocumentary Poetics, I observe undocumentary poetics as a current within contemporary poetics, one that is invested in imagining a world with more nuanced and fluid, and less rigid, forms. It is a poetry that “inhabits contradiction” as M. NourbeSe Philip put it, “unraveling old systems of control and domination,” without creating new ones.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 'At all Times, and in all Places, Adored and Oppressed': Gender, Temporality, and Conjectural History in the Transatlantic World, 1600-1800.(2020) Durand, Emilee; Chico, Tita; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines scenes which imagine the collision between primordial time and the time of history to demonstrate that conjectural history is a productive term for understanding how temporality is embedded in constructions of race and gender in transatlantic literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The collision of temporalities in the texts of this dissertation is a product of an Enlightenment project. This project depended upon the temporalization of difference as a mechanism for narrating the progress of human societies. The following readings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts consider the transatlantic encounter as one inextricably involved with the process of the temporalization of difference. While this dissertation examines texts often included in the category of transatlantic literature, it also reads conjectural histories as joint participants in creating fictions about the Americas. Viewed in this way, conjectural history identifies both a mode of creating knowledge and certain kind of narrative which can emerge from a variety of texts irrespective of genre. Indeed, as this dissertation demonstrates, prints and maps, plays and poems, travel narratives and novels can all mobilize conjectural histories of their own. Drawing out the imaginative work required by conjectural histories, this dissertation shows how they are conceptually linked to more recognizable transatlantic encounter narratives. Because of its immediate and continual association with “early,” “young” or “backwards” humanity, the Americas as setting for encounter, both fictionalized and historical, necessarily activates the temporality of pre-history. Such a textual and visual collision theorizes difference through a temporal architecture. Scenes in which contact, social contract, and sexual contract are collapsed mobilize their own conjectural histories, using temporal frameworks to construct the genres of race and gender. By embedding these scenes in remote times and spaces, texts authorize and naturalize sets of relations between nascent human categories. The texts examined in this dissertation demonstrate how the reenactment of contact works to create narratives of human progress racialized and gendered by/within a temporal architecture made possible by contact’s collision of temporalities.Item Digital Frost: Accessibility and Public Humanities(2020) Yokoyama, Setsuko; Smith, Martha Nell; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)His frequently recirculated televised reading at President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration ceremony attests to the fact that Robert Frost is often remembered as one of the iconic popular poets of the early twentieth century. What is less remembered today is the fact that Frost gave talks and readings at universities, colleges, and other public venues for nearly five decades to make poetry accessible to general readers. These talks epitomize Frost’s dedication to the democratic discussion of literature and daily discourse as he demonstrated, through humor, how to practice auditory attentiveness to the figures of speech used by poets, scientists, politicians, and other authority figures. Though central to his career and his contribution to American culture and literary history, Frost’s public performance as a genre has long been overlooked primarily due to the inaccessibility of audio recordings housed in archives. Digital Frost: Accessibility and Public Humanities investigates how best to redress such critical neglect of Frost’s public talks and readings through the development of a pilot audio edition and the discussion of theoretical underpinnings of the very edition’s design. As part of the larger effort to build a cross-intuitional platform in partnership with literary scholars, special collections librarians, Frost’s family members and friends, as well as the poet’s literary estate and publisher, the pilot audio edition tests the feasibility of critical collaboration and expands on the disciplinary responsibility of textual scholarship. In its accompanying chapters, Digital Frost contests the seemingly monolithic discourse around “accessibility” via analyses of its sociohistorical meanings from archival, literary, disability, and digital studies perspectives. Digital Frost argues that only when technical accessibility is concomitantly considered from a sociohistorical perspective, are we equipped to invent a culturally appropriate access design for online literary collections.