English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item American Hospitality: The Politics of Conditionality in Twentieth-Century U.S. Fiction(2020) Gleich, Lewis S; Mallios, Peter L; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)American Hospitality rereads the canon of American literature by focusing attention on the centrality of hospitality to the twentieth-century American literary imagination. It argues that twentieth-century U.S. authors employ scenes of hospitality (scenes of welcoming and withholding, of invitation and rejection, of accommodation and imposition) and figures of hospitality (hosts and guests, strangers and trespassers, homes and thresholds, gifts and reciprocations) for three specific purposes: first, to reproduce dominant American discourses of hospitality; second, to critique these same discourses; and third, to model an alternative ethics of hospitality. Faced with the closing of the western frontier, rapid increases in immigration, the growing need to provide assistance to large segments of the population, an escalating call to secure and police the national borders, and the widespread demand to make public accommodations in all parts of the country more hospitable to racialized others, U.S. authors during the twentieth century utilized discourses of hospitality to reflect on the effects that sweeping historical changes were having on the nation’s ability to remain hospitable to peoples both inside and outside its borders. In examining discourses of hospitality in twentieth-century U.S. fiction, American Hospitality makes three principal contributions to scholarship. First, it opens the canon of American literature to reconstruction by tracing the central importance of scenes of hospitality across a wide range of twentieth-century American texts and genres, from highly canonical texts like Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! to less canonical texts like Zitkala-Ša’s Old Indian Legends and Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris’s The Crown of Columbus. Second, it expands on existing work on the subject of American exceptionalism by showing how American exceptionalist narratives rely heavily on scenes and figures of hospitality to justify and disavow acts of exclusion, dispossession, exploitation, and violence. Third, it lays the foundation for theorizing an alternative ethics of American hospitality. Modeled by the texts featured in American Hospitality, this alternative ethics, which I term affirmative hospitality, has four core principles: recognition of the conditional nature of all hospitality exchanges, affirmation of the singularity of the individual, accommodation, and deliberation.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.