Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 37-12, Section: A, page: 7755. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1976.

The novel takes place in the South, among lower-middle-class working people, who--with one or two exceptions--did not finish high school and have never read a book. They are the kind of people referred to as "trailer-trash," people two or three generations removed from their genuine rural roots, who grew up in towns, away from the strong family ties and traditional small-town religion that their grand- or great-grandparents left behind, who have no urban traditions to guide their lives in towns, and whose values have consequently been formed around the only culture that speaks to them--American popular culture; movies, television, and pop music. Accordingly, their conscious thought and feeling tend to be stunted; in the novel, a layered narration tries to suggest the richer subconscious levels that coexist, in the characters, along with the less-developed conscious level. / The first narrative line takes place in a "real-time" span of the last four days of the ten-year marriage between two characters, Griffin and Sarah. Although these two are close emotionally, they are incompatible sexually and socially, and it is clear from the beginning of the novel that their marriage must end, not only because of their personal disjuncture, but because Sarah has become involved in an affair with a character named Mark, a more exciting relationship for her than her marriage, and a relationship she feels unable to give up. / The second narrative line is made up of a series of flashbacks, which take up about half the novel, begin in the childhoods of the three main characters, and attempt to show how Sarah became the ideal object of Griffin's youthful fantasy, how marriage to Griffin became a necessary escape for Sarah when she needed one, and how Mark's background shaped him to fit his place in the triangle. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 49-03, Section: A, page: 0507. / Major Professor: Jerome H. Stern. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1987.

In this dissertation that discusses the American novels by William Faulkner, Nathanael West, and Richard Wright, I delineate the concept of modernist empathy as a radical urge for intersubjective immediacy, while adjusting the concept of empathy as each situation requires instead of squeezing various manifestations of empathy into a single, standardized definition. I observe how those writers struggle to represent modernist empathy by differentiating it from its similar psychological phenomena, especially sympathy. Instead of establishing empathy’s predominance over sympathy, however, I pay detailed attention to the constantly oscillating dynamic between a modernist urge for empathic immediacy and a realistic compromise of sympathetic distancing, thus revealing empathy’s instability and ambiguity. After briefly overviewing Amy Coplan’s conceptualization of empathy and sketching three categories of narrative empathy in the introduction, I have explained the concept of modernist empathy in the first chapter. In doing so, I first examine the discourse that surrounded the concept of empathy at the time, contrasting modernist empathy with its sisterly concept of sympathy. Then, since empathy and sympathy do not always form a clear dichotomy, I have argued that modernist empathy should be captured in the process of the oscillating dynamic between modernist urge for empathy and sympathetic compromise of distancing. In the second chapter, I have discussed how modernist empathy is manifested in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury according to the three categories of narrative empathy. First, I have analyzed the novel’s experimental narrative in terms of readerly empathy. Then, I have discussed the novel’s empathic and anti-empathic characters as manifestations of represented empathy. Finally, I have examined Faulkner’s writerly empathy, and I have observed how he embraces the ultimate instability of modernist empathy. In the third chapter, by considering Nathanael West as a late modernist, I have argued that his novels are critiques of modernist empathy. In the analysis of his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, I have revealed West’s dichotomy between intellectual distancing and emotional involvement. Then, I have attempted to depict how West dramatizes his protagonists’ failures of empathy in Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust. In the process, I critique Martha Nussbaum’s theory of compassion in relation to empathy. I also consider the relationship of empathy to the advent of the anonymous mass in the 1930s and observed West’s critique of empathy at the age of mass culture. The focus of the final chapter is about the writerly design of the strategic use of empathy in Richard Wright’s Native Son. After reviewing the past literary criticism of the novel’s empathy, I have discussed how the novel is strategized to establish an intimate readerly empathy with Bigger Thomas. At the end of the argument, I examine the author’s strategic design of empathy and its relation to racial politics. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester 2017. / November 6, 2017. / american literature, empathy, modernism / Includes bibliographical references. / Ralph M. Berry, Professor Directing Dissertation; Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya, University Representative; Andrew Epstein, Committee Member; John Mac Kilgore, Committee Member.

<p> Wanderers in the spaces of their memories and the streets of their would-be homes, generations of suffering immigrants are traced back to the past, propelled by the crescendo of melancholic stillness that moves displaced bodies through states of in-betweenness that both dispels and teeters on the far side of either assimilation or exclusion. Many transnational narratives situate the immigrant at a crossroads in terms of a loss of the &lsquo;original&rsquo; culture in exchange for the new &lsquo;American&rsquo; culture, where national diversities are confined to a singular framework and rhetoric of displacement, overruled by the myth of successful assimilation, whereby the hardships of adjusting to foreign spaces are &lsquo;normalized&rsquo; and reduced to a series of trials. This portrayal, in turn, does not leave any room for the rhetoric of pain, or what I label as the &lsquo;migrant&rsquo;s mourning&rsquo;, where the immigrant&rsquo;s suffering is suppressed and eclipsed by a collective history of racial abjection. Insights into the psyche of the immigrant serve to map the hedge between the past and the present and absolute versus relative spaces. Applying psychoanalytical and postcolonial frameworks to literary analysis, this dissertation explores some of the prominent transnational narratives to establish that the melancholic dynamics of space, memory, and language can subvert misrepresentations and grant the immigrant mobility within the confines of homogenized spaces. It seeks to explore the ways in which the transnational American narrative employs melancholic tenor as aesthetics to empower displaced figures. Situating its protagonists at the locus of nations, these narratives underscore melancholia, mourning, and memory as tools and protocols of agency that challenge the myth of assimilation and re-think the rhetoric of displacement.</p><p>

<p> This thesis examines the representation of domesticity in the psychological and physical lives of women in literature. The interpretive question of the argument asks, how does the haunting of domesticity affect and create meaning in the lives of female characters? Domesticity is an idea that has been used to as a means of submission by a domineering other. The idea of domesticity is a catalyst that is used to help Hulga Hopewell from Flannery O&rsquo;Connor&rsquo;s &ldquo;Good Country People&rdquo; and Eleanor Vance from Shirley Jackson&rsquo;s <i> The Haunting of Hill House</i> to break away from oppressive influences; by examining these feminist narratives we will see how two women attempt to survive the physical and mental hauntings of domesticity and its effects on their minds and bodies as they try to preserve the self. Hulga and Eleanor are women who are not following the expectations of family nor society, as they choose to take different paths in life, they face judgment and criticism for not following societal norms. These women will struggle against the domesticity that has been passed down for generations through their mothers. Hulga is forced to move back home, where she tries everything to avoid her mother&rsquo;s brand of domesticity, and Eleanor runs away trying to escape the bonds of domesticity. Both women come face to face with their deepest fears when they confront this haunting; and ultimately will be physically and mentally traumatized.</p><p>

<p> Commerce Clause New Federalism in the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts describes how interpretation of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution has evolved since the Constitution was first ratified by the several states. It shows how the clause, which was originally included to facilitate trade between the states by removing barriers to trade, evolved into Congress&rsquo; primary justification for all kinds of actions that had previously been the domains of the states. The work includes case studies of four controversial cases that occurred when the Chief Justice was William Rehnquist along with a case study of <i>National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius</i> decided in the court of Chief Justice John Roberts. The work also makes the case that commerce-clause-based legislation was a critical contributor to the current culture wars occurring in America because each piece of legislation becomes a winner take all proposition with national ramifications. </p><p>

This dissertation examines representations of undocumented aliens and explores the issue of illegality in contemporary American immigration fiction. It takes as a fundamental premise that in immigration, status matters. The importance of immigration status in the "real world" is evident not only in ongoing national debates but also in the daily experiences of immigrants, whose inclusion in or exclusion from America's social, economic and political spheres is largely dependent on their status as documented or undocumented persons. This dissertation proposes that status likewise matters in literary representations of immigration. As this project demonstrates, immigration narratives often rely on conventional structures, themes and tropes that privilege the legal immigrant subject. Indeed, the legality of protagonists is often taken for granted in many novels about immigration. Thus, by foregrounding fundamental questions concerning legal status in the study of immigration literature, this dissertation aims to show the ways in which status informs, influences and directly shapes immigration novels. While this project broadly proposes the concept of status as an analytical lens, I approach this literary inquiry primarily by critically examining the "illegal alien" as the subject of immigration novels. Focusing on three novels that feature an undocumented immigrant protagonist - Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine, Gish Jen's Typical American, and Mario Bencastro's Odyssey to the North - this dissertation argues that, like its real-world counterpart who poses social, political and legal problems for the nation state, the figure of the illegal alien poses problems for the genre of immigration fiction, challenging its narrative conventions and calling into question the ideology of American exceptionalism that underpins it. By exploring the relationship between law and literature, this dissertation seeks to bring insight into the ways in which stories about immigration participate in the broader political discourse on U.S. immigration. On the one hand, it demonstrates how conventional immigration narratives perform cultural labor for the dominant legal regime by reaffirming normative modes of inclusion into the nation. On the other, it shows how literature, by wrestling with the question of illegality, can serve as means to critique the exclusionary practices of American law and society.

The history of personality in American literature has surprisingly little to do with the differentiating individuality we now tend to associate with the term. Scholars of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American culture have defined personality either as the morally vacuous successor to the Protestant ideal of character or as the equivalent of mass-media celebrity. In both accounts, personality is deliberately constructed and displayed. However, hiding in American writings of the long modernist period (1880s-1940s) is a conception of personality as the innate capacity, possessed by few, to attract attention and elicit projection. Skeptical of the great American myth of self-making, such writers as Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, Gertrude Stein, Nathanael West, and Langston Hughes invented ways of representing individuals not by stable inner qualities but by their fascinating--and, often, gendered and racialized--blankness. For these writers, this sense of personality was not only an important theme and formal principle of their fiction and non-fiction writing; it was also a professional concern made especially salient by the rise of authorial celebrity. This dissertation both offers an alternative history of personality in American literature and culture and challenges the common critical assumption that modernist writers took the interior life to be their primary site of exploration and representation. Instead, it argues for a reassessment of American modernism as crucially concerned--in its literary texts and in its professional literary culture--with surface, blankness, and opacity, all barriers to seeing inside which nonetheless produce an impression of personal power.

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