<p> <i>Neurosity: The Speed a Dandelion Burns</i>, is a single, book-length poem that meditates on the existential awareness of negating absence through neurotic repetition of defining and redefining. My personal aesthetics encompass influences by Gertrude Stein, Charles Simic, Judith Butler, and Frank O'Hara. By negating absence I destabilize the fixed nature of focal points on present subjects and unveil language's performativity. Neurotic repetition and linguistic velocity are mantra-like statements that connect two distinct realities. "Neurosity" is a word I created to synthesize the words "neurosis" and "velocity." My poetic imagination is not interested in what is present in gender, racial, ethnic, sexual, class identities nor psychological states, but what is absent, or more importantly, how presence might be defined by synesthetic renderings of absence. The rapid immolation of a dandelion, a flowerlike weed, represents the delicate linguistic velocity and disambiguation that each .piece of this collection encapsulates.</p>

<p> <i>Thumb Twiddle Glossolalia: The Soumage</i> is a collection of poetry written during my two years in the Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing Program at California State University, Long Beach. While the structure and subject matter of these poems vary, the synaesthetic fusion of sound and imagery is at the core of them all. I define this sonic-sensual ideal as the <i> soumage</i> and examine its usage within a network of other poetic and thematic elements. The appendices are ordered to loosely trace a narrative about recognizing and appreciating the peculiar beauty of that which is overlooked by society, with the <i>soumage</i> bolstering this reverence.</p>

<p> A young American woman who lost her mother in 9/11 needs a heart transplant and discovers that her only hope is to pay a small fortune for her Muslim doctor to escort her to Iran for the operation. Reluctantly putting her mistrust aside, she agrees to the bargain but once in Iran her doctor's mysterious behavior and the terrible social injustice she finds propel her to become enmeshed in the tragic case of two young boys framed and threatened with execution for homosexuality. Her doctor finally reveals what her behavior is endangering, a secret clinic he runs to aid those abused by the system. He wants her to ignore the plight of the boys but she refuses. Her discovery of the heart that had been buried under the scar tissue of 9/11 nearly destroys them both, but in the end their passion for justice saves them and brings two opposing cultures a bit closer.</p>

<p> This dissertation explores the ways by which reading and writing mediated the experience of place and the meaning of community in the nineteenth-century United States. Drawing on the literary productions of well-known authors like Frederick Douglass and Rebecca Harding Davis, the project shows how imaginative representations of real American places came to simultaneously challenge and make use of the expanding networks and institutions of a national print culture. Through its study of local cultures of print in Trenton, New Jersey, Bennington, Vermont, Chicago, Illinois, and Johnstown, Pennsylvania, this dissertation also examines the societal and cultural reshaping that sprang from confrontations between the frontiers of local and national identity, attachments to the old and new places of the nation, and divergent beliefs regarding the importance of face-to-face communities in the lives of everyday Americans. </p><p> In each of its four chapters, the dissertation studies the consumption and production of what it calls "local literature," an oft-overlooked literary category comprised of texts written about a specific place by a resident of that place. This intentionally broad definition allows the project to study many diverse genres and texts, including diaries, unpublished letters, congressional testimony, national periodicals, melodramas, factory ledgers, pamphlets, autobiographies, short stories, speeches, memoirs, newspapers, toasts, slave narratives, poems, event programs, popular songs, and public art inscriptions. The vast array of materials considered by this dissertation offers a different angle on the diversity of print culture in the nineteenth-century United States, while also drawing attention to the ways that reading and writing affected how Americans thought of themselves in relation to the many local and distant places they encountered during this period in the nation's history. </p><p> By paying close attention to the local dynamics and contexts of nineteenth-century American literature, this dissertation sheds new light on the related issues of identity and attachment. To some degree, cultural historians have grown accustomed to viewing identity through the prisms of race, gender, nationality, and class; building off of these works, this project shows how the attachment to place - and the expression of this attachment through literary production - figures in the construction of identity.</p>

McCarthy's novels articulate a vision of man's state of grace as a trajectory. Outer Dark, representative of McCarthy's early career, reveals a world filled with overwhelming evil, a vision of terra damnata mitigated only by the grace suggested in the narrative tenderness toward the heroine, Rinthy. Suttree affirms grace as the titular hero "pulls himself together" to overcome "dementia praecox," a form of madness combining the primitive implications of schizophrenia (represented by Suttree's dead twin) and the Manichean split between good and evil that paradoxically issues in Knoxville's "good-naturedly violent" demimonde. Blood Meridian, McCarthy's apocalyptic Western, reverses the vision of Suttree. The novel's ambiguous silences--moments of ineffability--either condemn "the kid" for his senseless brutalities or confirm the meaningless of life which the desecrating bloodshed suggests. Both possibilities leave mankind poised uncomfortably at his blood meridian, McCarthy's version of an apocalyptic foreclosure on the possibility of grace.

Thoreau is read chiefly as the author of the only two books he published during his life, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden. However, Thoreau composed two other books, Cape Cod and The Maine Woods, which reveal a very different Thoreau in relation to time and place. A rhetorical analysis of the dialectic between lyrical, or metaphorical, nonnarrative and metonymic narrative in Thoreau's four books reveals a Thoreau increasingly engaged in natural and temporal human practice. By contrast with metaphorical writing's greater self-referentiality and insistence on its own mediation of experience, metonymy in conjunction with the mimesis of a narrative plot serves Thoreau simultaneously to mediate temporal human practice and yet also to point toward practice apart from mediation. In this way, metonymic narrative demonstrates simultaneously the necessity of human construction of experience and yet the contingency of human construction too. Such narrative, then, combines daring with deference to all that eludes construction. This disposition toward living and writing makes possible the articulation and exploration of crucial questions like how consciousness relates to practice, whether preservation of wilderness is necessary, and whether natural life is imperative and human life expendable. A rhetorical analysis of Thoreau's four books not only reveals a more historically engaged Thoreau than emerges when he is read as the author of only A Week and Walden, but it also shows Thoreau's rhetorical and thematic relation with several contemporary writers of nonfiction narrative prose of place. James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men perhaps more than any other single contemporary work embodies the conflict of rhetoric and purposes of all four of Thoreau's books. Looking at Agee in light of Thoreau as the author of four books illuminates within American nonfiction prose of place a persistent conflict between rhetorical strategies and related psychosexual and epistemological goals. However, the more this conflict resolves itself in favor of the rhetoric of metonymic narrative, as it does in Thoreau's Cape Cod and The Maine Woods and in William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways, John McPhee's narratives, Ann Zwinger's Run, River, Run, and Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, the more salient become the themes of social criticism.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has provoked controversy and invited censorship over its one hundred year history. Where once its detractors criticized its themes of violence and rebellion and protested the moral laxity in the language and characters of the novel, in the twentieth century the controversy has evolved into an issue of race. This study examines the history of the censorship controversy and reviews the twentieth century charges of racism. The contemporary debate on Huckleberry Finn centers around a literal interpretation of the text. Since Twain's treatment of race in the novel is presented through irony, it is crucial that the reader understands the author's ironic intent. An intensive evaluation of Twain, the racial issue, and his novel in light of the now accessible textual and biographical materials reveals his use of anti-racism motifs. Twain creates characters that are imprisoned by their social milieu. Huck, Jim, and the society as a whole are trapped within the confines of the existing slave system and the other entrapments of culture, most notably--language. Huckleberry Finn is a dialectic in that Twain uses the language against itself. Ironically, it is that very language that so upsets Black readers that the very essence of the true message of the novel is lost. The multi-faceted nature of Twain's subject and his literary technique necessitates the reader's full awareness of Twain's use of irony, language, and point of view in Huckleberry Finn. The figure of Huck as a narrator is the revealing of a divided self, and his developing consciousness and innocence are linked with the social satire. Twain's use of language and point of view creates a double vision of race. Huck's intuitive self is juxtaposed to the conflicting internalized mores of the society, his acquired or "programmed" conscience. This duality represents the double consciousness that permeated nineteenth century America. A textual analysis of Huckleberry Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson indicates a consistency in Twain's treatment of race, and both of these works suggest that social fictions create unalterable realities. The power of social fictions and the fear of isolation and social ostracism are recurring themes which illuminate the problem of race and morality, thus revealing the complexity of the racial situation America.

The novels of contemporary American fiction writer John Hawkes are commonly labeled experimental, postmodern, surrealistic. While they share characteristics with each of these loosely defined categories, what really distinguishes Hawkes's fictions is their radical humanism. Hawkes's fictions seek to be experienced by the reader and in so doing expose and expand who we are. In these concerns Hawkes is more easily associated with such writers as Flannery O'Connor, Nathaneal West and William Faulkner. While each of Hawkes's novels is significantly different, all actively encourage the reader into the text--without the benefit of a magnetic plot or characters with whom it is easy to identify. Hawkes uses empty space--areas of "not knowing"--much as Faulkner uses character and O'Connor plot to draw the reader into his fictions where the violence and beauty of the images and prose assail, exhaust and affirm the reader. Four types of empty space are examined: textual gaps and blanks, landscapes of desolation, silence, and sexual and ethical assault. While these ideas are discussed with reference to all of Hawkes's fiction and to other contemporary novels as well, extended discussion is given only to four of Hawkes's novels: Death, Sleep & the Traveler, Whistlejacket, Travesty, and Virginie: her two lives. Reader-response and psychoanalytic criticism, and several philosophical approaches to space are explored in the process of delineating those ideas which link physical, philosophical and ethical "holes" in Hawkes's texts to provocation, response, and vulnerability. Ultimately the center of the argument rests on vulnerability--how Hawkes's fictions render us unusually vulnerable, and how such vulnerability is vital to the intensity and satisfaction of the reading experience.

The term "female spectator" has, since its first appearance within feminist theoretical formulations, and in particular within feminist psychoanalytic interpretations of film, been the subject of contentious debate. Attempting to answer such questions as, What is a female spectator? Who does she represent? How meaningful is she as a social or textual construction?, feminist theorists of literature and film have sought and constructed a complex syntax of meanings, one which reveals the nomenclature of "female spectatorship" as a site not of looked-for, stable opportunity, but rather of multiple and unpredictable identifications. Drawing on the work of critics including Mary Ann Doane, Tania Modleski, and Teresa de Lauretis, this study seeks to explore that multiplicity through a construct of "masquerade": locating the strategic importance of female spectatorship, not only in its ability to figure female recognitions of gender as performance, but in its capacity to describe the very watching of that recognition, and the larger masks of theory that construct watching itself--and so authorizing feminist tropes of specularization, and a female "gaze" that deconstructs specularization as local, limited, and strategic. To this end, the dissertation is imagined as a series of "unmaskings" or textual re-visions which dramatize and self-consciously narrativize feminist "sights" of critical engagement with works by women which seek to encode female specularity. Chapter 1 offers a Lacanian analysis of The Awakening, an interpretation which is in turn challenged and complicated by the re-vision of Chapter 2, incorporating previously absent demarcations of race, class, and sexuality. Chapter 3 examines Barren Ground as a text which encodes the very watching of female textual production enacted in the first two chapters, and further as a work which expresses female visual authority precisely through such return and redress. Chapter 4, finally, reads the impulse to self-revision as itself open to a second look, offering an analysis of Quicksand which exposes the potentially "mirroring" and enclosed effects of white female spectatorship deployed as self-observation. Yet Larsen also holds out hope for the masks of female watching; masks which, when recognized, may reconstruct women viewers as diverse, distinct, and discerning.

This dissertation argues for the importance of works of leftist literary criticism, fiction, and poetry in our understanding of the cultural history of American modernism. Despite the scientific Marxist tendencies apparent in the critical debates that were conducted in the New Masses and at the 1935 American Writers' Congress, the leftist fiction of the decade reflects a critical Marxist stance, focused on alienation and the possibilities of formulating narrative strategies to overcome the distortions of ideology. Novels deployed a form of Lukacsian ideological critique, I argue, insofar as they engaged the stereotypes of high literary culture, as well as mass and popular culture, with historical materialism. This strategy is apparent in John Steinbeck's California labor novels, Nathanael West's surreal apocalyptic novels, and in Richard Wright's Thirties fiction, as well as in the lesser-known works of Robert Cantwell and Agnes Smedley. These works reveal a lineage of critical Marxism, engaging the dialectic of identity and ideology, a productive tension between subjective and objective forms of knowledge. The dialectic of ideology and identity explores human subjectivity in-itself and for-itself, both as a knowable object of rational inquiry as a radically unknowable experiential process. The latter prospect dovetailed with the nationalist paradigm of the American self, a figure of autonomous self-fashioning and reinvention that is central to the American novel tradition. While some novels enclose one aspect of the dialectic into the other, explaining away the ideological commitments of characters as symptoms of their psychological pathologies, for instance, as Steinbeck does, or on the other hand, underestimating the real effects of identity, as Wright does at his most ideological, the best works sustained the contradictions between these two discursive modes, "tarrying with the negative," to use the Hegelian phrase. The continued relevance of these works of literary leftism resides in their critical power, confronting and deconstructing the encroaching patterns of mass culture and gesturing beyond our categories of knowledge, not hubristically but warily.