Thesis (M.S.)--Oregon State University, 2010. / Printout. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 65-74). Also available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--West Virginia University, 2005. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains ix, 167 p. : ill. Vita. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--Boise State University, 2010. / Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--Boise State University, 2010. / Title from t.p. of PDF file (viewed July 21, 2010). Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2005. / Title from PDF title page screen. Includes bibliographical references (p. 233-249)

As I maintain throughout my study of the legacy of anxious antebellum white constructions of the ‘bad nigger’ trope, public sphere discourses too often deny African males access to the deliberations of civil society. Thus, I discuss the anxious public sphere discourses that created the antebellum ‘bad nigger,’ the ‘black beast’ rapist, and the violent ‘coon’ of Progressive Era popular song. However, my primary focus is the social, cultural, and historical circumstances that identify the assumption of negative identity as a form, however problematic, of masculinist African American oppositional discourse. Thus, I combine linguistic, cultural, and historical analyses to provide an ontological reading of the connection between African American appropriations of hate speech and the formation of counterpublics. I consider African American appropriation of the antebellum ‘bad nigger’ trope, construction of the ‘badman’ during the Progressive Era, construction of the ‘super bad’ masculinist African American hero during the 1970s, and the ascendancy of the ‘real nigga’ of hip-hop culture. To investigate some of the ways African American males and publics react to the imputation of negative masculine identities adequately, I pay particular attention to counterdiscourses embedded in African American folklore, literature, film, and popular music. The significance of these cultural forms to the shaping of some African American counterpublic discourses is great. On one hand, these forms allow specific African American concerns to be circulated within a larger public sphere in a fashion that exposes the ill effects of being denied access to civil society. The oppositional stance of these forms shapes and reflects African American counterpublic discourse. On the other hand, widespread public culture representations of figures similar to the antebellum ‘bad nigger’ call the usefulness of these figures to broad African American publics into question. This inquiry also shapes African American counterpublics. Thus, I come to question the efficacy of using this seemingly intractable and definitely problematic figure to shape and promote counterpublic discourses. Another question looms over this text, however. What circumstances must arise so these figures will becomes less culturally and rhetorically relevant? I hope I have provided details that will lead to potential answers.

Home Feelings with the Past explores modes of historiographical thinking among antebellum writers in order to explore the relations of history and literature as well as the uses of history in literature. Informed by postmodern theory and neo-pragmatism, yet authorized by the practice of antebellum writers, the dissertation departs from a consensus of assumptions and methodologies that have governed American literary studies since the “historical turn” in order to suggest alternative ways of imagining literary history. I contend that the historicist tendency to view literary texts as both constituted by and constitutive of their historical moment risks consigning texts inexorably to a particular cross-section of history, shackling them to a single slice of historical time. In the first part of the dissertation, I show that writers as different as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Catharine Sedgwick, and Ralph Waldo Emerson all imagine history anachronistically, disrupting the historical sequence of events or ventriloquizing voices from one historical period into another in order to imagine alternatives to the sequential course of history. Narratives which themselves refuse to be bound to a single moment in history, I argue, do not invite a critical approach which seeks to link them to a particular historical context. By contrast, in the second part of the dissertation, I demonstrate how old texts might be studied fruitfully by emphasizing historical contexts other than their time of production. Thus, I, too, “commit” anachronism, placing works by James Fenimore Cooper and Herman Melville in relation to contemporary contexts. Unlike “new” historicists, then, my readings do not assume that text “belongs” to particular moments in time or that I can tell a story about the past uninfected by my own location in history. Rather, I strive to portray these texts as I apprehend or “recognize” them in the context of our own time. The works by Cooper and Melville, then, become not just indices of a bygone era, but documents that place us, as readers, in a constellation of past and present, that allow us to experience history, not simply to know it.

“Normality” is an idea so deeply woven into U.S. culture that it seems always to have existed, yet this interdisciplinary American Studies dissertation reveals otherwise. Beginning by analyzing the appearance of Normality as a regular subject heading in the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature between 1945 and 1963, this project explores how the pressures of war and readjustment made “normality” (re)emerge as one of the most potent epistemological categories of the early post-World War II decades. Each chapter approaches the broader topic of “normality” through focused, in-depth analysis of one particularly revealing postwar text. The story of “Norm and Norma,” two anthropometric models created in 1943 as supposed statistical composites of the “average” American male and female bodies, shows how the impulse to measure and define the “normal” was taken to the level of the body itself. A postwar fashion remnant, the “gray flannel suit” served as a powerful signifier of middle-class identity, and also a target for sociologists anxious over the slippage between “normality” and conformity. James Jones' 1951 first novel From Here to Eternity, a critical and popular success quickly followed by an Oscar-winning film version, invokes then excises homosexuality in a prewar Army setting, in order to erect and normalize a certain brand of violent male heterosexuality in its place. Meanwhile, in the fictional small town of “Peyton Place,” citizens participate in a culture of “keeping up appearances” through the projection of façades and other-directed performances of identity. Such practices resonated with readers caught in the ambiguities of a postwar morality, making Grace Metalious's 1956 novel one of the first sweeping critiques of this culture of “normality.” These discrete examples, taken together, reveal much about this “homogenizing category” of culture: that a cultural preoccupation with the idea of normality did exist at this time; that normality was effectively produced and reproduced at the intersections of scientific/intellectual discourse and popular/material practices; and ironically, that normality would prove to be both powerfully coercive and impossible to achieve. Ultimately, this project reveals that “normality” has been both a subject of, and subject to, history.

‘Just Like Hitler’ explores the manner in which Nazism is used within mass American culture to create ethical arguments. Specifically, it provides a history of Nazism’s usage as a metaphor for evil. The work follows that metaphor’s usage from its origin with dissemination of camp liberation imagery through its political usage as a way of describing the communist enemy in the Cold War, through its employment as a vehicle for criticism against America’s domestic and foreign policies, through to its usage as a personal metaphor for evil. Ultimately, the goal of the dissertation is to describe the ways in which the metaphor of Nazism has become ubiquitous in discussion of ethics within American culture at large and how that ubiquity has undermined definitions of evil and made them unavailable. Through overuse, Nazism has become a term to vague to describe anything, but necessary because all other definitions of evil are subject to contextualization and become diminished through explanation. The work analyzes works of postwar literature but also draws in state sponsored propaganda as well as works of popular culture. Because of its concentration on Nazism as a ubiquitous definition of evil, it describes American culture through a survey of its more prominent, popular, and lauded works.

"(Un)Conventional Coupling" initiates a more expansive critical conversation on the contemporary neo-slave narrative. The dissertation's central argument is that authors of neo-slave narratives rely on the politicized theme of interracial coupling to both reimagine history and explore the possibility of social transformation. to establish a framework for my particular focus on interracial intimacy, this study extends the boundaries of the genre by adopting Paul Gilroy's theory of the black Atlantic. This theoretical paradigm serves as a provisional framework for both accommodating and analyzing the complexity of authorship, nationality, and influence within this large body of work.;This dissertation interprets neo-slave narratives' preoccupation with interracial sex and intimacy as a compelling reason to situate the critical analysis of the genre within a more expansive context. The prevalence of discourses and representations of interracial desire, sexuality, and intimacy within the genre reveals a preoccupation with cross-cultural connection. Additionally, authors of neo-slave narratives rely on black-white coupling to explore the concepts and realities of "race." Indeed, interracial intimacy provides an effective mechanism for this literature to invigorate a dialogue about "race" and why it still matters in the twenty-first century.;Adopting the term (un)conventional coupling to destabilize racialized ideologies of sexuality and desire, this project reads black-white coupling as a trope that represents a complex and conflicted sense of transracial intimacy in these novels. This study analyzes the representation of transracial intimacy in three different novels: Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose, David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident, and Valerie Martin's Property. Each chapter demonstrates the different ways in which these authors rely on the trope of black-white coupling to construct the double-edged critique of black Atlantic political culture. First, this trope exposes a hidden history in order to reveal a more comprehensive and nuanced version of slavery and its myriad legacies. Secondly, representations of interracial intimacy allow authors to posit utopian possibilities out of relations of difference by creating a space for transformative acts of social reinvention.