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This dissertation imagines certain contemporary literary oeuvres as perpetually shifting multi-layered palimpsests, their thematic and formal interconnections enacting both the repetitions of trauma and the necessary revisions of historiography, identity, and recovery. Across ethnicity, gender, and genre, my intratextual analyses reveal a cyclical dynamic that destabilizes plotting and the presumption of linear progress between past and future. Chapter One advocates for undisciplined humanities scholarship, drawing upon Jeffrey Williams's "posttheory generation," Shu-mei Shih's "technologies of recognition," and Theodor Adorno's "The Essay as Form." Chapter 2 considers form and reception via theories of intertextuality, intratextuality, and short story cycles. Linking politics and poetics, I suggest that these oeuvres invite consideration of gender, sexuality, and narrative, as well as the "spacetime" of genre. Chapter 3 explores the "serial unpredictability" of "trauma's palimpsests" as analogous to the disordered temporality of geomorphological relicts after impact to the earth. After discussing how these oeuvres mediate between realist and postmodern theories of language, I distinguish between personal and cultural as well as "event-based" and discursive theories of trauma. I emphasize the social nature of recovery, viewing intratextual reading as analogous to a witnessing relationship. Chapter 4 reads Louise Erdrich's "long story cycle," focusing on Tracks (1988) and Four Souls (2004), as emblematic of both traditional Native American forms of storytelling and postmodern witnessing. Drawing upon theories of tricksters, the roman-fleuve, and hypertext, I show that Erdrich's "story" is not a plot, but a performance of storytelling, historiography, and community formation. Chapter 5 argues that Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory (1982) is an essay cycle "impersonating an autobiography." Showing that the text's repetitions point to the discursive trauma of gay sexuality inextricable from ethnic loss, I illustrate how Rodriguez's narrative resists the plot of the coming out story. Chapter 6 posits Rodriguez's Brown (2002) as a "return story" that reprises his "long essay cycle." A close reading of the cubist self-portrait in "Peter's Avocado" reveals a metaphor for Rodriguez's multi-faceted identity and the structure of his writing. The dissertation concludes with "A Palinode on the Scholarly Real," where I reflect upon the structural relationship between autobiography and scholarship.

The aim of this dissertation is to explore how and why Toni Morrison employs biblical allusion, biblical names and entire books of the Bible both directly and ironically in order to emphasize the importance of ancestry and community in the lives of African-Americans. Morrison begins in Sula emphasizing the idea that communities that are not cohesive cannot survive. She challenges her readers to question how The Bottom community could have thrived if the people thought of it as more than just a place, but as a group of neighbors who help each other to live and grow. She continues in Song of Solomon with the emphasis not only on community but also on ancestry as identity. When Jake agrees to give up his name, he prevents his descendants from knowing or understanding from where they came. In not knowing their past, they are empty. She culminates her argument in Beloved where she fully emphasizes both community and ancestry with the incarnation of Beloved as the community of all slaves that have gone before. All three novels are heavily laden with biblical allusion that culminate in Morrison’s challenge for all not to forget and to let their history lead to a reclamation of ancestry and community.

In August 1912, American photographer Alfred Stieglitz published Gertrude Stein's word portraits of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse in a special issue of Camera Work. Most scholars agree that these word portraits inspired the invention of the object portrait in the American visual arts. Marius de Zayas, Francis Picabia, Marsden Hartley, Man Ray, Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven, Arthur Dove, Charles Demuth, and Georgia O'Keeffe explored the genre as members of American artistic circles from 1912 through the 1930s. As the genre developed, these artists drew simultaneously upon the semantic and syntactic play of cubist collage, photomontage, Dada language experiments, assemblage, and traditional fine art practices. The identification of Stein's word portraits of Picasso and Matisse as the source of inspiration for object portraiture is secure in scholarly literature. Yet, the theoretical relationship between the two over time remains unexplored. Moreover, scholars have failed to consider other literary experiments by Stein, such as Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms (1914) and the word portraits produced after 1911, as contributing factors in the genre's development. Steinian scholarship primarily attributes her portrait theory to the application of the American psychologist William James' system of characterology, which addresses the mental phenomena of simultaneity, stream of consciousness, and a continuous present. As Stein created a linguistic correspondence to Jamesian perception, she employed an alternative language system that made use of repetition, fragmentation, metaphor and metonymy, word play, punning, word heap (or a conscious, volitional emptying of words), nonsense, and sound associations. In so doing, Stein questioned and attacked traditional modes of identity construction in her experimental writing. Her primary objective was to capture modern character and personality as revealed through modern experiences. I argue that the development of the object portrait genre as practiced by the artists listed above must be considered in light of the profound impact of Gertrude Stein's portrait theory, embedded in the cultural interest in personality and psychology, as demonstrated progressively over the course of her literary career. Like Stein, the artists believed that traditional visual language systems based on mimesis were incapable of describing modern personality and alternative lifestyles. Instead, they employed an alternative visual language of objects associated with their subjects to replace portraiture's traditional reliance on physical resemblance as an indicator of character. Thus, they invented a new means of conveying essential personality traits. I argue further that Stein's development of an alternative language system based on Jamesian psychology, to question traditional modes of identity construction in her experimental writing, contributed to the overall structure and meaning of object portraiture. Art historians have addressed aspects of this argument but they have not attributed this to the artists' interests in Stein's writing specifically. Therefore, the primary objective of this dissertation is to bring together the literary scholarship on Stein's word portraiture and the related art historical scholarship on object portraiture to reconsider the claims made in each in an attempt to discern parallel themes and stylistic choices evident in the genre's development as a visual form of expression within the American avant-garde. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Art History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester, 2011. / June 20, 2011. / Alfred Stieglitz, Gertrude Stein, American art, modern art, object portrait / Includes bibliographical references. / Karen A. Bearor, Professor Directing Dissertation; John J. Fenstermaker, University Representative; Adam D. Jolles, Committee Member; Roald Nasgaard, Committee Member.

Few scholars have attempted to conduct a close examination of Whitman's relationship to his publishers in the context of Leaves of Grass. In their "Typographic Yawp: Leaves of Grass , 1855--1992," Megan and Paul Benton present a minimal, but interesting examination of the typographic story of Leaves, but they ignore three of the editions and deal with author-publisher relations only superficially. Other articles examine individual editions of Leaves of Grass, but none really explore what Whitman's complicated relationships with the publishers of his time tell us about the conditions for his work and for authorship in mid-nineteenth-century America. Most studies tend to focus on Whitman's poetry, rather than on issues associated with his publication history. In his Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of Grass, for example, Michael Moon carefully examines various editions, but chooses to concentrate on Whitman's poetic revisions and program, rather than discussing aspects related to the publication story behind Leaves of Grass. This study will try to address this gap in Whitman scholarship and, in so doing, try to answer the following questions: Were Whitman's ambitions for his Leaves of Grass fulfilled? Did he ever reach his intended audience?

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