Sarah Orne Jewett's spiritual beliefs, fostered by Theophilus Parsons and influenced by the culture around her, permeated her early fiction and can be seen as late as "The Foreigner." Her relationship with Professor Theophilus Parsons of Harvard College was rich and proved fundamental to her development of spiritual tenets, especially Swedenborgianism. Parsons was instrumental not only in Jewett's personal development, but also in her growth as a young writer. He helped her to sort out his and Swedenborg's ideas, as well as offered her guidance to the publishing world of Boston in the 1870s. Jewett was also a writer very much in tune with her time. Many nineteenth century Americans were electrified by spiritualist phenomena and were in active pursuit of extrasensory communication among themselves and with the departed. This great energy did not bypass Jewett. She actively pursued the occult throughout her lifetime. In her private papers, letters and manuscripts, she explores elements of the occult. This pursuit is also manifested in her published work. From her first book, Deephaven, to "The Foreigner," one of her last stories published in the Atlantic, Jewett probes the elements of her spiritualist beliefs in the public eye. Another aspect of her spiritualism is the creation of women characters who are herbalists and healers. Almira Todd, Jewett's finest herbalist, is the quintessential woman, mature, wise, and knowledgable in the healing arts. Todd's experience in "The Foreigner" punctuates Jewett's lifelong belief. Todd's vision of the ghost makes her the living link between the two worlds. The gates are "standin' wide open," and Almira Todd is positioned in the doorway. Todd, too, not only knows of the close proximity of the two worlds, but also makes a strong community within this one. By examining these elements of Jewett's life and writing, we have a new lens through which to view her work. Understanding Jewett's relationship with Theophilus Parsons and her belief in Parson's faith enrich our knowledge of Jewett and offer another possibility for interpreting her work.

In this dissertation I examine how three contemporary writers represent their religious experience and interpret the varied landscape of American Christianity. Central to my study is the consideration of contemporary religious discourse and how spiritual meanings are constructed and reflected in personal narratives by spatial structures and codes. Some of the questions that I focus on include: What and whom do the representations of religious life center around? Who's there? Who's not? Also, how important is the physical landscape in the rendering of spiritual experiences? What spaces and places are sacred? In chapter one I discuss why it is important for literary and composition scholars to consider contemporary religious writings. I also overview numerous theories of space, and point out how attending to the discourses of space helps elucidate the incarnational motif that is as strong a paradigm within contemporary Christian narratives as that of conversion. Chapter two focuses on what is most likely Dillard's best known work, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I explore in detail the ways in which she presents the landscape of the creek as both a natural playground and a spiritual wonderland. In chapter three, I consider four of Dillard's "churchscapes" that appear in Holy the Firm and Teaching a Stone to Talk. I argue that Dillard's "map" of the American church reveals a variegated Christian landscape and highlights clashes of incongruities. Dillard provides candid and occasionally humorous portraits of religious cultures as she attempts to make the sacred realm recognizable in her texts. In chapter four, I look at Norris's Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. I first establish how she represents her external landscape before engaging questions of how her spiritual views and her natural surroundings mutually shape each other. What most strongly gets expressed in Norris's essays is a vision of the sacred that is grounded within ordinary time and space and intensely human centered. In chapter five, I discuss Buechner's three spiritual autobiographies, Sacred Journey, Now and Then, and Telling Secrets. I detail how place imagery assists him to describe his internal life; via the landscape of his imagination, he drafts a blueprint not only for himself but for Christianity in North America as well. I argue that by naming his everyday, ordinary world as a regular venue of sacred encounter, Buechner's works both demystify the holy and reintroduce elements of enchantment into postmodern American spaces. I conclude with a brief afterword, drawing together some of the key ideas that appear in each chapter. I consider how differently these writers articulate their Christianity as well as, surprisingly, how many similar tropes and concerns appear in their personal narratives of faith.

Charles Chesnutt is perhaps best known for his short stories; he also, over the course of his relatively short publishing career, produced three novels, which have been less well represented in the critical community. This neglect is due to some oversimplified readings in the past. My readings offer a revised view of Chesnutt's work, which I have opened up by using the critical lens of liminality, and by drawing on Chesnutt's own natural deconstructionist tendencies to do deconstructive readings of the novels. I draw on Victor Turner's definition of liminality, which comes from Turner's rites of passage studies. I show that Chesnutt's characters frequently attain liminal status in his work--they take on the "betwixt and between" characteristics that Turner defines as essential to the liminal state. But far from attaining the final assimilation that comes at the end of liminality, Chesnutt's characters end up as marginals--Turner's term for permanent outcasts. Thus, Chesnutt, in his typically ironic way, has described the status of black Americans at the turn of the 19$\sp{\rm th}$ century in America. Chesnutt's novels are, when looked at as a continuum, a brooding meditation on the despair of black existence following Reconstruction. In the first novel, The House Behind the Cedars, Chesnutt shows the liminal quality of passing, an option which he chose not to exercise. In the second (and most successful) book, The Marrow of Tradition, he shows the liminal nature of the racial space occupied by a professional black man, who tries to be all things to all people, and who ends up utterly unable to express himself. And in the third, and final, novel, The Colonel's Dream, Chesnutt shows the failure of a white man who tried to go back to his hometown in the South and change the course of its future by combining what he perceives to be the best of the past with the best of the present. But in the frozen landscape of the post-Reconstructionist South, all dreams have become nightmares. Thus, because of his prophetic voice, Chesnutt deserves more appreciative readings in the present.

This study argues the need to consider the impact of social class in women's narratives. Beginning with the turn of the century, a time of great social and economic change for women, I examine how women writers challenge and redefine traditional notions of middle-class womanhood in order to accommodate emerging feminist ideals, for example, the rejection of marriage for the pursuit of a career. Using the fiction of Wharton, Austin, Yezierska, and Hurston, I explore how the female characters of their novels negotiate between traditional roles ascribed to middle-class women and new definitions of womanhood symbolized by the appearance of the "New Woman." Interestingly, while some middle-class ideals are rejected, i.e. domesticity, two of these writers, Wharton and Austin, nonetheless remain committed to a middle-class ideology. For Yezierska and Hurston, middle-class acceptance means necessarily negotiating the uncertain terrain between a desire for middle-class stability and the reality of one's ethnic and racial background. By highlighting the importance of class in the construction of female subjectivity, my study of women's narratives makes a substantial contribution to the field of feminist literary theory.

The purpose of my research into Thomas Pynchon's use of ideas from science and philosophy is to show that this group of novels is not, as critics contend, nihilistic, but rather hopeful. In his first novel, V., Pynchon establishes the idea that truth--whether historical, political, scientific or personal--cannot be determined with absolute confidence. He extrapolates from Wittgenstein's claim (Tractalus Logico-Philosophicus) that "the world is all that is the case" to demonstrate that "the case" is different according to each observer. He makes this apparent in a variety of narrative devices which upset conventional novelistic expectations. In his second novel, The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon explores the social implications of adherence to ideas of certainty based on bivalent models. The central metaphor of the novel is James Clerk Maxwell's thought experiment, in which a demon sits between two chambers in a closed thermodynamic system, sorting molecules of gas according to their ability to do thermodynamic work. The novel presents a variety of worlds which exist between the two values recognized by the sorting demon. In Gravity's Rainbow the emotional and intellectual uncertainties of the characters stand in marked contrast to the products of modern science, represented by the A4 rocket. By novel's end the rocket is about to fall on Los Angeles, but beneath the arc between the firing of the A4 in 1945 and its eventual fall on Los Angeles are possibilities for stopping its progress. Together the novels present a critique of European-American ideas and contemporary attempts at social reform through a web of scientific, historical, and philosophical allusions.

This dissertation uses the rhetorical theory of Kenneth Burke to illuminate the development of Walt Whitman's rhetorical poetics, in which Whitman sought to transform the reader's identity from one based on static and divisive notions of race, class, region, and gender to a malleable identity based on the actions of the human body. I show how this rhetorical poetics is the product of a number of factors, including the variety of roles poetry played in early nineteenth-century American culture, the economics of the publishing industry, the fragmentation of the two-party system, and nineteenth-century oratorical culture, and that a careful examination of the intersection of Whitman and these factors reveals the development of this rhetorical poetics. I focus on four bodies of evidence: Whitman's pre-Leaves of Grass poetry; the various rhetorical roles poetry played in America from 1820–1850 (roles shaped in large part by changing economic conditions) as exemplified by three poets whom Whitman read and admired, McDonald Clarke, Martin Farquhar Tupper, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; Whitman's pre- Leaves of Grass notebooks; and the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman's early poetry reveals a young poet, intensely aware of the variety of roles poetry could play, moving progressively toward a poetry that could combine the communal persona of the ballad with the individual persona of the romantic lyric. In his pre-Leaves of Grass notebooks, written from 1848–1855, we see Whitman struggling to discover a poetics that will replace party politics. Close attention to external references, developments in style and rhetoric, and manuscript evidence reveals both the order of the notebooks and the different purposes for which Whitman used them, and the origin of some of the key themes of Leaves of Grass, including slavery, race, class, the body, and sexuality. Finally, the 1855 text itself is an overtly rhetorical text. While C. Carroll Hollis has shown how Leaves of Grass reflects nineteenth-century oratory at the micro-level, I show how the macro-level also reflects that discourse. Specifically, I show how “Song of Myself” employs theories of rhetorical arrangement described by Aristotle and Hugh Blair.

From Vietnam rap groups in the 70s to the popularity of 12 step programs in the 90s, it has been established that telling one's story to a sympathetic audience can help bring about recovery. However, these groups are closed circles. People who have experienced trauma can communicate with one another because they have a common reference. In their memories are images and visceral experiences they can access to help them understand the experience of fellow survivors. But trauma survivors often feel paralyzed communicating to those who have not been initiated into violence. Because trauma is experienced and remembered differently from the non-traumatic, it must be communicated differently. This study involves one form of that communication: the soldier narrative. By using the combat stories of Ernest Hemingway and Tim O'Brien as an entree, I will explore how these authors created a particular narrative for trauma. Both authors use a style that borrows from the experience of dreaming. This seemingly illogical world of the dream parallels the mind and body's reaction to trauma. By understanding why these authors connected dream narrative to trauma narrative, we can better understand the unique ways combat violates narrative and psyche. Although my analysis will be based on literature, I will be using sociological and psychiatric studies of the military to understand how combat is experienced, particularly through the condition of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and the challenges inherent in communicating it. I will show how the dream in literature is not just a way to perform character analyses, but a viable alternative narrative for conveying the experience of trauma.

In November 1852, Frederick Douglass composed The Heroic Slave , a novella about Madison Washington's leadership of the 1841 Creole insurrection. In the novella, Douglass attempted to justify his adoption of political methods to the antislavery community. As literary models for his story, Douglass drew on portraits of heroic slaves in his own autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), Harriet B. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin; Or, Life among the Lowly (1852), Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812–18), and the deposition of the Creole crew, called the “New Orleans Protest” (1841). The result was an intertextual conversation among Douglass, Stowe, Byron, and the Creole crew, which Douglass used to initiate a series of autobiographical revisions. Reading The Heroic Slave as an intertextual conversation offers an alternative to the current practice of assigning this work either to the genre of fiction or to the slave narrative, which has subordinated discussion of the historical context for the story's composition to contemporary attempts to theorize the genre of autobiography. An intertextual reading shows that Douglass was developing a notion of political discourse and action based on friendship as an alternative to Stowe's emphasis on moral reform based on sympathy. Douglass's emphasis on friendship in the novella was, in part, a response to his collaboration with Gerrit Smith, whom he helped elect to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1852, and the novella reflects Douglass's intellectual and professional development from 1847 to 1852, a period to which his latter autobiographies give relatively little attention. Writing a history of Madison Washington's participation in the Creole rebellion for an audience who had, largely, forgotten the event, offered Douglass the opportunity to examine the connection between enslavement and erasure from national history. His novella attempted to reverse this process by presenting Washington's actions as a battle in an ongoing American revolution.

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.

This dissertation explores the ways in which four post-modern American novelists continue to use their fiction to address questions regarding the nature and place of ethics and spirituality in contemporary America in spite of the supposed "death" of history, man, and God. The four novels examined represent different ethico-spiritual traditions, which this dissertation seeks to engage in an open and fruitful dialogue. The introduction (Chapter I) traces the trajectory of Modernity, beginning with the Enlightenment's rejection of traditional modes of thought and the devastating effects of that rejection for moral theory, for human beings, and for the world they inhabit. The Modern world that resulted from that rejection forms the backdrop against which play out the dramas of the four novels. Chapter II explores, by way of Walker Percy's The Last Gentleman , Western man's tendency to abstract and alienate himself from the world around him in an attempt to transcend the messiness and uncertainty of the post-modern lifeworld. Chapter III focuses on Toni Morrison's Paradise in order to examine the effects of Modernity's emphases on order, hierarchy, and mastery and its tendency to produce rigid social and religious institutions incapable of adapting and adjusting to the rapidly changing circumstances of the post-modern lifeworld. Chapter IV delves into the chaotic world of E. L. Doctorow's City of God, which acknowledges the chaos and confusion of our contemporary milieu but views post-modernity as an opportunity to establish a new kind of ethics and spirituality more open to the continuing revelation of God in the post-modern urban lifeworld. Chapter V explores Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, which joins the other texts in critiquing Modernity and offers an all-inclusive vision of what we must do if we are to renew our communities and heal our world. The conclusion (Chapter VI) integrates the critiques of the four novels with the recent insights of contemporary moral philosophers and theologians in order to pose a starting point for living more serious, fecund, and worthy ethical and spiritual lives in an effort to renew and heal ourselves and, eventually, the world around us.