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Thesis advisor: Robert S. Lehman / Thesis advisor: Jennifer Greiman / “American Imperception” explores how early American writers investigated the role that political economy plays in the relation between sensory perception and knowledge. This dissertation argues that nineteenth-century American writers used literature to teach their readers to understand how economic forms and forms of economic activity fundamentally shape and train the sensorium to sense in historically and contextually specific ways. In “American Imperception,” I show how literature can make legible otherwise insensible forms of social and economic relations. The impossibility of sensing social and economic form—and the way in which that impossibility is rendered through literature—is what I call in this project “imperception.” Imperception describes the way in which literary form makes intelligible the structures of social, political, and economic life: structures that themselves cannot be sensed directly and which therefore cannot be directly represented by literature. “American Imperception” is focused on how literature interacts with social life within a capitalist modernity defined by the value form and the commodity form, and how literature formalizes the structures of social life through a specifically literary logic, transforming them into something that can be read where they cannot be seen, heard, felt, or represented. This dissertation draws on Karl Marx’s thinking on the senses and the suprasensible to consider how U.S. writers of the nineteenth-century mobilized literary form to make thinkable forms of sociality that cannot be contained by the imperceptible nature of sociality under capital. As I show in this dissertation, the political economy of social life determines what can be sensed, just as what can be sensed marks the horizon of political and social possibility. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

<p> The difficulties to assimilate within any country when one&rsquo;s parents are from another country has its own set of obstacles, especially within second-generation U.S. born Central Americans, or Mexicans. Second-generation children are constantly situated within positions to assimilate into U.S. culture, presented with stereotypical images of Latin-American figures like the Cholo, Spitfire or the unwanted illegal immigrant, have familial expectations to be a part of the &ldquo;American Dream,&rdquo; but still keep true to their ancestral roots. The struggle to completely assimilate into U.S. American society without losing one's cultural identity is a strong influence for the works of poets and book artists, and is reflected within the artist&rsquo;s own internal conflicts in struggling to unite their cultural heredity with their new U.S. American culture. This paper will explore the work of LatinAmerican, U.S.-born book artists and poets and argue how their artwork has been impacted by their struggles to merge their cultural heritage and their present culture. This paper will also examine and highlight how social conflicts within both cultures augment further struggles within the formation of identity.</p>

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Stories from Klamath Country is a encounter with contemporary Klamath/Modoc oral literature from south central Oregon. Part ethno-poetics, part folklore, part literary criticism, and part narrative essay, the text presents an encounter with the enduring yet dynamic range of traditional and contemporary Klamath stories. Chapters focus on the issues of the transcription of an oral literature, performance, the connections between traditional and modern storytelling, ethnographic encounters and cross-cultural reading. Old and new stories are presented in this text, framed by an attention to the dynamics of assembling this larger story. Central as well to the discussion is the relationship between storytelling, landscape and identity.

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