While literary critics have explored the politics of labor in pre-war modernist literature, the post-45 avant-garde has continued to be framed as a depoliticized repetition of previous avant-garde styles. Examining American avant-garde literature in its relation to the political and economic shifts from the 1960s through the late 1980s, my dissertation corrects this narrative to show that labor and labor politics were central categories in post-war experimental poetry and fiction. I argue that writers as disparate as Charles Olson, William S. Burroughs, Samuel R. Delany, and Susan Howe reworked disjunctive modernist forms to cognitively map emergent economic tendencies in the US. Parataxis, collage, surrealist imagery, aleatory compositional methods, non-linear plotting, and metafictional narrative conceits all constitute the stylistic techniques of an avant-garde engaged in an extended dialogue about work and the politics of work. The canon of experimental literature functioned as a counter-discourse that contested and reshaped discourses of labor by considering it alongside categories of race, gender, and sexuality. By using labor as an entry point into the avant-garde, my dissertation reconsiders the post-war literary canon, revealing an avant-garde that includes writers working across modes and genres. The adaptation of experimental techniques in genre writing turned the avant-garde into a popular literary mode. My dissertation particularly focuses on science fiction (SF), where the adaptation of experimental style played a crucial role in the development of the genre. Beginning with the 1960s British and American New Wave movement, SF writers turned to the experimental novel--often by way of modernist poetics--as a way to challenge the reified form of mainstream science fiction novels. I argue that this critique of the novel also functioned as a covert critique of the labor practices of the literary market place that guided the production of genre fiction. In this way, I contest traditional accounts that see post-war and contemporary experimental literature as increasingly marginal and self-reflective by tracking the avant-garde's concern with depicting quotidian work, and representing themselves as workers, to critique institutions of intellectual and artistic production.

<p> This dissertation argues for a greater recognition of the impact &ldquo;the animal turn&rdquo; has had on literary studies. The study analyzes a group of influential North American writers critically engaged with fascist formulations of bodily expendability and the entanglement of violence that crosses species boundaries. Narrative accounts of human genocide and nonhuman animal slaughter are key sites of the intersectionality of oppression in theoretical formulations by scholars of Critical Animal Studies. Such narratives offer the opportunity to explore the possibility of homology while acknowledging the limits of any analogy. Literature of &ldquo;the animal turn&rdquo; explores the entanglements of subjectivation across humanist and speciesist divides, one that determines in advance if it is permissible to systematically exploit and kill nonhuman animals with impunity. Emphatic in the different experiences of oppression, the narratives analyzed nonetheless identify and critique this speciesist discourse resulting in a tension that acknowledges a shared complicity in discursive violence while calling out for a new response to the question of the animal. This new response, I argue, requires a merger of the humanities and sciences: what I call a new <i>Humanimalities</i>. </p><p> Close readings of Gregory Maguire&rsquo;s <i>The Wicked Years</i>, Octavia E. Butler&rsquo;s <i>Xenogenesis</i>, Margaret Atwood&rsquo;s <i> MaddAddam</i> trilogy, Randall Kenan&rsquo;s A <i>Visitation of Spirits</i>, Leslie Marmon Silko&rsquo;s <i>Ceremony</i>, Art Spiegelman&rsquo;s <i>Maus</i>, and Yann Martel&rsquo;s <i> Beatrice and Virgil</i> draw out implicit and explicit critiques of what Jacques Derrida characterized as the &ldquo;sacrificial structure&rdquo; of the Western subject. By highlighting literature&rsquo;s critical engagement with the discourse of species, this dissertation explores the complicated navigations of selected narratives as they attempt to resist calculations of expendability without resorting to what one critic has characterized as an, &ldquo;egalitarian pluralism of life forms and lifeways." Each narrative struggles with a utopian impulse of the total liberation for which Critical Animal Studies calls, an acknowledgement of the different experiences of non-human animal hierarchies, and an acknowledgement of their own narrative&rsquo;s complicity in animal genocide.</p><p>

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The use of the blues as a critical theory and as a literary model for the crafting of fiction opens new possibilities for both intellectual and artistic exploration. Reflecting the power of human agency amidst antagonism, the blues is the music of personal triumph over the brutality of circumstances despite any change in condition. The music's emphasis on improvisation reveals human agency because through instrumentation, singing, stylistic nuances, audience participation and/or venue individuals transform perceived or imagined woefulness into hopefulness. Studying the blues and its cultural legacy is significant in identifying the mechanisms by which individuals and ultimately entire communities sustain themselves. The literature that uses the blues as an aesthetic guide demonstrates variety of experience, human agency, and an individual crafting of identity in relation to group identity.;Albert Murray's Scooter series, Train Whistle Guitar (1974), The Spyglass Tree (1991) and The Seven League Boots (1995), lends insight into the ways in which the blues contributes to the writing of fiction. Initially set in the 1920s and 30s Jim Crow U.S. South, the series follows Scooter through maturity into the 1960s. Scooter is reared in the blues tradition; its history is his life. Music abounds, living conditions are harsh but his community exudes vitality that parallels the music. The blues is intrinsically linked with heroic activity because it demonstrates the ways in which personal agency transforms actual or perceived limitations.;In Murray's blues-based series, a modeling of jazz is the logical outcome of Scooter's characterization because jazz resonates with ingenuity and variety while being rooted in African American culture. This study analyzes Scooter's maturity as it parallels the development of the blues through the country blues (Train Whistle Guitar), classic blues to jazz during Scooter's college years (The Spyglass Tree), and the smoothness of style consistent with swing-style jazz during Scooter's mature adulthood (The Seven League Boots). Scooter's characterization will be considered in conjunction with Thomas Malory's, Arthur in Le Morte D'Arthur (1485); Ralph Ellison's protagonist in Invisible Man (1952); and Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas in Native Son (1940).

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