This dissertation is a comparative examination of how certain works by Ernest Hemingway and Richard Wright jointly address themes concerning manhood, violence, and alienation. The dissertation considers how each American writer's treatment of common themes is effected by race and the social climates they come out of: the American Midwest during and after the World War I era and the American South after The Great Depression. An important dimension of this study is how each man traveled to identical geographical settings-Spain, Africa, and France and responded to globally significant events taking place there such as The Spanish Civil War and independence coming to Anglo-Africa after World War II. The shared subject here is the affects of modernity on traditional culture. Their debut collection of short stories in the mid 20's to late 30's on through to their nonfiction journals on Anglo-Africa in the early 1950's shows a developing struggle, in each writer, with detached individualism and offering political analysis and commentary.

This dissertation enters the conversation about what experimentalism has to do with poets of color while paying particular attention to the ways in which three women writing now—Myung Mi Kim, Claudia Rankine, and Marlene Nourbese Philip (the latter poet publishes under the name “M. Nourbese Philip)—deal with the complicated matter of contemporary selfhood. In all of their works, one of the central questions of poetic inquiry, “Who is speaking?” turns out to be a rather inappropriate question that forces traditional readings on these non-traditional texts, thus producing meanings that have more to do with poetic convention than the texts at hand. Instead, this project approaches these writers' texts asking, what kind of reading do these texts invite, as well as resist? Indeed, what kind of contemporary poetics do they create? This dissertation looks at how contemporary experimental poetry of racial mourning locates its grief not in racial experience itself, but in what produces identity-based experience in the first place. It contends that racial identity creates melancholia precisely because it is, paradoxically, a social construction that feels natural to us. Poets Kim, Philip, and Rankine use formal and linguistic innovation—including fragmentation, stammers, brackets, blank spaces, made-up words, lists, and pictograms—to re-imagine identity as inauthentic and unstable, while acknowledging the desire for a sense of one's self that's more whole, more sayable, more recognizable. This dissertation contextualizes their experimental work by charting a kinship between them, early elegiac poetries of racial mourning, and other contemporary poetry from Frederick Douglass to Major Jackson.

This dissertation articulates the ways in which space and place permeates grand national narratives as well as everyday events of "American" life, and captures how they are represented in literary texts. I am committed to exploring, through the lens of the cultural geography, the workings of representation in the "production of space" as simultaneously real, symbolic, and imaginary. Embedding my study in critical perspectives provided by New Americanist, postcolonial, and transnational studies, I aim at mediating simultaneously abstract and material lineaments of our social emplacement, and putting in historical contexts the material geography of the United States (and beyond) and its literary representation. Chapter I traces the main issues in current writing on space and attempts to produce a nuanced account of the instrumentality of space as a register of not only built forms but also of embedded ideologies. Chapter II addresses a more pluralistic notion of "southerness" envisioned in William Faulkner's Light in August by reading him as a different kind of "regionalist" who crosses regional and national boundaries while seemingly staying within his own fictional counties. Chapter III delves into what it means for displaced people to reclaim a secured placed called "home" in Toni Morrison's Paradise, and examines how the geography of exclusion is re-worked through a postethnic vision. Chapter IV scrutinizes how transnational migration and the flow of capital, labor, and cultures give American suburbs new faces and bring about tensions, opening up a national context to transnational frames of reference---"Third Worldization" of American suburbs in David Palumbo-Liu's words. My dissertation seeks to add to and extend the field of study because its focus on the spatial and representation shifts the axis of analysis, taking literature into new arenas not yet fully cognizant of its spatial critiques. In order to overcome both empty geography that requires only minimal material grounding and thus resists being represented as "place," and pure textuality impervious to cultural content, there should be, I would contend, a continuing special interest in understanding the ways that questions of difference are spatialized in new ways to map "American" sites of place formation.

Beginning in the early nineteenth century, American jurisprudence grappled with the issue of marital property. States under the Anglo-American legal tradition of common law revised marital property allocations to allow wives to hold certain categories of property separate from their husbands. These changes were enacted, in part, to insulate a wife’s property from the vagaries of the market but the judicial response reveals a larger narrative of ambivalence and anxiety about women, property, and the suggested mobility of separately held possessions. Marital property reform begins in an historical moment when the question of what a woman could own in marriage morphed into larger cultural anxieties such as the very meaning of ownership and “things” themselves in the face of new intangible properties. Writers of fiction also captured these anxieties, and created imagined scenarios of marriage and property to expose constructions of ownership, property, womanhood, and marriage. Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening attempts her withdrawal from her marriage by dismantling the Pontellier home and removing what she believes she owns to a separate physical space. The tragedy of her story can be understood for its legal impossibility under common law, as well as the restricted meanings of marriage and separate property under Louisiana’s civil law jurisdiction. At the end of Edith Wharton’s Summer, Charity Royall chooses to secretly reclaim a brooch that was a gift from her lover. Her action suggests a desire for privacy and could be viewed as fraudulent to her marriage vows. Pauline Hopkins’s character Hagar in Hagar’s Daughter repossesses material spaces which she was forbidden to own and control because of her race and gender, and uses the American justice system to support her claims to ownership and contractual rights. In contrast to Hopkins’s tenuous but nonetheless optimistic portrayal of contract, Marìa Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s novel Who Would Have Thought It? describes contract and the American legal system overall as empty promises. Marriage and property in Ruiz de Burton’s novel work as tropes through which to critique nineteenth-century American society and the destructive force of capitalism within its most intimate spaces.

This dissertation examines the four novels published to date by Milton Hatoum, a contemporary Lebanese-Brazilian author from the Amazon region. There are a great number of critical readings of his work that foreground the postmodern dissolution and fragmentation of the self, of human relationships, and also of national identity. In contrast to such approaches, I propose what I call a reading of hope. I argue that Hatoum is at the forefront of a shift in sensibility in Brazilian literature, one that simultaneously demonstrates certain aspects of postmodernism, but also breaks with other elements of it. In order to illustrate this issue, I analyze how Hatoum’s characters forge personal identities, utilizing the mythological symbol of the uroboro (the snake that bites its own tail) as the organizing structure of my analysis. The uroboro has historically been used to represent circularity in the cycles of nature, communal and personal renewal, the return to origins, and self-reflection. In addition to circularity, the symbol has also been visually depicted as half black and half white, creating a duality that stresses interdependence rather than binary logic. With the above characteristics of circularity and duality in mind, the postmodern aspect that I analyze in Hatoum’s work is its break with binary logic. First, I identify a variety of dualities extant in the novels, from language and silence to myth and reality, that instead of canceling each other out complement one another and emphasize identity’s inherent ambiguity. Next, I analyze the rupture with postmodernism, which comes with Hatoum’s characters’ perpetual search for a more meaningful relationship with others, the environment, and themselves. As a consequence, the postmodern rootless and unstable characters give way to individuals that express more humane concerns (the recovery of the past as a value, self-reflection, and the search for familial bonds as well as for a connection with beauty and aesthetic pleasure through the arts). The symbol of the uroboro thus provides a graphic means of metaphorically representing not only the characters’ identity as ambiguous and self-reflective, but also Hatoum’s novels as simultaneously working within and breaking with postmodernism.

This dissertation elaborates an American pragmatist aesthetic tradition that anticipates recent "turns" in cultural studies to aesthetics and affect. Although a commitment to the nondiscursive ends of art is most explicitly voiced by pragmatist philosophers, I emphasize fiction writers who likewise argue that what most matters in art is our immediately felt, inarticulate experience of an artwork rather than anything we can say about it. These writers celebrated the nondiscursive character of aesthetic experience as a critique of an emerging culture of professionalism that, they felt, reduced aesthetic experience to linguistic meaning and thereby consolidated the authority of the professional middle class over rural, poor, and immigrant Americans. While these writers were critics of the culture of professionalism, they were also its products and participants, and they registered their dual commitments in images of bifurcated consciousness, most famous of which is W.E.B. Du Bois's concept of a racial "double-consciousness" endemic to the African American. Here double consciousness serves as a metaphor for the tension between professional discourse and nondiscursive aesthetic experience. Each chapter explores a different valence of this metaphor, illustrating it through analysis of a fictional work. The protagonists in these works are encountered at crises in their professional careers, and their dual commitments to discourse and nondiscourse are dramatized in their encounters with artworks. Chapter 1 argues that a dual commitment to the analytic and the vague in William James's The Principles of Psychology and Henry James's "The Figure in the Carpet" reflects these brothers' ambivalence toward a late-nineteenth-century aestheticism that insisted on art's "uselessness." Chapter 2 demonstrates that Harold Frederic's The Damnation of Theron Ware negotiates a double consciousness prompted by the nineteenth-century "warfare" between science and theology. Chapter 3 examines the role that a racialized difference between "white" words and "black" music assumed during the Jim Crow era, as demonstrated in James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man. Chapter 4 demonstrates that Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark mitigates a tension between art's functions as escapism and as propaganda by sketching a model of American cultural nationalism rooted in "primitive" nondiscursivity.

In SALVATION PHILOSOPHY FOR TODAY, Melinda Wilson explores questions and grievances regarding feminism, everyday sexism, motherhood, fertility, marriage, love and domesticity. The poems approach and unearth our darkest appetites in brazen verse reminiscent of Confessional poets such as Anne Sexton. If we are fated to die, daily life can appear futile. How best then can we meet each day? In an interminable battle with nihility, Wilson's poems labor to see the quotidian with a sense of wonder. At times, with the quietude of poets like James Wright, Elizabeth Bishop, Mark Doty and Mark Wunderlich, these poems rely on natural imagery and landscape. Animals, in particular, offer these speakers meaningful connection to the earth in moments when despondency appears insurmountable. In an attempt to reconcile the brutality of this world with its beauty, the poems mine the imagination for shelter. / A Dissertation submitted to Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2015. / March 16, 2015. / creative writing, philosophy, poetry / Includes bibliographical references. / Erin Belieu, Professor Directing Dissertation; Adam Jolles, University Representative; Andrew Epstein, Committee Member; James Kimbrell, Committee Member; Martin Kavka, Committee Member.

This dissertation is a multiethnic exploration of the ways in which contending realisms in the 1930s and 40s attempted to remake "America" within the terrain of popular culture. Unlike in the late 19th century, when American realism was largely intended as a competing mode of representation with an emergent mass culture, the realist-inspired work of the 1930s and 40s I investigate---much of it affiliated with the Popular Front social movement---was produced by individuals who had grown up in a world in which there was virtually no space untouched by the culture industries. Thus I explore what their conscious stance toward mass culture, their authorial position in relation to the culture industries, and their at times unconscious incorporation of mass cultural forms into their realism tell us about the subjectivities they created. Central to this investigation is the relationship between these mass cultural realisms and emergent, official notions of American pluralism, notions embodied domestically in the phrase "We're the People" uttered by Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath. Many (but not all) of the cultural workers I cover worked within and against this idea of pluralism, intertwining class, race, and gender to create hybrid subjectivities not generally associated with American culture before the Second World War. Each chapter investigates these dynamics within very disparate instances of midcentury popular culture---in the contending, southern bestsellers of Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Mitchell, in the Hollywood-inspired boxing narratives of Nelson Algren and Clifford Odets, in the struggles of Carlos Bulosan and H. T. Tsiang within an orientalist literary market: and, finally, in the co-optation of Margaret Bourke-White's documentary methods by LIFE magazine. These fusions of realism and mass culture are important to understanding the re-definition of American pluralism at mid-century, as the tradition of American realism carried with it certain epistemologies of what should and should not be visible, and the mass culture of the era diffused that realist-based epistemology to an unprecedented degree, converting it, albeit temporarily, into a "common sense." I argue, ultimately, that the tradition of American realism both enabled and constrained a more inclusive notion of "the people."

El tema de esta disertación, La poética del bolero en Cuba y Puerto Rico, es el resultado de nuestro interés por contestarnos algunas preguntas que por muchos años quisimos responder, aunque sus respuestas parecían evidentes para los estudios formales de la literatura cubana y la puertorriqueña. La pregunta generalizada era: ¿cuáles son los lazos culturales que unen las historias de Cuba y Puerto Rico? Las respuestas parecían encontrarse en la literatura y en la música. Es por esto que esta disertación resultó ser de carácter interdisciplinario al proponernos estudiar el género del “bolero” como fenómeno cultural poético-musical. El bolero resultó la excusa para asomarnos tanto a la historia de la literatura y la música cubana como puertorriqueña en busca de sus orígenes y desarrollo y con la intención de observar si de verdad exiten esos lazos culturales y cuáles son. Es por esto que el capítulo II pretende hacer un estudio minucioso sobre el Romanticismo en ambas islas. En éste establecemos cuáles son las poetas y músicos fundacionales en ambas naciones, sus estilos y sus propósitos. Sin pretender entrar en comparaciones vamos descubriendo los puntos de contacto que comienzan a enlazar culturalmente a ambas islas en los que el interés por definir “la nación” es el temas principal. La lucha por la definición, reafirmación y liberación nacional fue el motivo que generó muchos encuentros poéticos y musicales durante el siglo XIX. En el capítulo III repetimos la metodología del primero para estudiar el origen, desarrollo y culminación del movimiento Modernista en ambas naciones. Es en éste en el que desarrollamos el tema del bolero con más detalle porque es justo en este período de la historicidad de ambas naciones cuando el bolero alcanza su madurez. Con el objetivo de delinear los rasgos románticos o modernistas del bolero examinamos las letras de los boleros de los compositores más significativos, siguiendo el orden cronológico-historicista que la metodología de la investigación supone. El capítulo IV está dedicado a la aportación de las mujeres cubanas y puertorriqueñas tanto en el quehacer poético como musical-bolerístico. La mirada filosófica de este estudio intenta acercarse a los postulados que Gilles Deleuze asume en algunos de sus textos.

This dissertation examines a series of conceptions shared by the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan and two key, first-generation members of the American pragmatist school of philosophy, Charles Sanders Peirce and George Herbert Mead. In one sense, this undertaking responds to the recent international interest in uncovering affinities between pragmatism and continental postmodern thought, but in a more polemical vein, the dissertation inveighs against the work of neopragmatists who configure “pragmatism” as a nominalist-oriented, anti-theoretical system of thought. By emphasizing pragmatist formulations of two often-overlooked members of the pragmatist school, Pragmatism and the Unconscious attempts to restore a stridently abstract, unapologetically theoretical, and indeed pragmatist cast of mind to its proper place. Lacan's writings and seminars have gained notoriety as a form of obscurantism, but in linking Lacanian theory to pragmatism, the dissertation does not merely attempt an improbable synthesis of opposites. Rather, the premise here is that Lacanian theory is the natural partner of pragmatist philosophy, and for very concrete reasons. One of these is that Lacan's central thesis, that “the unconscious is structured like a language,” emerged in part out of Lacan's engagement with the founding texts of pragmatism, the semiotic theories of C. S. Peirce; another is that the social psychology of George Herbert Mead provides perhaps the closest analogue to Lacan's treatment of intersubjectivity we may find in the twentieth century. Pragmatism and the Lacanian unconscious are thus already linked both in terms of textual transmission and conceptual affinity; Pragmatism and the Unconscious merely attempts to reveal these linkages in their philosophical richness. American narrative plays an explicative role in the dissertation. Whereas Chapter One stages a meeting between Peirce and Lacan, Chapter Two locates the shared concerns of these thinkers within the status of women in Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction. While Chapter Three focuses on George Herbert Mead's ideas concerning identity as an effect and process of social collaboration as well as Lacan's approximations of such notions, Chapter Four locates these problems as a fundamental issue for Nella Larsen's treatment of African-American subjectivity in her novels Passing and Quicksand .* *Originally published in DAI Vol. 62, No. 4. Republished here with corrected abstract.