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Rituals of Diagnosis argues that nineteenth-century America’s literary representations of madness and its diagnosis respond to interdisciplinary efforts at cultivating a national psychology. Uniting theological and philosophical traditions with medical speculation, mental health reformers from Benjamin Rush to Dorothea Dix linked the expansion of democracy with new vulnerabilities for madness. Theories about insanity thus hypothesized relationships between freedom and responsibility. I examine how America’s first psychological fictions contributed to this rich field of discussion. Taking up novels by Charles Brockden Brown, Robert Montgomery Bird, and Oliver Wendell Holmes that pivot around the investigation of madness, I examine how literary works from the Revolutionary Era to the Civil War dramatize interpretive processes that classify transgressive behavior. I argue that the grotesque subjects at the center of these investigations—Anglo-Americans who are likened to demons, animals, and “savage” racial others—indicate the provisionality of the period’s theories of mental illness and register anxieties about affiliation and responsibility that accompanied their development. This inquiry contributes to contemporary conversations about authority, desire, and the role of violence in the American imaginary, and argues that scientific speculation and literary experimentation collaborated in constructing this imaginary. While many have acknowledged that discourses of mental health participated in codifying social and political norms, I draw explicit attention to literary form as a site for examining the motivations that fuel these discourses by showing how their narrative trajectories put medical knowledge into conversation with sentimental ideologies. Examining how these novels conjoin problems of interpretive confusion with affective confusion, I explore how these mysteries destabilize the disembodied rationality central to the perch of objectivity that sustained white supremacist interrogations of racial and gendered others. The struggle to situate the locus of social unrest into psychological and ethnic others betrays an archive of fears and fantasies contained by diagnostic procedures. / text

abstract: Anchored to the Mexican-American and U.S. Latino historical experience, this dissertation examines how a Latino and Chicano Canibalia manifests itself in literary and cultural production across the different literary periods of the Southwest and the United States as formulated by Luis Leal and Ilan Stavans: Colonization: 1537-1810, Annexations: 1811-1898, Acculturation: 1898-1945, Upheaval: 1946-1979, and the fifth period, Into the Mainstream: 1980-Present. Theoretically, the study is primarily based on the work Canibalia: canibalismo, calibanismo, antropofagia cultural y consumo en América Latina (2005) by Carlos Jauregui. This Canibalia claims that the symbol Caliban, a character taken from the drama The Tempest (1611) by William Shakespeare and interpreted in Calibán (1971) by Roberto Fernández Retamar, is an indispensable reference that, today, links the discourse on Colonial Studies in Latin America and, for us, also in the Mexican-American Southwest. To particularize Jáuregui’s critical perspective, we draw from the work The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History (1990) by José David Saldívar, whose call for a School of Caliban not only brings together all subaltern subject positions but marks the value of the “schooling” such an institution will provide. For Saldívar, Chicano and U.S. Latino scholarship needs to be incorporated into Caliban Studies due to a shared anti-imperial resistance. We also rely on the theoretical work Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (2000) by Walter Mignolo, which links colonial difference to border thinking and examines contemporary dialogues on Orientalism, Occidentalism, and post-Occidentalism with regards to Latin American, Chicano, and U.S. Latino cultures. Our study interprets such works as I Am Joaquín (1967) by Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, the performances of Guillermo Gómez-Peña, the novels Peregrinos de Aztlán (1974) by Miguel Méndez and Entre la sed y el desierto (2004) by Óscar L. Cordero, US Latino films like Balseros (2002) and Which Way Home (2009), the Mexican film Acorazado (2010), and Chicano and US Latino poetry that features the literary symbol examined under our critical approach; in turn, we have learned that the Chicano and Latino Canibalia is a collection of cannibal discourses which have as an objective stereotyping civilians of Mexican and Latin American descent in the United States. Our critical discourse provides an understanding of today’s complex cultural ties between all countries. A Chicano and Latino Canibalia serves as a bridge of understanding regarding the discursive silences in the history of the United States and Latin America as well as the world. [TEXT IN SPANISH.] ABSTRACTO Anclada a la experiencia histórica mexicoamericana y eulatina, esta disertación examina cómo se manifiesta la Canibalia chicana y eulatina en su producción literaria y cultural de las distintas épocas del Sudoeste como diseñadas por Luis Leal y Ilan Stavans: la Colonización: 1537-1810, las Anexiones: 1811-1898, las Aculturaciones: 1898-1945, la Turbulencia: 1946-1979 y el quinto periodo, Hacia la corriente cultural dominante: 1980-Presente. Se fundamenta en la obra teórica Canibalia: canibalismo, calibanismo, antropofagia cultural y consumo en América Latina (2005) de Carlos Jáuregui. Esta Canibalia afirma que el personaje simbólico Caliban, tomado de la obra The Tempest (1611) de William Shakespeare e interpretado en el ensayo Calibán (1971) de Roberto Fernández Retamar, es un referente indispensable que hoy en día conecta los horizontes de los estudios de la colonialidad en América Latina y, para nosotros, en el Sudoeste de los Estados Unidos. Para profundizar la perspectiva crítica de Jáuregui, se acude el trabajo The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History (1990) de José David Saldívar, cuyo llamado por una School of Caliban reúne no sólo las posiciones de los sujetos subalternos, sino que nos acerca a entender la schooling o escolarización sobre lo que significa su resistencia. Para Saldívar, la lucha chicana y eulatina se incorpora a los estudios calibánicos de resistencia anti-imperial. También, nos apoyamos en el trabajo Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (2000) de Walter Mignolo, el cual liga la diferencia colonial con el pensamiento fronterizo y explica los diálogos contemporáneos alrededor del orientalismo, el occidentalismo y el post-occidentalismo con respecto a las culturas latinoamericana, chicana y eulatina. Nuestro estudio se ha enfocado en los trabajos Yo soy Joaquín (1967) de Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, las performances de Guillermo Gómez-Peña, las novelas Peregrinos de Aztlán (1974) de Miguel Méndez y Entre la sed y el desierto de Óscar L. Cordero, filmes eulatinos como Balseros (2002) and Which Way Home (2009), la película mexicana Acorazado (2010) y la producción de la poesía chicana y eulatina con el símbolo examinado bajo dicho enfoque crítico; como resultado, hemos aprendido que la Canibalia chicana y eulatina es un conjunto de discursos caníbales los cuales tienen por objetivo estereotipar a los ciudadanos estadounidenses de origen mexicano y latinoamericano en los Estados Unidos. Se trata de una nueva forma de entender los complicados lazos culturales que unen a los países de hoy en día. La Canibalia chicana y eulatina es el puente que conduce al entendimiento de los vacíos discursivos de la historia de los Estados Unidos y América Latina así como el mundo. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Spanish 2015

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 1998. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 246-258).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Riverside, 2009. / Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references. Issued in print and online. Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2008. / Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 332-354).

My dissertation examines four Black speculative novels from the turn of the twentieth century, published between 1892-1904. Texts from this tradition tend to be grouped under an umbrella of “proto-Afrofuturism” or “proto-science fiction” and considered as early, surprising instances of a speculative mode that would only fully emerge several decades later. This categorization, while accurate in some respects, flattens out the diversity of the Black speculative imagination at the turn of the century. Therefore, I prioritize demonstrating the uniqueness of each author’s vision. At the same time, I argue that these texts share a fundamental similarity in their approach: they anticipate Arthur Schomburg’s famous injunction that the “Negro must remake his past in order to make his future.” They use the affordances of the speculative mode to experiment with a shared Black history and explore the possibilities and limitations of that history for a viable and desirable Black future. The authors that I examine challenge the conclusions of racial science that were used to justify a racially stratified society. In doing so, these authors speculate about the imminent future of Black Americans. But even though the perspective of these texts is the imminent future, their central preoccupation is actually Black history. Each of these texts experiment with a different possible shared history with which Black Americans can anchor a collective political identity. This approach is in distinct contrast to the typical approach of turn of the century utopian texts. If we can say axiomatically that white utopian texts, though they often extrapolate and project a distant future, actually function to estrange the present moment; then we can say, in contrast, that Black utopian texts from this era, although they are concerned about an imminent future, more fundamentally estrange the past. / English

This dissertation relates the lessons of historical materialism to literary production in nineteenth-century America. In an attempt to refocus discussion of social class in this time period, I argue an emphasis on labor is essential to assess the political and economic understanding of authors writing during the reorganization of laboring life of the Market Revolution. I examine American authors from Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln to Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Frederick Douglass whose interests in the aesthetics and politics of labor underlie the foundations of our understanding of class in nineteenth-century American literature.

This thesis explores the nature and function of language as it is used in twentieth-century fantastic fiction, as represented by the work of C. S. Lewis and Ursula K. Le Guin. In it I argue that the anti-mimetic impulse behind the language of fantasy makes it a polemical, contentious mode, which situates itself against discourses (religious and scientific) that assume the existence of a reality to which language may be said to correspond in certain clearly understood, conventional ways. Both Lewis and Le Guin suggest, by contrast, that experiential reality is an arbitrary and shifting construct, although each writer has a very different attitude towards the category of the ‘real’ and the question of how it may best be articulated. Despite the fact that Lewis uses the language of authority and Le Guin the language of liberation, they both interrogate fundamental ethical, social, political and theological evaluative assumptions embedded in language, disrupting the rigidity that conventional usage confers upon words and the concomitant human tendency to submit unquestioningly to cultural conventions. Lewis challenges the modern, secular, materialist understanding of reality, contending that metaphor has the power to undermine post-secular fixed notions and reveal new semantic fields pertaining to what he understands as the ‘spiritual’. Le Guin celebrates human and non-human embodied existence, with its possibilities and limitations, refuting any transcendent reality. The thesis is divided into two parts. Part One deals with the ‘reactionary’ school of fantasy represented by Lewis. My contention is that Lewis’s Narnian Chronicles dramatise Owen Barfield’s theory of the concomitant evolution of human consciousness and language in relation to the phenomenal world. The three chapters in this part demonstrate that in the Narnia books Lewis represents initial forms of mythical, ‘participatory’ consciousness (as Barfield calls it) – that is, a world in which no linguistic or imaginative distinction is made between the human, animal, material and spiritual dimensions; followed by the loss of participation and the consequent alienation of human beings both from immaterial things and the environment; and concluding with the renewal of participation through a new use of language. Part Two is concerned with Le Guin’s sequence of fantasy novels about the imaginary world of Earthsea. Following Darko Suvin, I divide the sequence into two trilogies, which embody two contrasting responses to the conservative fantasy represented by the Narnia books. For me, the difference between these responses can best be understood through a close examination of Le Guin’s changing attitude to language in the First and Second Trilogies, which I undertake in four chapters. The first chapter explores Le Guin’s initial collusion with Lewis’s patriarchal politics, a collusion signalled by the rigid linguistic conventions and unchanging cultural practices of her imaginary world. The three final chapters deal with the Second Earthsea Trilogy, with particular emphasis on the last two books, since these have so far received little critical attention. In these books she deconstructs the earlier premises of her created world by finding new ways in which to represent the voices that had been excluded or marginalised in her previous trilogy, as well as in the work of her predecessors in fantasy. The thesis as a whole represents an effort to reassess the political implications of linguistic choices, and of attitudes to language, in twentieth-century fantastic fiction.

This dissertation examines narratives of passing of the nineteenth- and twentieth century fins de siècle. My central thesis is that passing narratives of the 1990s and beyond evidence symmetry between the tropes of passing that occur at plot level and passing strategies surrounding the production of the texts themselves. I argue that the connections between passing and authorship that emerge in contemporary stories invite us to reconsider extant interpretations of earlier passing stories, specifically those published at the turn of the twentieth century. The Introduction challenges the historiography of the passing narrative traced in existing studies of passing. It also suggests the ways in which authorship and passing are inextricably linked via the arbitrary standard of "authenticity," both authorial and racial. In Chapter One, I examine the relationship between the African American body-as-text and the African American author who produces a text in The Bondwoman's Narrative (date unknown), Philip Roth's The Human Stain (2000) and Percival Everett's Erasure (2001). Chapter Two takes the self-reflexive detective genre and traces the changing roles of the passing character within the conventions of the form, from femme fatale to hard-boiled detective. Here, I focus specifically on Pauline Hopkins's Hagar's Daughter (1901-1902), Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress (1990) and Robert Skinner's Wesley Farrell series (1997-2002). In Chapter Three, I examine texts whose protagonists' gender and/or racial ambiguity serve to destabilise analogously the religious categories under interrogation in those texts, namely Hopkins's Winona (1902) and Louise Erdrich's Tracks (1988) and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001). Chapter Four examines tropes of passing in relation to three contemporary novels of adolescence, Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle (1996), Danzy Senna's Caucasia (1998) and Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex (2002). Finally, the Conclusion discusses recent controversies of authorship and authenticity in the U.S., particularly as these pertain to the ambiguous literary category of "memoir."