<p> This dissertation consists of a critical essay and a collection of short fiction. The essay discusses how testing the structures of authority is a central component in the signature novels of Jack Kerouac and John Barth. This is visible in both narrative structure and content. As the road becomes the embodiment of Kerouac&rsquo;s rebellion against a social order that ultimately leads to a disintegration of the family, stories that highlight their own artificiality become Barth&rsquo;s protest against a literature exhausted by its realist devices. In content (Kerouac) and in form (Barth), both authors seek redemption&mdash;a new purpose. But behind every failure stands the figure of the Father/Author. Several themes unite the five stories that form the collection, the most prominent being the male protagonist&rsquo;s struggle for purpose in a chaotic, hostile, and grotesque world to which he feels no connection. The stories use dark humor and, at times, fantasy against a realistic background to capture a feeling more than a type of character: a sense of lostness, of wandering without direction in a world where the road is the purpose and running away or being silent is a way of being. </p><p> The collection is tied together and framed by a series of email conversations between a fictional character and the fictional construct of the author, Seth Johnson. Seth is nearing the end of his last semester in an English graduate program and will be returning to work in South Texas, and his old logging buddy, Don Bush, is eager for his friend to join him once again on the oil rigs.</p><p>

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, some of the most forceful accounts of modernity have located the traumatic shocks of war, urbanization, and technological change at the heart of modern experience and modernist literature. SURPRISE ENCOUNTERS argues that a dominant framework of shock and rupture has obscured a nineteenth-century conception of surprise, which transformed models of mind and narrative on both sides of the Atlantic. I draw on Ralph Waldo Emerson's formulation of life as "a series of surprises" to distinguish a paradigm of surprise from Walter Benjamin's influential definition of modernity as a "series of shocks and collisions." For Emerson, the fact that we live in an uncertain universe of chance requires moment-by-moment exposure to contingency. The challenge, as he framed it, was to invent new forms of living and writing that allow the unexpected to amplify rather than deaden receptivity, to enrich rather than impoverish experience. "Surprise," one of Emerson's "lords of life," guided such American writers as Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen, but also Benjamin's shock poets par excellence--Baudelaire and Proust. Each translates Emerson's central question--How do I live so that every moment is new?--into compositional terms, to ask: How do I write so that every sentence is new? Their widely various responses to the Emersonian call hinge on unexpected syntactical and scenic turns that reorient attention and restructure narrative form. My chapters locate surprise in Proust's and Baudelaire's techniques for collapsing timelessness with the ephemeral (modernist methods I trace back to Emerson's "method of nature"); in the lacunae that lodge between past and future tenses in James's scenes of recognition; in Stein's cultivation of fresh grammars of attention; and in Larsen's challenge to Anglo-American master plots that deadeningly dovetail with the deterministic logic of race and reproduction. Each writer's dedication to renewal--temporal, psychic, grammatical, narrative--reframes the present as an open site of experiential and experimental possibility. Beyond representing surprise, the writers of this study are dedicated to training new habits of attention to the unpredictable events that punctuate daily life. In this endeavor, they join psychologists William James and Silvan Tomkins in theorizing surprise as a sudden event that both arrests and spurs processes of feeling and thinking. The literary subject of each chapter is a theorist of emotion and modern experience who exercises a capacity to express as well as enact the aesthetic and psychic dimensions of surprise.

At its broadest conceptual level, "Simultaneous Diversity: Discontinuity, Entanglement, and contemporary American Fiction" investigates how the rhetoric of discontinuity entangles contemporary evolutionary theory, social theory, science studies, and literary fiction. The dissertation's main focus is a partial taxonomy of the heterogeneous field of contemporary American fiction emphasizing the differences between selected individual novels and novelists along with their commonalities. Rather than attempting to describe a unifying zeitgeist or articulate a particular formal or thematic interest as constitutive of contemporary authenticity or now-ness, dismissing non-conforming works as anomalies or residual slag, "Simultaneous Diversity" affirms that everything in the present is of the present. The result is a dynamic taxonomy of "contemporary American fiction" that interrogates the significance of each of these three terms with respect to each of the texts examined. This taxonomy remains "partial" in both the sense of being necessarily incomplete, and in the sense of being a subjective, or necessarily arbitrary, selection of texts and authors. All the novels discussed herein are in my opinion accomplished works of literary fiction that merit more critical attention, but they do not constitute even a personal "canon", much less a prescriptive one; moreover, while the examined nine fictions by six authors amply demonstrate the simultaneous diversity of contemporary American fiction, they by no means fully encapsulate that open-ended field in microcosm.

This dissertation is about the psychology of imagination in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. In the critical account of this period, much has been written about the relation between literature and sight; it has hardly been noted, however, that the period was marked by the emergence of a field of research into a different kind of "vision" -- the images produced by words on a page. My dissertation addresses this gap in two ways: first, in an account of a major shift in the psychological understanding of the mind's eye in this period; second, in a series of readings which explore the ways in which writers and critics responded to this new science. Both accounts begin with Francis Galton's 1880 publication of "Statistics of Mental Imagery" -- the first study of its kind. His findings -- still cited by psychologists today -- disrupted the idea that words predictably or even reliably produced "pictures" in the mind, thus troubling more than a century of philosophic and literary debate over the nature of mental representation. As William James observed in 1890, Galton's study had "made an era in descriptive Psychology." After repeating Galton's investigation in his own classroom, James concluded that "There are imaginations, not `The Imagination,' and they must be studied in detail." My dissertation traces the work of a series of writers who drew upon this research. In chapters centered on Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mark Twain, William James and Helen Keller -- all of whom were familiar with Galton's study -- I locate a literary tradition which found its value not in objective correspondence with the outside world, but rather, in the embodied feeling of the mind at work. These writers took from psychology the premise that mental vision, like physical vision, had limits -- limits defined by the body. While this limitation could be understood as a constriction, it also suggested the possibility that the imagination could take on the status of physical experience -- that the mechanical act of transforming shapes into signs could become a form of training for "real" life. In order to understand these texts, I argue, we must attend to what James described as the "half" of reading that is not present on the printed page -- the "half" provided by the reader him or herself. In pursuing this claim, I model a style of critical analysis that remains grounded in close reading, but that nevertheless seeks to account for the reader's imaginative experience. This style of reading critically re-orients our understanding of these texts, moving us away from "problem" plots and unresolved themes, towards larger structures of perception. These writers, I argue, do not seek to inform us about another person's experience; rather they provide us with a grammar of experience -- a technique for living intended to last well beyond the moment when the book is set aside.

This dissertation examines quotation specifically, and intertextuality more generally, in the development of American/literary culture from the birth of the republic through the Civil War. This period, already known for its preoccupation with national unification and the development of a self-reliant national literature, was also a period of quotation, reprinting and copying. Within the analogy of literature and nation characterizing the rhetoric of the period, this study translates the transtextual figure of quotation as a protean form that sheds a critical light on the nationalist project. This project follows both how texts move (transnational migration) and how they settle into place (national naturalization). Combining a theoretical mapping of how texts move and transform intertextually and a book historical mapping of how texts move and transform materially, the dissertation traces nineteenth century examples of the culture of quotation and how its literary mutability both disrupts and participates in the period's national and literary movements. The first chapter engages scholarship on republican print culture and on republican emulation to interrogate the literary roots of American nationalism in its transatlantic context. Looking at commonplace books, autobiographies, morality tales, and histories, it examines how quotation as a practice of memory impression functions in national re-membering. The second chapter follows quotation in early nineteenth-century national and literary contests of space and fashioning, the movement for international copyright in the culture of reprinting and the calls for a national literature. The third chapter considers questions of appropriation, assimilation, and translation in hemispheric poetic interactions within the context of the annexation and Manifest Destiny. The last chapter examines quotation in the antebellum period where, in the absence of a unifying authority, the fragments of quotation offer a way to tell the story of the nation

Among other paradigm shifts, in the last decades Latin America has underwent not only the privatization and corporatization of the historical State, but also the de-materialization of the book in paper and ink. Far from a death knell, however, this apparent limit has instead given rise to a further visibility of the support, material, and conditions of production of the historical book object. This dissertation will reconstruct through period sources, critical essays, fiction, photography, and film the hallowed, yet troubled, status of the State-sponsored book. Tracing an arc from the utopian 1960s and increasingly privatized 1990s and 2000s, I consider imaginaries of reading through the materials and cultural politics that comprise books in the most concrete of senses—paper, format, copyright policy, and reproduction technologies, in particular Xerox, linotype, and mimeograph. These elements form subjectivities that extend beyond what is normally understood as the reader to broader collective narratives. Something as simple as paper made of tobacco or sugarcane, for example, may link questions as diverse as anti-colonialism, the popular national subject, and racial, ethnic, and gender alterity. Conversing with and, simultaneously, contesting the work of critics such as Roger Chartier, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Rancière, and Johanna Drucker, I argue that what at first may seem anecdotal is instead a map of the material, spatial, and subjective distribution of knowledge told through the material life of books. The following chapters, will address the nascent critical discourse on book materiality in Latin America, and then turn to three case studies drawn from Cuba, Chile, and Venezuela that variously imagine new subjectivities of the reader.

This project alters the field of American Studies and Modern American Poetry. For after Cold War critics of America's Myth and Symbol School had employed D.H. Lawrence for an American exceptionalism, and after Kate Millet's Sexual Politics (1970) had disapproved of Lawrence, the British author has been marginalised by scholars of American Studies and American Poetry. As a result, Lawrence's foundational role within America's countercultural poetry has been overlooked. Robert Duncan, who led the Berkeley & San Francisco Renaissance, has repeatedly testified that Lawrence remains the 'hidden integer' within the poetics of Donald Allen's groundbreaking anthology, The New American Poetry: 1945-1960. This research project asks: how does the transatlantic reception of Lawrence change the tradition of post-1945 American poetry? Within the so-called 'New American Poetry,' queer, black, feminist, and non-academic voices emerged, yet their poetry defined itself by resisting the structures of 'closed-verse' as well. The break into 'open form' had renounced much of the American poetry tradition, especially the intellectualism of high-modernists. In this generational gap, Lawrence's banned writing on the sexual, sensual and political body becomes privileged by countercultural poets, and integrated into open-forms of poetry. Therefore this project also asks: how does the physical body, as found in Lawrence, surface within the disparate literary forms of leading poets and their coteries? Each chapter introduces an undocumented reception of Lawrence within a social network of post-WWII poets and follows a poet's reading of Lawrence's bodily form throughout their formative years. Featured poets include Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Sylvia Plath. The poets are chosen for their reliance upon Lawrence, but each poet also represents a wider social scene. As a new transatlantic and American literary history is charted, new readings emerge in new American poets and in Lawrence alike. In reinterpreting well-known and unknown poems though this lens, a new hermeneutic is explored wherein a bodily form surfaces within the spatial formations working upon the page.

In my introduction I begin by sketching Ezra Pound's engagement with utopian and paradisal themes, charting his moves from aestheticism in the pre-war years to utopian-political concerns in the 1930s and on to a synthetic-paradisal phase after the Second World War. In my first chapter I chart the period of Pound and Louis Zukofsky's closest collaboration, analysing the presence of Zukofsky's political thought in his poetics through this crucial phase and the proximity of his thought to his mentors Pound and William Carlos Williams. In my second chapter I discuss Pound and Zukofsky's interest and use of music in their poetries, suggesting that this theme provides an analogue to their paradisal thought from the late 1930s until the mid-1950s. Music is of great importance to both writers and the points at which their approaches coincide and differ are revelatory of their conceptions of paradise. Finally I turn to the late, paradisal segment of Zukofsky's career in the 1960s and 1970s, describing the manner in which Zukofsky's synthetic paradisal method relates both to Pound's in The Cantos and takes stock of the work and interests of the younger poets writing of the period. In my conclusion I briefly describe the termination of Pound and Zukofsky's relationship and make some closing comments on their paradises, relating their final synthetic paradises to differing conceptions of time that relate to their entire oeuvres, even back to the poets' early aesthetic phases.

The present thesis reads Don DeLillo's fiction as expressive of the process of financialization which emerged in response to the 1970s capitalist crisis in the United States and gave rise to a specific social materiality and peculiar “structure of feeling” grounded in finance capital. I will argue that DeLillo's works offer a powerful representation and critique of the workings of finance capital and of American hegemony pursued via the emergence, consolidation and expansion of finance. As DeLillo's novels depict a specifically finance-driven US hegemony, they also register the attempts to resist such hegemony. Simultaneously, I shall focus on DeLillo's analysis of a culture immersed in what Keynes called “the fetish of liquidity”, and on DeLillo's investigation of how the seemingly dematerialising power of speculative capital modifies the construction of a new social materiality and human experience. By articulating a comparison between specific mechanisms within finance capital and the workings of mourning and melancholia, I shall explore the anxiety and dread pervading DeLillo's characters as originating within the erasure of the commodity form from the dominant financial mode. Within such purview, I will first explore those texts, written in the 1970s, which best depict the crisis in US capitalism and the response to such crisis via the emergence of a chiefly financial economic and cultural mode. Subsequently, I will investigate DeLillo's latest production in order to highlight how such works expose the contradictions and limitations of a finance-dominated economy and its attendant “structure of feeling”, and express an ever-growing need to return to less virtual, less evanescent forms of economic production.

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