This study argues the need to consider the impact of social class in women's narratives. Beginning with the turn of the century, a time of great social and economic change for women, I examine how women writers challenge and redefine traditional notions of middle-class womanhood in order to accommodate emerging feminist ideals, for example, the rejection of marriage for the pursuit of a career. Using the fiction of Wharton, Austin, Yezierska, and Hurston, I explore how the female characters of their novels negotiate between traditional roles ascribed to middle-class women and new definitions of womanhood symbolized by the appearance of the "New Woman." Interestingly, while some middle-class ideals are rejected, i.e. domesticity, two of these writers, Wharton and Austin, nonetheless remain committed to a middle-class ideology. For Yezierska and Hurston, middle-class acceptance means necessarily negotiating the uncertain terrain between a desire for middle-class stability and the reality of one's ethnic and racial background. By highlighting the importance of class in the construction of female subjectivity, my study of women's narratives makes a substantial contribution to the field of feminist literary theory.

This dissertation explores the communal uneasiness and hermeneutic impasse created by suicide in twentieth-century US American literature by women. By considering how history is negotiated through suicidal acts and how literary texts are structured by self-inflicted death, I suggest that this intentional turn is most fundamentally readable through public spaces—the Middle Passage, Hiroshima, Harlem, San Francisco's Chinatown. My first chapter focuses on Ludwig Binswanger's The Case of Ellen West: An Anthropological-Clinical Study (1944), an existential analysis of a Jewish woman who killed herself in Switzerland when she was thirty-three. Along with Anne Sexton's poetry, West's writing acts as a prelude to my subsequent chapters because it makes the body inextricable from the imagination, and both inextricable from history, community, and politics. In Chapter Two, I trace the conflation of white femininity and suicide in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature before turning to modern novels in which women ambiguously fall to their deaths: Nella Larsen's Passing (1929), Mary McCarthy's The Group (1963), and Fae Myenne Ng's Bone (1993). These texts disperse intention over a field of inquiry, connecting the private act of suicide to culture less through consciousness than through public space—the fictional space of falling in public and the imagined space of a reading public. In Chapter Three, I examine revolutionary suicide in Toni Morrison's Beloved (1988), Sula (1973), and Song of Solomon (1977), integrating theories from Emmanuel Levinas and Huey Newton. Self-destruction operates on two revolutionary levels: within the story, as a political form of resistance and within the narrative structure, as a discursive strategy, an axis around which meanings revolve. Finally, in Chapter Four, I sketch the political terrain covered by female suicide in Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), Velina Hasu Houston's Tea (1983), and Suzan-Lori Parks's Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1990). Each play extends the logic that I have traced in previous chapters, deploying the act of suicide to register the effects of colonialism, war, and white supremacy on contemporary American women's lives.

Detective fiction, thematically and structurally, contains the potentially rich ability to stand at multiple places simultaneously. Consequently, it provides an appropriate mediating structure for the discussion of potentially disruptive ideas, particularly ideas on identity. Beginning with an examination of the nineteenth-century literary and cultural contexts, I consider the geography of gender and the literary strands that provided fertile ground for the emergence of detective fiction. Through close readings of detective narratives by the three earliest women writers of the genre, Seeley Regester (1831-1865), Anna Katharine Green (1846-1935), and Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958), I examine how these writers thematize the need for informed choice for their female characters, who either as detectives or suspects learn to achieve expansive readings of the confusing signs surrounding them, and seem to request expansive readings by their readers. Paralleling the discourse that moves toward answering the question "who did it?" is the double text of many of the novels that suggests a series of seemingly contradictory realities: women's entrapment by socially sanctioned roles and the clever ways they achieve freedom; women's victimization by male texts and their creation of a new story; women's invisibility to those unable to hear, see, or understand them and their vivid presence obvious in the emancipatory strategies employed for their survival. The ands suggest the wholeness of the vision of these novels and the possibility of their being read both ways--that is, read for their reinforcement of traditional ideologies and read for the future discourse they evoke. Central to my exploration are the disruptive pauses that begin a renegotiation of gender boundaries in Regester's texts, the significance given to gendered language in Green's novels, and the discourse of humor that demarcates a newly created space for women in Rinehart's narratives. Drawing connections between these early women writers and the presently emerging feminist detective novel, I argue that Regester, Green and Rinehart provide multiple mysteries in their narratives--mysteries that emphasize the desire of these women to understand the boundaries that define them and the ways in which they can change these contours.

On April 15, 1862, Emily Dickinson asked Thomas Wentworth Higginson of the Atlantic Monthly to confirm her impression that her verse was alive. Both her letter, which turned on the figure of a breathing body, and her enclosed poems, which served as samples of her living artifacts, presented Dickinson as a maker of verse and a remaker of human sentience. The context out of which her sense of language arose was local networks of exchange among kin, neighbors, and friends who had some connection to Amherst. This social economy of white, middle-class women involved exchanges of living artifacts from one household to another: food, stitched items, texts, flowers. The practice of trading handmade, material things that engaged Dickinson throughout her lifetime alters the perception of her as a recluse who isolated herself from others in order to develop her genius alone. Her linguistic choices and her indirect style are derived in part, from her social practice. So are several values espoused in her poetry: goods, not cash; unique artistry, not mass production; personal interaction, not the literary marketplace. The exchange of floral gifts reflected wider cultural practices of white, middle-class women: identifying flowers and sending messages through them. These "feminine" conventions offered Dickinson more than a temporary blurring of science and sentiment which was "corrected" by Charles Darwin in 1859: they freed her from some of the sexist constructions of nature dominant in her time. Her floral imagery resists the teeth and claws of Darwinian survival and the classifications of botanists. Science and religion emerge in her poetry as authorities proferring "instructive utterances" that require misreading. Her grounds for misreading include her experience with the Amherst landscape and her own body. Her various strands of earth, garden, and body imagery demonstrate how central the speaking body was to her art. By ignoring literature about diseased women's bodies and constructing gardens as primarily positive space, Dickinson found the means to let her body speak. Although speaking physical, sexual, and poetic fulness was difficult for Dickinson, she made verses that expressed the body's potential and touched others with their breath.

This dissertation is an exploration of the novel Gone with the Wind and its journey into Vietnamese readers' minds, specifically how the novel's concept of womanhood is perceived by Vietnamese women readers. It looks at the original text and a variety of Vietnamese translations to discover the perceptions of Vietnamese readers that may have formed from this Southern saga of the American Civil War. Chapter I traces the creation of Gone with the Wind from a Southern belle's experience of the Confederate's defeat, contextualized by women's viewpoints during the roaring 20s of the last century. Chapter II examines the characteristics of the translations into Vietnamese from English and Drench. It identifies the problems inherent in the translation process and highlight issues relating specifically to the Vietnamese language. This chapter explores various translation theories and practices and analyses the derivations that are due to the translators' viewpoints and their relation to the text. Chapter III discusses the reading and feedback process of a group of female lecturers in the English Department of Hochiminh City Open University in Vietnam. Their feedback is considered the precritical responses to the basic elements of a literary work such as the narrative's plot, characters, story, and ending. Chapter IV interprets the readers' treatment of the novel's concept of womanhood, especially the central female protagonist, Scarlett O'Hara, who dealt with the collapse of the plantation's system of values and the emergence of a new role for women. This dissertation concludes by showing that there is a strong link between Gone with the Wind and Vietnamese women readers, illustrating the reflection of Vietnamese society's interaction on a personal level. The novel's influence manifested itself in different ways in each of the respondents. This dissertation explores, through qualitative research, the meaning of Gone with the Wind for women readers in Vietnam and gives a fresh perspective of the novel's success.

Working at the intersections of various disciplinary axes, this dissertation brings together contradictory elements to create a postmodern feminist critique of the "autobiographics" of three American women writers, Dorothy Allison, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Kim Chernin, whose works enter into current conversations about the contemporary subject, story, and representation. This study explores thirteen self-representational works that cross numerous genres to examine how these writers foreground the mediating role of language in self-construction, but refuse to surrender the self to language. Close readings of selections from these texts suggest that, although socio-cultural symbolic systems are often motivated by efforts to control, social scripts are continually under processes of revision, as are histories and individual subjects. Drawing on Thomas Kuhn's scientific theory or shifting paradigms, this study illustrates how apparently fixed structures and systems are in fact fluid forms always in the process of change. The concept of "eX-centricities" that is worked with in this dissertation is linked to the politics and possibilities of moving beyond (as in time) and outside (as in space) traditional cultural and literary "centrist" thinking. It suggests a perspective that is in concert with contemporary physics, which suggests that all systems are dynamic, multifaceted, interdependent, and mutually influencing. Such a perspective argues that postmodern tropes do not arrive on the contemporary landscape as abstract theory, but from the lived reality of plurality, marginalization, annihilation, mobility, and partial positionality within constantly changing configurations. Within such systems, "universal truths" are problematized, and although patterns do arise, difference and diversity become as significant as sameness and commonality. In deconstructing the cultural matrices of dominant socio-symbolic systems, Allison, Pratt, and Chernin fracture those frames that have been constructed to contain some self-representational stories while privileging others. By foregrounding what has been in the background, these "autobiographics" create a geo/graphically transformative shift in perspective that brings the invisible into view. By seizing authority for self-representation, these writers show that "the subject" who has purported to be "universally representative" has in fact been merely another eX-centric point of view.

La lirica de Dulce Maria Loynaz (Cuba 1902) ha sido considerada por el canon academico como perteneciente al post-modernismo hispanoamericano. Tal lectura no satisface la plenitud metaforica que la constituye. Esta disertacion propone una relectura de su obra lirica desde las teorias de Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray y Julia Kristeva en torno a la identidad femenina. Se inicia con dos capitulos socio-historicos. El primero revisa la aportacion lirica de las mujeres poetas cubanas al canon literario desde sus camienzos hasta la generacion de Loynaz. Para la organicazion del esquema generacional se sigue a Raimundo Lazo. A caballo entre el post-modernismo y la vanguardia, el segundo capitulo analiza la produccion de estos movimientos en Cuba, deteniendose en unas consideraciones sobre la "poesia pura", para concluir que la lirica de Loynaz amplifica su poder significativo si se plantea su lectura desde los presupuestos de la Modernidad. Loynaz utiliza su textualidad poetica para disenar un Imaginario o identidad femenina basado en la liberacion de los presupuestos patriarcales que lo configuran tradicionalmente. Su estrategia reside en la metaforizacion acuatica, desde la que el yo lirico, paradojicamente, al adquirir una posicion marginal alcanza la integridad deseada. En una combinacion con imagenes de aire se desarrollan instancias misticas que contribuyen a la ausencia de limites. Lo inefable de la experiencia mistica se textualiza en el poema a traves de la liquidificacion. Al recuperar la voz a traves de la metafora, la voz lirica lleva a cabo un des-exilio, una ruptura de la especularidad que le hacia ser imagen de otro. Se copia la mimica del proceso mistico pero se transgrede pues, al alejarse del silencio, se lleva a cabo un proceso de des-histerizacion en la voz lirica. El pensamiento binario se suspende y se pasa a la fluidez. En la asimilacion de la tradicion literaria femenina que le precede, Loynaz recoge el misticismo de La Avellaneda, de Juana Borrero y de Emilia Bernal, para innovarlo a nivel estructural y otorgarle la dinamicidad de los enclaves liquidos en la constitucion del Imaginario femenino.

Born in Juticalpa, provincial capital of the Department of Olancho, Honduras in 1902. Clementina Suarez left her hometown at age twenty-one. Once on her own, she began to publish her poetry and to develop a life-style unique for a Central American woman in the early decades of the twentieth century. She lived and worked throughout Central America, in Mexico, New York and Cuba, gaining notoriety for her rebellious, woman-centered poetry, her bohemian life-style and her activities as a dedicated promoter of Central American art and literature. She gradually became a living legend in Honduras, in part because of the numerous verbal and visual portraits of her created by writers and artists from all the countries where she has lived. This is the first full-length biography of this matriarch of Honduran letters. It differs from other portraits of Ms. Suarez in its length, its point of view and its narrative strategy. Told from the perspective of an outsider observing and interacting with another culture, it begins with a brief history of the Suarez-Zelaya family, followed by a retelling of Ms. Suarez' life that is broadly chronological but that weaves together her past, present and future with a reading of her work that foregrounds her use of poetry as a workshop in the construction of herself. The theoretical concerns that inform this biography question the representational possibilities of language, particularly that discourse intended to describe one's self to another, while the biographical praxis responds to the feminist imperative to attend to the female subject and reinscribe her in her many contexts--social, historical, geographical, literary, feminine. Consequently, the narrative constructs an inconclusive portrait of the subject, drawing on such sources as personal interviews, gossip, autobiographical texts and poetry-as-autobiography, as well as the more conventional material found in archival and bibliographic sources. The result is a life-story that attempts to leave the legend intact while bringing the woman to life.

<p> The question at the root of this study is why the political formation of state power in Latin America always seems to be accompanied by violence against women. Two threads run throughout: an analysis of the relation between image, violence, and subject formation; and the application of this theory to the political violence exerted upon feminine subjectivity in relation to state formation in Latin America. I trace the marginalization of women through experimental dictatorial fiction of the Southern Cone up to the crisis of femicide that has emerged alongside the so-called narco-state in Mexico in the wake of NAFTA. I argue that Latin American feminist thought has sought to articulate itself as a post-hegemonic force of interruption from <i> within</i> the dominant order, a project that is problematized in the face of the perverse seriality of the femicide crimes and the intolerable yet enigmatic power of which they become a forced representation.</p><p> The first chapter stages a close reading of Salvador Elizondo&rsquo;s <i> Farabeuf</i> (1965), locating in the novel&rsquo;s engagement with a photograph of the Chinese <i>Leng Tch&rsquo;&eacute;</i> execution a theory of the relation between cut, image, and the female body that understands the subtraction of the feminine as the foundation of the political. The second chapter turns to the structure of dictatorial violence in Argentina, looking at Alejandra Pizarnik&rsquo;s <i>La condesa sangrienta</i> (1965) and Luisa Valenzuela&rsquo;s &ldquo;Cambio de armas&rdquo; (1982) alongside the Argentine Revolution and the Dirty War, respectively. Pizarnik&rsquo;s meditation on Elizabeth Bathory&rsquo;s crimes highlights both the fetishization of the subversive body and the inevitable failure of sovereign power to designate itself. Valenzuela&rsquo;s fragmentary story deconstructs the notion of erasure at the heart of the regime&rsquo;s use of forced disappearance by staging a perverse sexual relation within an environment of domestic confinement. The third chapter examines Diamela Eltit&rsquo;s critique of neoliberalism during the Pinochet regime in Chile through her cinematographic novel <i> Lump&eacute;rica</i> (1983) before following this economic trail northward to the femicide crisis that has ravaged the Mexican-U.S. border since 1993. I demonstrate that both oppressive power structures&mdash;official and unofficial&mdash;are founded on the fusion of economic and gender violence. A reading of Roberto Bola&ntilde;o&rsquo;s <i>2666</i> through the notion of the exquisite corpse situates this urgent crisis in relation to globalization and the postmodern world of images, technology, efficiency, and instantaneity for which it becomes a disturbing emblem.</p>

This dissertation explores the many-faceted, and somewhat elusive question: "What is American Jewish feminine literary identity?" Working from the premise that no one set of writers, themes, or literary forms constitutes a centralized identity, I suggest that Jewish feminine "collective" identity is heterogeneous and involves multiply-voiced debate. Drawing on feminist criticisms that emphasize both form and social context, as well as on Bakhtinian dialogism and theories of Otherness, I approach the problem by focusing on three prominent, yet diverse writers--Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, and E. M. Broner--who construct multiple and mutable selves rather than fully-integrated personae. Rejecting rigid dichotomies, I probe the tensions both among and within their identities as Jews, women, and Americans. I first illustrate how Paley, resisting any firm or didactic explanation of her Jewishness, widens American Jewish identity by depicting diverse immigrant women's voices--all too often subsumed in a "world of our fathers." For Paley, Jewish identity is inextricably enmeshed in feminism, social activism, and empathy with the Other. Next, I explore how Ozick employs literary strategies rooted in what she terms forbidden, "pagan" magic in order to carve a place for herself in male-dominated Jewish literary and religious traditions. I argue that despite her resistance to the term "woman writer," Ozick's identity as a woman is a major driving force shaping her identity as an American Jewish writer. I then examine how Broner rebels vehemently against Jewish patriarchal frameworks and at the same time patterns her Jewish feminism after them. While the dissertation focuses on issues specific to Jewish women writers, the same problems of dual (or multiple) identities also bear upon the work of other women who identify both as feminists and members of ethnic groups. Thus, my last chapter offers a comparison between black and Jewish women's literary identities, showing that frameworks which attempt to essentialize race almost inevitably break down when viewed across borders of ethnicity. Seen in a broader perspective, the dissertation serves to integrate further the fields of Jewish, feminist, and ethnic studies.