The power of the system we call whiteness, as Toni Morrison points out in Playing in the Dark, has long resided in its invisibility—or, more specifically, in the invisibility of its reliance on the racialized Other in order to articulate what we take to be “the norm.” All of the issues and themes that we take to be particularly “American” rely upon the presence that Morrison names “Africanist,” and that embodied presence carries the burden of our culture's anxiety about the unpredictable, explosive, vulnerable and mortal condition of all bodies. Further, our conception of the U.S. as a nation and of whiteness as a racial category both rely upon fictionalized instances of racial contact that the reader finds sentimentally “touching.” In this dissertation, I argue that contemporary ethnic American novelists Toni Morrison, Chang-Rae Lee and Philip Roth have designed their narratives to revise the terms of that contact and revise the nature of that “touching.” In so doing, they seek to revise our ability to incorporate their narratives into a U.S. nationalism that valorizes whiteness. Generally speaking, works by “minority” authors are read in terms of what I call “ethical content”; that is, they are used to explain or elucidate historical injustices or consequences of difference such as “double-consciousness.” Such readings, ostensibly presented to “touch” the reader with a sense of outrage at the consequences of racism, often inspire much less feeling than that and always leave the structure of “whiteness” intact. I read Morrison, Lee and Roth as challenging this use of their narratives by structuring them in such a way as to make “ethical contact” with the reader. This contact is designed to translate the sympathetic relationship historically set up between whiteness and the racial other into a phenomenological relationship wherein whiteness is revealed to be not only visible, but touchable. In other words, these narratives reach out to the reader in order to implicate each of us in the material histories and racialized present that the characters (and authors) must contend with, and that includes the ghosts and the grief that attach themselves to racialized bodies.

This dissertation centers on the theme of "the woman warrior," historically grounded in premodern Chinese culture and represented in contemporary Asian American literature as well as in visual art forms. I apply a historical perspective to this interdisciplinary project in order to examine the global evolvement of one particular woman warrior, Mulan's legend, starting from the Northern Dynasties (386-581 A.D.) until the beginning of the twentieth-first century. This work conceptualizes the transmission and transformation of Mulan's story as a palimpsest, thereby highlighting the enduring interplay of continuity and erasure in the construction of her tale in China and the United States. The thesis investigates what the development of her tale reveals to us not only about womanhood, heroism, filial piety, and loyalty in premodern China but also about the construction of female agency, ethnic identity, and cultural origin in contemporary Asian America. Contextualizing Mulan alongside other heroines in premodern China my discussion considers the woman warrior as a paradigm of women warriors at large, thereby addressing Mulan as a culturally and historically rooted image coming out of a fascinating typology rather than as a singular character. Through the phenomenal example of Mulan this dissertation explores representations of female identity in the complex and frequent negotiation between womanhood and warrior value in premodern Chinese society, thus contributing to the current discussion on transnational feminism. By way of scrutinizing the multiplicity and complexity characterizing the "origin" of this particular figure, my research complicates the debate on cultural authenticity in the context of Asian America and the Asian diaspora. By looking at Mulan as a character claimed by various regions in China as their local heroine, the discussion deconstructs the monolithic "China" in Chinese America, and by extension, that of the "Asia" in Asian America. Through examining Mulan as a cross-cultural palimpsest, I hope to broaden our understanding of the interrelations between cultural heritage, gender politics, and ethnicity as exemplified by the global journey of her story and to inspire further scholarly engagement with her warrior sisters in Chinese as well as other cultures.

The importance of the letter as a means for social, personal and intellectual expression for humanists has been highlighted in various studies. For those studies, its value resides in its effectiveness in responding more directly to the presence of a new pool of readers giving rise to a new cultural type, transforming it into the emblematic genre of the humanists. I am interested in considering the influence of epistolary models in the New World, because, as these models were transferred to a new context, they acquired new forms that responded to the needs of communication, representation, symbolization and, finally, a new rhetoric. For the purposes of this dissertation, I will depart from the conception of the letter in the New World as a "polysynthetic" genre; that is to say, inasmuch as I wish to respond to the plurality of communicative needs that arose from the new contexts that were unforeseen by the humanist rhetoric, I will consider the letters from the New World as emerging from and forming part of other genres: accounts, petitions, diaries, among others. The starting point for this dissertation is the thorough reading and analysis of eleven unpublished letters, all written by women, currently located at the Archivo General de Indias in Seville and sent from the Rio de la Plata during the XVI and XVII centuries. In my investigation, I intend to demonstrate how the authors used the writing of such documents as an empowering practice. Secondly, I will prove that these first epistles, written from America, do not necessarily belong to the ars epistolandi, but to the ars dictaminis. Furthermore, this change in distinction requires a critical review of the current state of classical letters. Finally, I maintain that these letters provide a space for the emergence of the authors' identity. In other words, I understand and ground the conclusions of this work on the fact that space culturally shapes gender, but that gender acts in the production of such spaces as well. The participation of female authors by means of these letters merges them with that spatiality in a process both of production and reproduction, since, as a conscience building act, the "I" is turned into text in order to discuss on/about the space.

This dissertation is a study of the religious and ethical influences on the lives of three American Jewish women: Anzia Yezierska (ca. 1880-1970), immigrant-born author from the Lower East Side who gave poignant voice in her fiction to immigrant Jewish women's lives; Rose Pastor Stokes (1879-1933), immigrant-born political activist and an early member of the American Communist party; and Maud Nathan (1862-1946), an upper-class, American-born Jew who fought for female enfranchisement and better working conditions for store clerks and sweatshop women. In a thematic approach drawing comparisons among the three women, this study explores the role and impact of Jewish religion and values on their personal and professional life choices. Related to this main question are the following secondary questions: As deviant women--women who did not fulfill traditional gender and religious prescriptions for home-bound domesticity--how did these women negotiate their deviance within the Jewish and larger American communities? In their autobiographies, how did they present their lives, and to what extent did they reveal any awareness of the impact of their Jewish birthright upon their life choices? And how did their relations with the significant people in their lives--friends, families, and mentors--influence both their gender and Jewish consciousness? Through close reading of their writings, especially their autobiographies, augmented by selected theoretical work in the presentation of self, I examine how they each defined their Jewishness in ways consonant with their personal and professional aspirations, and how they all drew on their cultural, religious, and class values to play an active public role in their time.

Informed by object-relations theory (as formulated by Alice Miller, D. W. Winnicott, and Christopher Bollas), this study explores the emotional impact upon children of parental unavailability in a sequence of four Cather novels published between 1915 and 1923--The Song of the Lark, My Antonia, One of Ours, A Lost Lady. However varied the scenarios or parental absence in these texts (whether inscribed as parents' dying, as parents' relocating and leaving children behind, or as parent's failing to recognize their children's emotional needs), their absence bears strikingly similar consequences in the lives of their children. What may be those children's most far-reaching loss is a psychic one: namely, that of the parental mirror, to adopt the language of object-relations. What recurrently characterizes the adulthoods of Cather's child-protagonists is the quest for a surrogate mirroring-object in which they seek a glimpse of a part of the self that plagues them by its half-detected presence--suggesting that in Cather, realization of self must be preceded by recognition by another. As Cather's protagonists attach themselves to various objects (another family, a social cause, an art), so do they characteristically elide an emotionally injurious past by erecting in its place an idealized past which becomes the object of a most intense nostalgia. This dynamic--by which the image of one's childhood (at the center of which often figure one's parents) is preserved at a cost to the integrity of the self--underwrites depression, as that concept has been defined by object--relations theory.