<p> USonian identity has been defined controversially since its inception. Its representatives have largely been independent, white, wealthy, male, and heterosexual. However, the actual population of the US is more diverse and possesses much more complex identities. Some of the identifying factors of USonians derive from the US tradition of self-making. Traditional US self-made narratives, as with larger definitions of US identity, lack a full inclusivity and nationally representative characters, as scholars such as Mary Carden explain. However, rather than simply disappearing, traits of the US self-made man, as part of a larger national identity, continue to exist but in ways more suitable to the US nationality that has developed. For example, some of the newer versions of US self-makers include women, ethnic minorities, and homosexuals. </p><p> The more important elements of the changing definitions of US identity and self-making, community building and belonging, arises when more diverse representatives appear in texts ranging from Susan Sontag&rsquo;s <i> In America</i> to works like Lin-Manuel Miranda&rsquo;s <i> Hamilton.</i> This dissertation studies more communal self-making models as well as US representatives who are recognized within texts and by readers in works by authors such as Philip Roth. The modeling of these characters results in the opportunity for readers to identify with them and/or some of their contexts. Such a relationship sets the foundation for what I have termed &ldquo;fabulous ordinariness.&rdquo; This means that despite possessing some fabulous or extraordinary storylines or characteristics, there are daily events, interactions, or traits that readers can empathize with, connect with, or feel represents them. Such experiences with the characters and texts provide the space for a representative relationship to be established and articulated as such. </p><p> The redefinitions of self-making and US identity, along with the enactment of fabulous ordinariness, ask readers to consider how culture, identities, and nationalities are preserved, challenged, and protected. Scholarship addressing traditional US role-models, along with works that support and challenge those representatives and roles, examines contemporary US identities and their connection to the past. This dissertation asks questions concerning the boundaries between fiction and history, culture and its artifacts, as well as readers and their texts.</p>

The aim of this dissertation is to explore how and why Toni Morrison employs biblical allusion, biblical names and entire books of the Bible both directly and ironically in order to emphasize the importance of ancestry and community in the lives of African-Americans. Morrison begins in Sula emphasizing the idea that communities that are not cohesive cannot survive. She challenges her readers to question how The Bottom community could have thrived if the people thought of it as more than just a place, but as a group of neighbors who help each other to live and grow. She continues in Song of Solomon with the emphasis not only on community but also on ancestry as identity. When Jake agrees to give up his name, he prevents his descendants from knowing or understanding from where they came. In not knowing their past, they are empty. She culminates her argument in Beloved where she fully emphasizes both community and ancestry with the incarnation of Beloved as the community of all slaves that have gone before. All three novels are heavily laden with biblical allusion that culminate in Morrison’s challenge for all not to forget and to let their history lead to a reclamation of ancestry and community.

"Pledging Transnational Allegiances: Nationhood, Selfhood, and Belonging in Asian American and Jewish American Narratives," represents a comparative study of immigrant fiction that traces its development over the course of the twentieth century. The use of Jewish American and Asian American writers occurs because of past and contemporary scholarly connections made between the two groups, which include their respective status as model minority subjects within the larger U.S. body politic. Moreover, with regard to immigration legislation and dominant-held ideas about the immigrant body, the two groups share histories of exclusion and inclusion. The narratives examined in "Pledging Transnational Allegiances" are inflected with global sensibilities that traverse both countries of origin and countries of settlement. Thematically speaking, what links authors as diverse as Abraham Cahan, Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton), Israel Zangwill, C.Y. Lee, Mary Antin, Gish Jen, Nechama Tee and Luong Ung to one another is that each writer examines the ways in which citizenship is not necessarily the product of assimilation but rather the unstable outcome that occurs through the constant re-imagining of transnational affiliations vis-à-vis dominant-held notions of nationhood and selfhood. Concomitantly, these authors negotiate the complicated matrix of sociopolitical belonging through a particular trope of naturalization (the public process by which an immigrant obtains citizenship in the country of settlement). "Pledging Transnational Allegiances" moves the scholarly consideration of immigrant narratives from static and unilateral classifications (e.g. as stories of exodus and deliverance, narratives of rebirth, tales of melting-pot assimilation, and dramas of generational conflict) to a more politicized and multisided discussion of diaspora and ideological border crossings.

<p> This dissertation explores the unhomely nature of the slave system as experienced by fugitive and captive slaves within slave and neo-slave narratives. The purpose of this project is to broaden the discourse of migration narratives set during the antebellum period. I argue that the unhomely manifests through corporeal, psychological, historical, and geographical descriptions found within each narrative and it is through these manifestations that a broader discourse of identity can be generated. I turn to four slave and neo-slave narratives for this dissertation: Solomon Northup&rsquo;s <i>Twelve Years a Slave</i> (1853), Frederick Douglass&rsquo;s <i>My Bondage and My Freedom</i> (1855), Octavia Butler&rsquo;s <i>Kindred </i> (1979), and Toni Morrison&rsquo;s <i>Beloved</i> (1987). </p>

<p> Writing about food and eating food are both environmental acts. The ways in which humans conceive of edible material&mdash;by speaking about it and growing it in the ground&mdash;are reflections of their view of the natural world. </p><p> Ecological fiction like Karen Tei Yamashita&rsquo;s <i>Through the Arc of the Rain Forest</i> connects imagined visions of food with the current reality of our agricultural system in the United States. In both the fictitious narratives and lived experience, synthetic polymers overtake almost every aspect of life, including edible matter. The ubiquitous <i> plasticization</i> of food is one of the main causes of the current global environmental crisis. </p><p> Ultimately, the treatment of food in ecological fiction and in practice reveals our mistreatment of the environment and of our own bodies. Employing a systems-based way of thinking ecologically make visible the yet invisible lines of interconnection among the natural world, edible matter, and living beings.</p>

<p> <i>Liberating Blackness: African-American Prison Writers and the Creation of the Black Revolutionary</i> takes an in-depth look at a selection of works written by African-American writers who, in autobiographies and novels written during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, utilized their own experiences with the carceral system to articulate revolutionary Black identities capable of resisting racial oppression. To articulate these revolutionary Black identities these authors would develop counter-narratives to three key historical discourses&mdash;scientific discourses of Black bodies, pedagogical discourses of Black minds, and political discourses of Black communities&mdash;that had, respectively, defined Black bodies and Black intellects as inferior to White bodies and White intellects, and subordinated the political interests of Black communities to White communities. These discourses would be used by state and federal agencies to justify racially disparate practices and processes of incarceration. In my first two chapters, I closely read <i> The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Soledad Brother, Assata: An Autobiography, </i> and <i>Angela Davis: An Autobiography</i> to look at how, respectively, Malcolm X, George Jackson, Assata Shakur, and Angela Davis utilize their own experiences in prison to craft counter-narratives about Black bodies and Black minds. I argue that while these counter-narratives aided readers in developing Black identities resistant to racist stereotypes, the dialectical frameworks that X and Jackson used in shaping their revolutionary subjectivities, informed by heteronormative, misogynist, and patriarchal beliefs, had the effect of (re)producing many of the practices of exclusion that justified the carceral system. In reaction, Black women prison writers, like Davis and Shakur, would utilize a dialogical model to develop a revolutionary Black female intersubjectivity based on practices of inclusivity, diversity and community. In my last chapter, I explore the novels <i>Iron City</i> by Lloyd L. Brown, and <i>House of Slammers</i> by Nathan Heard, novels written at the beginning and end of the era I review, to display how the counter-narratives put forth by all of these authors shaped the political landscape during the Civil Rights and Black Power eras. I argue that the changes in tone between these two works, from optimism to pessimism, reflect on how X and Jackson&rsquo;s dialectical models encouraged the political balkanization of Civil Rights and Black Power organizations, which inhibited them from mounting as effective a resistance against the carceral state as they could have had they taken heed of Davis and Shakur&rsquo;s intersubjective model.</p>

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 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.

<p> This dissertation reads twentieth and twenty-first century U.S. multicultural literatures, women&rsquo;s literature, and science-fiction film and literature to identify a tradition of literary representation of long-standing patterns of economic entrapment in American cities.&rdquo; I argue that the capitalist ideologies of opportunity and spatial, economic, and social mobility associated with American cities have been largely false promises, and that literature provides an avenue to investigate the ideological matrices and cultural narratives that American capitalism uses to situate bodies where it needs them, primarily in urban centers. I claim that this entrapment remains more or less a constant in American cities despite the fact that both capitalism and the space of the city have radically changed since the late 1930s. I further claim that the persistence of this entrapment across different instantiations of both the American city and American capitalism speak to its normalization, acceptance, and the fact of its continuing legacy. As the ideological narratives are culturally projected as ones of the promise and freedom of mobility in cities, and as the historical conditions of entrapment have proven so resilient, literature and film have constituted important tools for exposing just how these capitalist ideologies generate consent for hegemonic capitalism. The dissertation seeks to understand how a large percentage of urban populations are interpellated by the very capitalist machinery which fixes them in space and class while simultaneously denying them the benefits of American capitalism.</p><p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Texas at Arlington, 2009.