This dissertation critically examines the question of language revival in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Hebrew literature. Focusing on major texts that participate in the political and aesthetic endeavor of reviving Hebrew as an exclusive national language, this study traces the narrative of revival and explores the changes and iterations it underwent in the course of several decades, from the 1890s to the early 1920s. Informed by a wide range of critical literary theory, I analyze the primary tropes used to articulate the process whereby Hebrew came to inhabit new discursive roles. Building on close readings of canonical texts by authors ranging from Ahad Ha’am and Mikha Yosef Berdichevsky to Hayim Nahman Bialik, Rachel Katznelson, and Yosef Hayim Brenner, I argue that while modern Hebrew literature largely rejected the philological assumption that Hebrew was a dead language, it nevertheless produced a discourse around the notion of “revival,” in a manner that deferred the possibility of perceiving Hebrew as fully living. My readings show that while many of these texts contemplate linguistic transformation in terms of revitalization or birth, the national mission of language revival is in fact entwined with mourning, and ultimately produces the object of revival as neither dead nor fully alive. Dwelling on the ambivalence and suspension of that moment, and examining a range of nuances in its articulation, I explore the roles that Hebrew language and literature play in nationalization, Zionism, and the constitution of a new Hebrew subjectivity.

This dissertation argues that the journeys of naturalists, explorers, intellectuals, and engineers through the Amazon in the second half of the nineteenth and first decade of the twentieth century gave rise to perspectives that challenge foundational assumptions about technology in modern metropolitan centers. Chief among these assumptions are the ideas that technology contributes to specialization, the disenchantment of reality, the entrapment of the subject in the logistics of urban labor, and the removal of natural obstacles. The examination of the roles of nature and technology in texts and images of the period shows that travel and exploration were represented as experiences of enchantment and encounters with impassable terrains. The dissertation focuses on three interconnected cases to support its thesis: Euclides da Cunha’s reading of the naturalists in his essays on the Amazon; experiences and practices of exploration on the Madeira and Mamoré Rivers; and the construction of a railroad along these rivers to render the hauling of vessels over land and long voyages unnecessary. Developing a cultural-historical framework that counters narratives of technological domination and failure, the dissertation concludes that the tensions between exploration and engineering in these cases reveal the eschatological facets of the history of technology. The eschatological facets show both how technologies contribute to the construction of the farthest frontiers and how technologies themselves arrive at their final stages.

Picturing Reality proposes new literary historical and art historical contexts for the development of American literary realism in the late nineteenth century. While studies of American literary realism have tended to emphasize the importance of social, political, and cultural contexts in determining the forms and aims of realist representation, Picturing Reality demonstrates the importance of aesthetic contexts for a realist art of fiction. In particular, this project proposes that painting served as a model for the development of American realist fiction of the late nineteenth century that aspired to achieve the status of art because it offered a compelling model for reconciling the aspirations of prose writing to be artistic with the requirements that it be realistic. Painting served as a creative inspiration, a conceptual template, and a practical example for the development of an art of literary realism at a time when realist writing was more often seen to be anything but a fine art. The development of an art of realist fiction was to a large extent predicated on the degree to which extended narratives in prose could “picture” in order to represent dimensions of reality that had been resistant to representation by traditional narrative forms. Picturing Reality demonstrates this influence through the writings of four American writers – William Dean Howells, Henry James, Hamlin Garland, and Sarah Orne Jewett – all of whom used painting as a model for understanding themselves as realist artists. The model of painting served each of these writers in unique and idiosyncratic ways, but in all cases the sense that it was the task of the novelist or writer of prose to “picture reality” had a pervasive influence on the form, style, and content of their works. By reading broadly and deeply in their critical and fictional body of work, and by reading reviews and critiques of contemporary critics, as well as the work of other writers and artists who served as both models or obstacles for the development of an art of realism, this project seeks to situate these four writers in their literary historical and art historical contexts. In the first chapter, I show the difficulties William Dean Howells faced as he sought to make an art of realism, and suggest that American Pre-Raphaelitism furnished a model by which realistic representation could satisfy the eye of both the scientist and the artist – a model that could be adapted to the form of the realist novel. In the second chapter, I examine Henry James’s early aesthetic education among writers associated with the art journal The Crayon, as well as among painters such as William Morris Hunt and John La Farge, and look at his early career as an art reviewer in order to demonstrate the depth and breadth of painting’s influence on James’s subsequent art of fiction. In the third chapter I demonstrate the ways in which Impressionist painting informed Hamlin Garland’s theory of local color fiction and served as a model for his sketches and stories. And in the fourth chapter I demonstrate the ways in which Sarah Orne Jewett sought to create a form of local color writing in which vivid description and word-painting would take precedence over plot-driven narrative by showing Jewett’s own complex relationship to painting – particularly watercolors. For all these writers, painting served as a complex – and ultimately ambivalent – model for the development of an art of realist fiction.

This dissertation analyzes the ways in which monstrosity is articulated in fantastic literature, a genre or mode that is inherently devoted to the challenge of representing the unrepresentable. Through the readings of a number of nineteenth-century texts and the analysis of the fiction of two twentieth-century writers (H. P. Lovecraft and Tommaso Landolfi), I show how the intersection of the monstrous theme with the fantastic literary mode forces us to consider how a third term, that of language, intervenes in many guises in the negotiation of the relationship between humanity and monstrosity. I argue that fantastic texts engage with monstrosity as a linguistic problem, using it to explore the limits of discourse and constructing through it a specific language for the indescribable. The monster is framed as a bizarre, uninterpretable sign, whose disruptive presence in the text hints towards a critique of overconfident rational constructions of ‘reality’ and the self. The dissertation is divided into three main sections. The first reconstructs the critical debate surrounding fantastic literature – a decades-long effort of definition modeling the same tension staged by the literary fantastic; the second offers a focused reading of three short stories from the second half of the nineteenth century (“What Was It?,” 1859, by Fitz-James O’Brien, the second version of “Le Horla,” 1887, by Guy de Maupassant, and “The Damned Thing,” 1893, by Ambrose Bierce) in light of the organizing principle of apophasis; the last section investigates the notion of monstrous language in the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft and Tommaso Landolfi.

This dissertation interrogates writers’ references to “constancy” during the English civil wars, reading the debate surrounding this vexed and multifarious term as indicative of a broader examination of constancy as a concept. Through generic case studies of the emblem book, prose romance, epic, and country house poem, I show how writers used constancy’s semantic and contextual slippage to participate in key debates of the civil wars; Hester Pulter, Percy Herbert, John Milton, Thomas Carew, Mildmay Fane, and Andrew Marvell deploy constancy as they intervene in civil war polemic surrounding kingship, property ownership, liturgy, and England’s relationship with the wider world. These cases, I argue, show the interaction between writers’ reevaluation of constancy and their reevaluation of inherited literary traditions. In interrogating constancy, writers articulate and even inspire innovation in literary genre, thereby demonstrating not the destruction of literary form during the civil wars, but writers’ ability to accommodate established literary tradition to dynamic religiopolitical circumstances.

Although scholarship on human rights has burgeoned within literary studies in recent years, that scholarship primarily engages literature as an outlet for trauma and witnessing, rather than restoration and recovery. "The Art of Reconciliation in Rwanda" instead reflects upon the recuperative capacities of art to fuel State-led reconciliation programs. Concentrating on Rwandan literature, theater, film, and memorial sites following the 1994 genocide, I theorize the many literatures of reconciliation in terms of three distinct genres: transfiguration, trial, and memorialization. Existing debates about reconciliation within Rwanda have furthermore been dominated by social science and ethnographic research that wrongly reduce reconciliation to ethnic identity, thereby presuming that survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators only possess conflicting views over the national project to unify. But as the artworks I discuss differently indicate, Rwandan reconciliation has exceeded such formulaic categories to manifest in overlapping genres and vectors of identification that transcend ethnic divides. In my dissertation, genre thus offers a route to both creating and perceiving the “commonality within difference” so crucial to successful reconciliation politics.

“The Ontological Imagination: Living Form in American Literature” proposes a new theory of the imagination as a way forward from the long academic critique of the human subject. It is unclear how we should conceive of the human—of our potential, for example, for self-knowledge, independent thought, or moral choice—after the critiques of self-presence, intentionality, and autonomy that have come to define work in the humanities. This dissertation offers an image of the human responsive to such challenges. I argue that a set of major nineteenth-century American writers (Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, Henry James, and Walt Whitman) held a paradoxical conception of the imagination as both the mark of human uniqueness—the faculty that raises the mind above the world’s sheer givenness, allowing for creative action—and the space of our greatest intimacy with the nonhuman world. For these writers, the highest human achievements simultaneously differentiate us from the rest of nature and abolish our difference from it. Chapter 1, “Emerson’s ‘Doctrine of Life’: Embryogenesis and the Ontology of the Fragment,” presents an Emerson whose investigations of emotional numbness reveal a disintegrative force immanent to living beings. In the new science of embryology—a model of life at its most impersonal—he finds a non-teleological principle of growth by which a human life or an imaginative essay might attain fragile coherence. Chapter 2, “‘Concrete Imagination’: William James’s Post-Critical Thinking,” claims that James’s multifaceted career is best understood as a quest for an intellectual vitality that would not abandon self-consistency. I argue that an ontology of thinking underlies his seemingly disparate projects: his theory of the will as receptivity, his conception of faith as mental risk, and his late practice of exemplification over sequential argument. Chapter 3, “‘The Novel is a Living Thing’: Mannerism and Immortality in The Wings of the Dove,” argues that Henry James envisions the novel as an incarnation, a means of preserving the life of a beloved young woman beyond her death. Through formal techniques inspired by painterly mannerism, James creates a novelistic universe that unfixes the categories of life and death. Chapter 4, “‘Like the Sun Falling Around a Helpless Thing’: Whitman’s Poetry of Judgment,” emphasizes the figural and perspectival features of Whitman’s poetry at even its most prosaic in order to show how the imagination grounds us in a common world rather than detaching us from it. In opposition to an ethics for which realistic recognition of the world demands suppression of the imagination, Whitman’s realism requires acts of imaginative judgment. In sum, “The Ontological Imagination” hopes to reorient study of nineteenth-century American literature by revising both its traditional humanist reading and its recent posthumanist critique. On the level of the discipline, by defining literary form as a singular space in which the human imagination and impersonal life are revealed as indivisible, I make a case for the compatibility of the new formalist and ontological approaches to literary study.

This dissertation argues that interethnic romance narratives reflect and express central religious, political, racial, and gendered identities and agendas of Jewish American literature and culture in the early twentieth century. Chapter One shows that fin-de-siècle Reform Jewish women authors employed interethnic romance narratives to express a belief in America as exceptional as a place of religious and gender egalitarianism. Chapter Two turns to journalist and fiction writer Abraham Cahan, who wrote interethnic romance narratives to weigh the balance between idealism and pragmatism, socialist universalist values and the principles of Jewish nationalism in determining the character of Jewishness in America. Chapter Three demonstrates that Jewish American women’s popular fictions of interethnic romance in the 1920s employed interethnic romance plots to show women’s independence and mobility in light of early feminism and to express the limitations of feminist discourse when it ran counter to their ethnic identities. Chapter Four describes how narratives of interethnic romance written by Yiddish writers I. I. Shvarts, Joseph Opatoshu, Isaac Raboy, and David Ignatov employ tropes of interethnic romance together with geographical border crossings into non-immigrant or non-Jewish spaces, co-locating physical dislocation and disorientation and intimate interpersonal desire and unease. Together, these studies demonstrate the significance of interethnic romance in the American Jewish collective imaginary in this period and reveal the flexibility and longevity of this central theme in American Jewish discourse.

This dissertation traces Richard Wagner’s influence on the twentieth century Western European novel. Through a close reading of three monumental works: Gabriele d’Annunzio’s Il fuoco (1900), Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927), and Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: The story of the German composer Adrian Leverkühn, as told by a friend (1947), I argue that Wagner’s artistic and theoretical legacy helps set the course for modernist prose. By investigating the vast webs of intertextual references present in these works, this project examines how novelists manipulate multimedia collage, autobiographical incursion, and narrative silence to replicate the ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or “Total Work of Art” both championed by Richard Wagner in his early theoretical manifesti and deployed, in evolving ways, throughout the composer’s life. I argue that, rather than creating simple allusions to the Wagnerian ideal across media, d’Annunzio, Proust, and Mann strive to reproduce the full spectrum of Wagner’s biographical and operatic spectacle within the confines of the printed page. In so doing, they pioneer revolutionary prose techniques that bring Wagner’s innovations to an audience far beyond the walls of the opera house.

This dissertation is a comparative and transnational study of the techniques of racial impersonation used by white performers to represent black Afro-diasporic people in early modern England, Spain, and France. The racialization of blackness that took place in England at the turn of the sixteenth century has been well studied over the course of the last thirty years. This dissertation expands English early modern race scholarship in new directions by revealing the existence of a multi-directional circulation of racial ideas, lexemes, and performance techniques that led to the development of a vivid trans-European stage idiom of blackness across national borders in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While early modern race scholarship has traditionally focused on the rhetorical and dramatic strategies used by playwrights to create black characters, this dissertation brings to the fore the ideological work inherent in performance. It does so by arguing that the techniques of racial impersonation used in various loci of European performance culture, such as blackface, blackspeak (a comic mock-African accent), and black dances, racialized Afro-diasporic people as they led spectators in a variety of ways to think of those people as belonging naturally at the bottom of any well-constituted social order. This dissertation shows how the hermeneutic configurations and re-configurations of techniques of racial impersonation such as blackface, blackspeak, and black dance responded to social changes, to the development of colonization and color-based slavery, and to changing perceptions of what Afro-diasporic people’s status should be in European and Atlantic societies across the early modern period.