My dissertation responds to recent calls for a critical medical humanities and a literature of global health by first investigating the function of literature in the development of earlier specialties in international health, with tropical medicine at the turn of the twentieth century as a key example. Scholarship in history and rhetoric of the period has described the formation of modern disciplines as a separation of scientific and literary textual traditions, predicated on the rise of distinct genres for the production of scientific knowledge, namely the scientific article, the case study, and the medical report. These genres were certainly used by key specialists of the tropics to establish a new rhetoric for description and to reduce the role of the imagination when dealing with human and geographic difference. Yet their writing on sub-Saharan Africa continued to signal a disciplinary disorder. Malaria, in particular, demanded the use of scene and figuration for the classification of space, ecologies, diseases and natives--rhetoric derived from literary genres, particularly the travelogue, memoir and novella. The result is a corpus I call malaria literature, one that includes works as disparate as Richard Burton's travel account, First Footsteps in East Africa (1856), Patrick Manson's textbook, Tropical Diseases: Manual of the Diseases of Warm Climates (1898), Joseph Conrad's novella, Heart of Darkness (1899), AR Paterson's pamphlet, A Guide to the Prevention of Malaria in Kenya (1935) and Isak Dinesen's memoir, Out of Africa (1937). I read these five texts as part of an undisciplined library underwriting the construction of a modern medical specialty, and thus illustrate how the positivist turn in Africanist discourse became an incomplete effort to distance medical writing from traditions of poesis. Instead of a rupture between the literary and the scientific, I find a sustained epistemic complicity: a set of persistent knowledge-producing relations between both representational modes, where metaphors for space work with microbial notions of contagion to define disease and shape policy. Reading for such complicity, I argue, recasts tropical medicine as a confluence of scientific and literary traditions. It also complicates contemporary notions of medical literature developed after World War II, the birth of the World Health Organization, decolonization and the emergence of global health, and it enables the field of literary studies to enter into debates about the ethics of public health endeavors from a vantage point unique to the study of representations of disease.

This dissertation explores the dynamics of identity construction and nation building in Hebrew and Yiddish literature in Russia and Poland in the decade following the 1905 revolution. It examines these dynamics through a study of the poetry of Yaakov Steinberg between the years 1903-1915. Steinberg, an important but little studied poet and writer, wrote extensively in both languages. He renounced Yiddish upon his immigration to Palestine. Through the comparison of Steinberg's Hebrew poems and the poems he wrote in Yiddish this dissertation exposes the intricate relations between the languages and the political ideologies of Yiddishism and Zionism that accompanied them, in Steinberg's work and in general. The dissertation shows how the constitution of a modern national subject became the prime concern for these literatures, both as a general ideological demand and as a personal, emotional question. By placing the conflict between the two language ideologies in the center of the debate, this dissertation seeks to point out to a serious methodological lacuna in the study of Hebrew literature and of Zionist history. By placing Yaakov Steinberg's poetry in a wide polyglot context and defining his bilingualism as a fundamental characteristic and a major theoretic concern, this work seeks to demonstrate the depth and span of the discourse on the future of the Jews, as individuals or as a nation, that took place in the revolutionary space of turn of the century Russia.

This dissertation analyzes how the motif of the “morbid genius” became a central concept for the formation of the literary field in 1910s and 1920s Japan. Writers deployed the idea that artistic creativity is a form of mental abnormality in order to carve a privileged space for themselves as “modern authors,” at a time when literary writing was becoming professionalized. Psychological abnormality offered both a mark of modernity, as well as a set of aesthetic, medical and political discourses to legitimize a notion of literary value based on the artist's unique experience of the world. This discourse of uniqueness was often contrasted with the logic of economic profit, as if the authors' abnormality were proof that their works had value beyond the price they commanded as a commodity in the mass cultural market. However, it was precisely this configuration of literary value as extra-economical that made possible the creation of a privileged space for literature within the cultural economy of value. Chapter 1 traces the origins of medicalized concepts of “morbid genius” and their reception and development in modern Japan. I argue that by the 1910s, psychological abnormality had become naturalized in Japan as a key feature of “modern literature.” Next, I look at the circulation of biographical literature on 19th-century European artists in Japan. While relatively rare before, modern artists become the dominant subject in biographical literature published after 1914. This interest in the lives of European artists appears actually at the same time that their works became widely available in translation, establishing a very close connection between their oeuvre and their pathological diagnosis. The rest of the chapter is devoted to the discussions of artistic pathology in the popular psychology journal Hentai shinri (Abnormal Psychology, 1917-1926), both in the form of “pathographies” of 19th-century European artists, and in writings by 1920s Japanese authors on their own experiences with psychological abnormality. Chapter 2 focuses on the early works of Tanizaki Jun'ichirō (1886-1965), looking specifically at stories that explore the moral and aesthetic implications of the ideal of the “morbid genius” in the context of the modern cultural market. I interpret Tanizaki's use of psychological abnormality motifs as an attempt to construct a model of artistic development that is markedly different from established narratives of bourgeois and academic success, exploring an idea of artistic value as originated in the unique psyche of the artist. Tanizaki’s texts highlight the ambivalent position of the modern artist by focusing on protagonists who waver between the lure of the “morbid genius” image, and the need to participate in the economic exchange of the cultural market to achieve recognition as artists. Chapter 3 is devoted to the early writings of Satō Haruo (1892-1964). I analyze his utopian theory of art as a path towards one’s “highest self,” and a space of resistance against the uniformization of human experience and alienation from one’s labor brought by the industrial economy. Against this background, I highlight in his fiction the contradictory interplay between the unique morbid sensibility of artists, and the demands of their professional position in the modern economy. To close, I propose Satō's 1920s writings about Taiwan as an endpoint for this utopian project, when his fascination with abnormal creativity encounters the harsh realities of colonial violence. Chapter 4 looks at the works of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892-1927). I understand Akutagawa's experiments with fragmented narrative form as an extension of his interest in abnormal perception, and not as the crisis of a previously unproblematic and self-contained “modern artist.” Akutagawa's historical fiction and critical texts, as well as his obsession with the risk of an inherited madness, show that his idea of the “modern artist” was always based on liminal figures that struggled with the taxing demands of artistic activity. I close the chapter with Akutagawa’s re-telling of the life of Christ, to consider how the discourse of abnormal genius, and artistic labor by extension, gains an existential dimension when used to re-interpret the New Testament and celebrate artists as “christs.”

This dissertation studies modernist translation spaces in Mexico City, a city that became an important hemispheric destination during the early twentieth-century. Although some earlier examples are provided for historical context, my analysis focuses primarily on architectural and editorial spaces that emerged in the city between 1917 and the late 1930s, the decades between the final years of the Mexican Revolution—during Venustiano Carranza’s administration, following the Queretaro Constitution—and the instauration of the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana—founded by Lázaro Cárdenas in 1938. Modernism in Mexico City involved an international circuit of people—such as the poet Langston Hughes, the art historian Anita Brenner, the editor and anthropologist Frances Toor, the Indian activist, and founder of the communist party in Mexico M.N. Roy, and the photographers Tina Modotti and Edward Weston—all of whom traveled to or lived in Mexico City during the 1920s and 1930s. It also involved a series of Mexican writers, artists and intellectuals—among them, the poets Gilberto Owen, Salvador Novo and Xavier Villaurrutia, the writer and intellectual Alfonso Reyes, the muralist Diego Rivera, the architects Juan O’Gorman and Juan Segura, and the painters Dr. Atl and Nahui Olin—whose translation practices were instrumental for the making of Mexican modernism. I argue that these modernist actors played a key role as cultural translators and that it was ultimately through their work that Mexico City, among other so-called peripheral modernities, found a place in the cultural and geographical map of international modernism—a place, nonetheless, which modernist studies still tend to ignore or misrepresent. Drawing from translation theory, architectural history, transatlantic modernism, and the spatial semiology and hermeneutics, Translation Spaces maps the places, both cultural and physical, that these international modernists occupied or, in some cases, created. The five chapters study different architectural spaces—i.e. theaters, rooftops, houses, cinemas, and apartment buildings—and combine spatial analysis and architectural history of such spaces with analysis of specific translation practices that took place in them, such as literary translation, film dubbing and subtitling in modern sound cinemas, urban photography, adaptations of architectural languages to local needs, as well as literary representations and discussions of modern spaces. Taken together as different examples of modernist translation practices, the objects of study in this dissertation map modernist Mexico City as a space in a synchronic relationship to the larger map of international modernism.

My dissertation Between Geopolitics and Geopoetics – “Mitteleuropa” as a Transnational Memory Discourse in Austrian and Yugoslav Postwar Literature examines how the German idea of Central Europe inspired a new poetics of memory in Austrian and South Slavic literary texts during the Cold War period (1945 – 1989). As early as the 19th century, German and Austrian political thinkers (Fürst von Metternich, Friedrich Liszt, Friedrich Naumann) have framed ideas of Germanic cultural and economic eastward expansion under the term Mitteleuropa. This was countered by a wave of post-imperial Austrian literature after 1918 that nostalgically evoked what had once been the largest multiethnic and multilingual political entity on the continent as Mitteleuropa. Even though these writings offered far from a unifying vision of old Austria, literary scholarship in the 1960s interpreted them as creating a retrospective utopia or “Habsburg myth.” Decades later, a group of Eastern European dissidents resuscitated that same literary idea to attack the Cold War division of Europe. The dialectics inherent in the Mitteleuropa debate from the beginning (east versus west, Germans versus Slavs, center versus periphery) have continued to shape postwar public discourses on memory, loss and justice. Challenging both expansionist and nostalgic visions of a larger Europe, my dissertation argues that with the radical geo-political shifts after World War II, an alternate memory discourse of Mitteleuropa emerged in the work of writers who questioned previous notions of geographic identity and national allegiance. By looking at the way that iconic writers like Ingeborg Bachmann, Peter Handke, Danilo Kiš and Dubravka Ugrešić utilize the legacy of Habsburg nostalgia in the postwar period to develop their own poetics of memory, I show how they establish a new form of engaged writing, which transgresses the ideological divide that has defined the continent. I reveal deep ties between the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia and the second Austrian Republic of 1955, dating back to a common imperial past, the persistent ideal of a multiethnic community and an uneasy relationship to dogmatic political ideologies. Both the second Austrian Republic and the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia found themselves in what seemed to be a historical vacuum after the end of the Second World War: Though under completely different political premises, both countries elided uncomfortable aspects of their recent pasts and replaced them with a highly edited version of historical ‘truth.’ In Austria, this meant a self-fashioning as the first victim of Nazi-Germany, and a denial of widespread collaboration in Holocaust atrocities. In the newly founded federative republic of Yugoslavia, Socialist ideology promoted the image of the partisan hero, but kept silent about crimes committed by the ‘liberators’ themselves. While Austria sought to distance itself from postwar Germany through a nostalgic reference to the Habsburg Empire, the Yugoslav Socialists’ official rhetoric of progress, plurality and unity left no room for inconvenient truths that might ignite conflicts between its numerous ethnicities. For lack of a public debate, the role of critical memory in both countries was consequently taken over by postwar authors and artists offering a different ‘engaged’ literature without succumbing to the pitfalls of ideology. Unlike previous interpretations, which focus on the historical ruptures created by Nazi Fascism and the Iron Curtain, my dissertation shows that Central Europe persists both as a literary network and a cultural community (Kulturgemeinschaft) defined by political debate and civic engagement.

This dissertation examines the literary and cultural history of information in modern China from 1919 to 1949. This era witnessed a kind of communications revolution, marked by the rapid proliferation of new ways of transmitting and inscribing information, which joined other revolutions (sociopolitical, linguistic) in ushering in the modern subject. In the form of xiaoxi, xinxi, or tongji, “information” became an essential entity by which to understand and implement modern practices cropping up throughout China—from statistical knowledge to political propaganda, from stock speculation to new virtual communities. This dissertation uses four case studies to revisit familiar writers such as Mao Dun (1896-1981), Ding Ling (1904-1986), and Shen Congwen (1902-1988), while also excavating a number of innovative figures such as the avant-garde psychologist, Zhang Yaoxiang (1893-1964), and the communications critic, Xie Liuyi (1898-1945), to show how the rise of a modern literary culture is inseparable from the rise of this early information era, when writers, critics, and artists collectively developed new modes of literary representation, critical reading, and visualizing information. New fiction did not simply passively reflect the spread of information into everyday life or changes in China’s information order. Rather, as writers and critics integrated forms of information into their work, even envisioning literature itself as a kind of medium of information, they contributed to what I call an emergent “aesthetics of information.” Why did forms like the database or the encyclopedia inspire new modes of literary composition? How could literary forms incorporate or critique forms of data organization such as account books or statistical tables? When did information provide new ways of constructing the real—and when did literary realism seem directly opposed to the abstractive and disembodying qualities of information? The aesthetics of information directly and creatively engaged with information in a variety of ways, sometimes by way of a process of absorption and appropriation, and at other times through a more oppositional logic of resistance in the form of critique, unmasking, or satire. Ultimately the lens of “information” sheds new light on the development of modern Chinese literature, while also contributing a crucial piece to the broader mosaic of modern information’s global history. It thereby historicizes the early foundations of many of the hallmarks of postindustrial life and culture in China today: the spread of abstraction, the rise of white-collar information management, and the increasingly important role of network communications in modulating sociality and politics.

This dissertation investigates the transformation undergone by the Francoist dictatorship (1939-1978) in Spain in the 1950s and 1960s, which occurred under conditions of neoliberal rationalities and petroleum toxicity –petrotoxicty. It addresses the transformation at three levels: the dictatorship’s criminalized bodies; the Francoist national political project; and early transnational attempts for European unification. By exploring an archive of laws, mass media, and intellectual dialogues, the dissertation contends that there was a shift in regimes of criminality that allowed the dictatorship in the south and Europe in the north to establish the initial form of their coalition. The dissertation addresses processes of recognition of criminality by establishing a critical framework that examines the transition from a dominant paradigm of disease toxicity to one of petrotoxicity. In proposing that this transition took place together with the development of neoliberalism, the dissertation argues that the neoliberal regime operated during its period of consolidation by generalizing, at national and transnational scales, forms of exclusion and inclusion that were characteristic of what the text presents as the “petrotoxic regime of criminality.” By conducting the analysis through the lens of the petrotoxic regime of criminality, the dissertation offers a fresh perspective to the debate within Spanish Peninsular Cultural Studies about the seemingly contradictory nature that the Francoist dictatorship acquired during this period; both anti-modern and modern; both Catholic fundamentalist and neoliberal capitalist. It allows us to shed light on a process of revaluation of the regime’s toxic nature that resulted in a Catholic Fundamentalist Capitalist dictatorship.

This dissertation performs a diary-side ethnographic reading of socialist Yugoslavia of the period 1950-1974. It offers a reassessment of the diary-form, starting with an analysis of approaches in historiography, literary studies and theories of the advent of the modern self, by proposing and demonstrating a reading that takes into full consideration the understandings and practice of diary-keeping in terms of anthropological debates. The epistemological concerns surrounding the questions of writing and the field, and the intricate place of the diary genre, of being there, and in the ethnographic archive are situated within close readings of discrete diaries written in socialist Yugoslavia of the period. The diary-form taken in the strict sense implies an account that argues with the reading of diary texts and with “diaristic evidence” and, in this case, depends on the “law of genre.” Its concerns is with the genre practiced, hence authored, by individual diarists,. This ethnographic engagement is rooted in the practice of collecting (published, archival and private sources) and further tracing of the diary texts, by close reading and with attention to the problematic of textuality. Two quasi-concepts of “every-daily inscriptions” and “economies of secret-ing” are posited as generic marks and inform an analytical approach that focuses on the historicity and publicness of the diary-forms at hand. Thus defined, as different textual practices of serial diurnal self-recording that adhere to calendar marks, diaries are not to be substituted for by the ideologies of the everyday, nor simply reduced to chronologies of (general) events. In focus here is the diary-form’s capacity to create withdrawal, not only in terms of publicness, but what is inscribed or marked in the text as the folding of a secret. I read the diary as a place of dissemination and circulation of (public) textual forms. In this way, in the work of this dissertation that depends on diaries as its primary object and source of study, attention is moved to scenes of the social life of the form. It presents the classificatory logic of autobiographical and other documents, public forms, and the literary and (personal) archive-creating practices of diarists. The textual historicity is read within this logic of diaristic inscription and the practices specific to the form, such as withdrawal, re-reading, publishing and keeping. The dissertation probes the question of periodization in terms of the diary-form that is neither a culturally specific practice, nor posited as expressive of the period. It is a study that makes visible a set of contingencies, and thus addresses the complex question of the forms, historicity and historical consciousness inscribed by the diarists’ textual practices outside heritage discourses, histories of the present and the approaches of memory studies. The four parts of the dissertation are curated from within case studies to address the forms of authority and authorial discourses in socialist Yugoslavia where diary-side, or, what is considered to be a subjective source, subsumes the institutional as well as the realms of the “ordinary” along with that of dissent, where studies of the authoritative forms are more frequently directed. The ethnographic work of the dissertation and its arguments are situated within the logic of “diaristic evidence,” where the strictness of the diary-side reading of socialist Yugoslavia puts forth (auto)biographical political authority as a form of political power and its representational logic, the forms of ambassadorial representation of Yugoslav exceptionalism, the claims of youth and generationally authoritative interpretations, the forms of literary authority, and testimonial diaristic accounts.

The topic of this doctoral thesis is the nature essay: a literary form that became widely used in European literature around 1800 and continues to flourish in times of ecological crisis. Blending natural history discourse, essayistic thought patterns, personal anecdotes, and lyrical descriptions, nature essays are hybrid literary texts. Their authors have often been writers with a background in science. As interdis-cursive agents they move swiftly between different knowledge formations. This equips them with a unique potential in the context of ecology. Essayistic narrators can grasp the interdisciplinary character of environmental issues because they have the ability to combine different types of knowledge. They can be encyclopae¬dic fact mongers, metaphysical ramblers and ethical counsellors. More often than not they are all in one person. Where nature essays were taken into consideration so far they were mostly discussed together with other nature-oriented nonfiction forms under the label ‘nature writing’. This study proposes a different approach in that it insists that the nature essay has to be understood as a literary form in its own right. It explores canonical works of nature writing, such as Thoreau’s Walden, often for the first time as nature essays by discussing them alongside other typical examples of this genre tradition. In order to better understand the discursive impact of this form, I frame my discussion in the context of ecocritical theory. This means that I analyse my corpus of texts with regard to the ways in which writers depict the relationships between human and nonhuman spheres. Putting a particular focus on Germanic and An-glophone literature, the present thesis investigates central paradigms in the evolu-tion of nature essay writing. It covers a time period that stretches from its roots in late eighteenth-century natural history discourse to the present, identifying key epistemological, formal, and thematic patterns of this literary form the importance of which so far has been rather neglected by literary criticism.

Stages of History: New World Spectacles and the Theater of the World in the Sixteenth Century is a sweeping analysis of dramatic performances in New Spain and Brazil that superimposed depictions of far-flung conflicts with representations of local struggles. Settlers, Franciscans, Jesuits, and Amerindian collaborators overlaid stories of New World conquests with accounts of battles that took place in the Old World, the Mediterranean, and North Africa. The conditions of staging in New Spain and Brazil—particularly performance in public spaces and the use of non-professional actors (conquistadors, missionaries, and natives)—enriched portrayals of far off times and places. These circumstances led playwrights and actors to reinvent global history through the lens of local experience and thus contemplate the historical immediacy of the New World. Participants revised historical narratives and reinterpreted biblical prophecy; they reversed the outcomes of historic defeats and projected Amerindians into distant campaigns. The inhabitants of New Spain and Brazil pictured themselves as protagonists in faraway hostilities and boldly re-arranged Spain and Portugal’s place in Christian eschatology. In these spectacles, New World societies produced optical feedback loops that interlaced regional self-perceptions with worldviews held in the Americas. I conceptualize this visual dialogue by drawing on one of the early modern senses of the term “theater” (or the Latin theatrum): facilitated viewing or orchestrated seeing. Ultimately, the dislocations, anachronisms, and interruptions through which participants linked New Spain and Brazil to other parts of the world produced new narratives and legends. Chroniclers described these performances in the written histories and reports that they sent to influential patrons in the Old World. After their original performance, I argue, these spectacles were re-staged in the various forms of history writing in which they were described. In other words, theatrical performances were made to double as history writing. These spectacles inspired chroniclers to contextualize New World events within global history and tempted historians to edit the plots of dramas to better suit the aims of their histories. The theatrical practice of envisioning other parts of the world, and relating those images back to the Americas, I demonstrate, shaped the writing of New Spanish and Brazilian history. My title, Stages of History, refers to the multiple phases through which New World history came into being.