This dissertation argues that slapstick films conventions, including the gag, humiliation and violence, and comic business, produce the screen figure body-object, which operates as the substrate and the cause of slapstick. Slapstick creates body-objects that are passive, inept and failing, or active and successful. I contend that industrial and economic modernization in the United States increased the need for perceptual learning, a process through which the subject develops the ability to process new percepts, creating a new sensorium that responds to modernitys pressures through new attentional abilities. Slapstick models how attention should be allocated both inside and outside the exhibition space. The slapstick viewer is not a spectator because to be a spectator is to be isolated and silent, whereas the slapstick viewer participates in a collective viewing position. Slapstick reception focuses on the viewers body because slapstick film generates laughter, a bodily response that connects the individual viewer to other viewers within the exhibition space, with the screen figure as the pivot. Slapstick evokes four kinds of laughter: superior laughter, the laughter of analogy and recognition, laughter resulting from incongruity, and laughter resulting from release of tension. Viewers feel empathy toward each other though a direct encounter with the other. They also feel empathy both toward the screen figure that exhibits pain and humiliation and toward the screen figure playing the gag, a kind of empathy that involves mirror neurons, which fire both when a subject commits an action and when the subject sees that action committed. Finally, they experience empathy toward the film as an art form with which they cooperate to produce meaning.

In this dissertation, I argue that the shifting cultural signification of food in early-nineteenth-century England generates literary responses which frame crucial debates of Romanticism. As the emphasis of eating moves from a dietetic to an aesthetic one, the discourses surrounding food form a constitutive part of class identity, which in turn relies on definitions of aesthetic value. Gastronomy redraws the lines of middle-class identity in relation to bodily pleasure, and these lines correspond to literary engagements with materiality. The intersection of literary and gastronomic aesthetics shows how the logic of materiality always informs Romantic aspirations for aesthetic transcendence. Thus the attempt to separate transcendence from material aesthetics falters when broaching the topic through the terms established by food discourse. Lord Byrons wariness of aesthetic transcendence, posed frequently in his poetry, receives an analog in his obsession with his weight and his resulting idiosyncratic eating habits. John Keats, who frequently offers sensual images of food in his poetry, engages with the discourse of gastronomy in order to interrogate the fundamental dilemma of Romanticismthat aesthetic transcendence must be achieved through materiality. In the realm of political economy, Thomas Mathuss assertion that eating functions only biologically ignores the social implications of eating raised by gourmands, and taken up by Thomas De Quincey in his writings on bodily aesthetic experience. Ultimately, in this dissertation I trace how the formation of literary taste in the Romantic period emerges out of gastronomic discourse, and how the principles of gourmandism impinge on the assumptions of Romantic ideology. And yet, like Romanticism with its multivalent associations, gastronomy too signifies multiply. Instead of one monolithic discourse of food, many exist simultaneously and symbiotically, and this wide range of significations makes Romantic authors engagements with food equally diverse.

This project addresses the poetics of remembering historically traumatic events by examining Fred DAguiars long poem, Bill of Rights (1998). I argue that the poem constitutes a ritual of anamnesis against the forgetting of the events of Jonestown, Guyana through its detailing of the violence done by and on behalf of Jim Jones. Through a fictional poetic persona who has survived Jonestown, DAguiar explores that community and the ways in which it left scars on the individuals, and the collective, memories. I begin with a comparison of DAguiars work with another long poem that deals substantially with historical violence and dispossession, William Carlos Williamss Paterson. I then situate the poetics of both Williams and DAguiar in the context of Shoah literature and specifically in relation to Giorgio Agambens notion of testimony and to Walter Benjamins concept of the ethical state of emergency and political contestation that is inherent in all acts of remembering the past. Finally, I engage DAguiars reading of the Guyanese novelist, Wilson Harris, and of Harriss use of wilderness as a transformative agent, concluding that the poem, and the historical subject it depicts, constitute a stigmata that provokes further rituals of remembering.

This dissertation investigates how men on the racial margins, whose ownership of masculinity is contested within the American context, co-opt, subvert, and rupture that is disidentify with conventional registers of American manhood. José Esteban Muñoz explains disidentification as a survival strategy by which those outside the racial and sexual mainstream aim to negotiate and ultimately transform the cultural logic from within (11). While Muñozs work concentrates on the disidentification process of queer subjects, I theorize his paradigm in regards to Asian American literature by close-reading Frank Chins _The Chickencoop Chinaman_ (1981) which, I believe, best exemplifies disidentifying Asian American men in action. In addition to Chin, this dissertation reads works by three Asian American male authors Younghill Kang, Gus Lee, and Leonard Chang in order to elaborate on how these authors rewrite the dominant script of American manhood; these writers seemingly contend that the most effective way to disarticulate the majoritarian discourse that emasculates Asian American men is to for them to embrace black masculinity, which connotes hypermasculinity. These writers, nonetheless, elide that hypermasculinization of black bodies is the flipside of the same strategy that feminizes Asian American bodies, one that is mobilized to emasculate all nonwhite males. Thus I also delve into the slippage that occurs during the convoluted processes of disidentification. Along these lines, I critically assess (and, at the same time, embrace the shortcomings of) how Asian American men interrogate, reconcile with, and extenuate the prevalent definition of American masculinity. Acknowledging the possibility that disidentification may be an imperfect solution to remasculinize minority male subjects, theorizing literature by Asian American men through disidentification enables me to extensively critique the fixity of race and gender as categories.

This project argues that British modernism was directly informed by the theories of eugenic race-regeneration that gained popularity at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. In particular, the central figure of the eugenic mother, or race-mother, influenced the portrayal of maternal figures in modernism and offered a locus through which modernist authors could critique this construction and enter into debates about artistry and national regeneration. I begin by defining and contextualizing race-motherhood, a concept which united racial purity, imperialism, social service, and literal and metaphoric good breeding. I discuss the participation of little-known women, such as Victoria Welby, in the eugenics movement, and I argue that New Woman authors, such as Emma Brooke, Menie Muriel Dowie, and Olive Schreiner, challenged male-centered eugenic discourses through the creation of narratives centered on eugenic motherhood. The modernist authors I discuss -- Mina Loy, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce -- are simultaneously drawn to and repelled by the symbolic and political power of eugenics. Mina Loy actively endorsed eugenic motherhood; she desired a eugenic love child that would represent the fusion of masculine Futurism and feminist poetry. Like Loy, Woolf rejected Victorian models of femininity and sometimes endorsed eugenic feminism in her essays. However, in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, she remained deeply skeptical about the regenerative power of biological motherhood. The power of the race-mother (in the form of Mrs. Ramsay) proves to be insufficient, and the female artist must replace biological creativity with artistic creativity. James Joyce makes a similar move in Ulysses: although his artists are male, they figuratively give birth in Oxen of the Sun with the aid of a midwife who replaces the mother. Thus, modernist authors reference the symbolic construct of the race-mother in order to both criticize and appropriate her power for the creation of art.

This thesis analyzes the representation of dispersed subjectivity in Ito Seis 1937 novella, Streets of Fiendish Ghosts, paying special attention to the ways in which Itos depiction of a scattered, externalized selfhood prefigures later twentieth century concepts of the posthuman. The argument contextualizes Itos work within the overlapping discourses of Japanese modernism, British modernism (of which Ito was a translator), and international Futurism, all of which have resonances in the surreal and dreamlike world that Ito describes. Through acknowledging these multiple contexts, I endeavor to read Itos work as a site of cultural intersection rather than as a belated reaction to British modernist masterpieces. Itos expressions of a subject spread across space and time complicate the models of spatial and temporal organization that made possible hegemonies of center over periphery, or imperial metropolis over provincial outpost. In this way, Itos work both gestures toward notions of the posthuman and questions whether the preference that the post gives to the future over the past is not a sign of misplaced ideological optimism.

Eighteenth-century anthologist Vicesimus Knoxs Elegant Extracts were popular and influential literary collections that played no small part in the formation of the English literary canon. While Knox and his contemporaries have provocatively been analyzed with economic and generic models, this paper examines Knoxs subjective views about literature and the project of the anthologizing. While Knox ardently believed in egalitarian access to literature for the aristocracy and bourgeoisie alike, he felt threatened by a perceived split in the increasingly literate middle class. Knox roughly divided the middle-class readership into merchants and artisans and feared that the crude, utilitarian demands of the merchant for social mobility through literary acumen would diminish a popular taste for poetry Knoxs most esteemed genre. As a result, Knox anthologized only the best, the most canonical English poetry so as to preserve its cultural capital. Understanding Knoxs canonizing project as reacting to popular opinions rather than imperializing them gives a different inflection to commonly-held notions of canonization. For Knox, canonization was not so much a move to unite the reading masses as it was a ploy to save what poetry he could from cultural neglect.

This project links the modern American environmental movement, typically thought to have its origins in the social upheaval of the 1970s, with the earlier postwar period. I argue that the same domestic turn which characterized the expanding middle classs movement toward the suburbs, automobile culture, and other hallmarks of the modern lifestyle paralleled a new belief that modern technology, armed with such innovations as the atomic bomb, had once and for all conqueredor domesticatednature. This new perceived condition generated a powerful anxiety about the role of science in society which is reflected in the literature of the period, taking forms as diverse as cinematic fantasies of mutant insects taking ecological revenge on human cities, pedagogical texts which advised parents to help their children reconnect to the natural world, and wildly popular books and films which used modern photographic techniques to reveal the nebulous depths of the worlds oceans. Most importantly, this popular interest laid the groundwork for environmentalism to be understood as a matter of consumer choice and individual behavior. This project engages at length the work of Rachel Carson, whose 1962 bestseller Silent Spring is often cited as the beginning of modern environmentalist thought, but uses Carsons writing as a lens for reading early environmentalism in a variety of texts and genres. I also consult childrens texts such as Charlottes Web, childcare manuals, science fiction films and novels, popular science writing, fictional accounts of suburban life, contemporary social criticism, cartoons, and advertisements to understand, broadly, the dimensions of the environmental impulse. My work is driven by the assumption, garnered from social theorists such as Michel de Certeau, that readers consumption of these popular genres, the stuff of everyday life, not only gives vital insight into the ideas which govern historical change, but also, in subtle ways, helps to shape it.

The importation of Victorian economic discourse into discussions of the human body and, vice versa, the use of biological rhetoric to talk about the economic system result in the muddling of the symbolic and literal registers in a number of texts from the period. Victorian sanitary reports, John Ruskins tracts on political economy, and, most notably, Charles Dickenss Bleak House all exhibit an unexpected merging or overlapping of the metaphorical and the material in their discussions of both disease and economics. While numerous literary critics writing on Bleak House have recognized the symbolic function of disease as a representation of societal ills, few have acknowledged the inherence of the literal in Dickenss careful descriptions of the diseases to which his characters fall prey. Examining the deaths of Jo, Krook, and Richard in relation to prevailing economic and biological concerns in Victorian society about circulation, stoppage, and consumption will enable the exhumation of the literal and material facets of disease in Bleak House. A more complete picture of Dickenss novel as an active intervention in Victorian politics and social reform will thus emerge.

My dissertation argues British writers in the 1930s and 1940s all explored the political efficacy of other media in order to create new definitions of Englishness. It aims both to shed light on the relationship between different media and to explore the new definitions of English culture that arise from their self-conscious cross-media experimentation. This study, divided into two parts, examines 1) literary responses to non-literary media, such as photography, film, and radio; and 2) the way these cross-media experiments participated in a broader cultural project of defining what it meant to be English in the interwar years and the immediate postwar aftermath. The works of Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, W. H. Auden, and Graham Greene reveal how they thought about writing as a medium in terms of the unique visuality or aurality of radio, photography, and film. Responding to questions about Englands post-imperial status, these writers turned to notions of perception that other media provoked in order to seek new ways to define the nation, whether as a state, community, or organic whole.