This dissertation explores how four modernist writers of the 1930s and 1940sWilliam Faulkner, Richard Wright, Delmore Schwartz, and Eudora Weltyused their works to present ways to resist and navigate what they present as the frequently reductive worldview offered by the culture industry. Faulkner tends to show the culture industry as selling easy answers that focus on the end result, which allows his characters to approach the culture industry with a sense of fatalism. To resist this, Faulkner stresses a step-by-step, complex dialectical understanding of the culture industry, one that shows the fissures in its seemingly straightforward narratives and allows the reader to see how the narratives of the culture industry are not totalizing and can be resisted. Richard Wright, with his Native Son (1940), has written a better piece of mass culture, one that both gives the reader what he wants and helps show how the pleasures of mass culture are tied to a racist system. More than any of the other writers Im discussing, Wright courts a wide audience by expertly using the tropes of various popular forms of the late 1930smovies, crime novels, gothic fiction, newspapers, protest novelsand then adds an extra layer of analysis that explores how these pieces of mass culture are not ideologically neutral. One of the protagonists in a Delmore Schwartz story compares a movie to the Oracle at Delphi, which gave prophesies enigmatic enough to allow differing interpretations. The masses in Schwartzs stories approach mass culture looking for simple entertainment, and thats what they get. The conflicted artist figures who are the protagonists of Schwartzs stories approach mass culture more complexly, and Schwartz shows how an artistically inclined mind can find much of value in mass culture if he knows what to look for. Eudora Welty, finally, shows mass culture as something that can help compound a sense of (frequently female) alienation. For Welty, it is small moments of emotional connection that allow people to find a way out of the totalizing system of mass culture.

Through an historical overview of the never-married female character in twentieth century situation comedies and an in-depth analysis of three twenty-first century American sitcoms, this dissertation investigates how television creators, writers, producers, and actors have interpreted the figure of the single woman and attempted to make her appealing and acceptable to a broad viewing audience. Because of its traditionally family-friendly offerings and preponderance of female characters in comparison to other popular culture genres, the situation comedy presents a significant case study for the analysis of female representations on television. Through its encouraged identification with characters and portrayals of issues that face not only the character, but also the viewer, television opens the door for discussing and confronting deeply-held beliefs about the role of women in society. In order to understand the current situation of women, particularly those women who grew up with the medium, one must investigate what television has taught its viewers about the place of women in contemporary society. Drawing on feminist and television critical theories as well as more mainstream discussion and analyses, my focus on the single woman in the series Sex and the City, Gilmore Girls, and Ugly Betty illuminates how the life and desires of the single woman has been presented in sitcoms. These characterizations are negotiated with the prevailing cultural views about heteronormativity, motherhood, and feminism in ways that reveal changes in our cultural ideas about the single woman.

This dissertation examines how adaptations of Victorian literature made in Hollywood by postcolonial filmmakers contend with the legacy of British imperialism and Hollywoods role as a multinational corporate entity. Highlighting the increased number of postcolonial filmmakers adapting Victorian literature in Hollywood, the project demonstrates how film adaptation has become a strategy for, in the words of Salman Rushdie, writing back to imperial powers. Placing such adaptations of Victorian literature within the tradition of postcolonial rewritings of classic British texts, I bridge fidelity criticism, the auteur theory, and contrapuntal readings of source texts with studies of political economy in order to position Hollywood cinema as a location of past and present imperialisms. The first chapter examines George Stevenss Gunga Din, emphasizing how the film demonstrates a break in the American valorization of British culture. I then trace the global dominance of Hollywood film conventions through my discussion of Guy Maddins Dracula: Pages from a Virgins Diary. The next chapters engage with how three postcolonial adaptations address the legacies of the British Empire and Hollywood. Analyzing P. J. Hogans Peter Pan, Mira Nairs Vanity Fair, and Shekhar Kapurs The Four Feathers, the chapters discuss how the filmmakers maintain fidelity to source texts to imbue the narratives with the perspectives of their nations of origin. The final chapters discuss two reworkings of Oliver TwistTim Greenes Boy Called Twist (2004) and Danny Boyles Slumdog Millionaire (2008) to demonstrate the influence of positionality on adaptation as Hollywood International embarks on a globalized business model that controls representations of postcolonial nations.

Revolutionary Republics analyzes how U.S. literature depicted the independence of Latin America, focusing on the period from the beginning of the Spanish American revolutions in 1810 to the outbreak of the U.S.-Mexican War in 1846. During this brief timespan, the nations literature featured a radical transition in which the independent republics of Latin America shifted from being viewed as southern brethren of the United States, a term used by such prominent public figures as Daniel Webster and John Quincy Adams, to hostile enemies allegedly in need of assistance from their northern neighbor. This reversal exposes a contradiction between the imperialist ventures of the United States and its espoused principles of republican democracy, especially considering antebellum celebrations of the American Revolution as the beginning of a transatlantic discourse promoting universal liberty. Formulated in national narratives, literary responses to the revolutions and independent republics expose U.S. territorial and ideological expansion south and west as a form of Anglo-American empire-building. By transposing traditions of revolutionary inheritance onto the wars for independence in Spanish America, writers reinforce the ideology of U.S. exceptionalism. The studys geographic focal points are Cuba, Mexico, Texas, and Louisiana, particularly the circum-Caribbean city of New Orleans. Several chapters examine Spanish-language works published in the United States, focusing specifically on texts issued by Hispanophone presses in New Orleans and Philadelphia. Authors discussed include Robert Montgomery Bird, Henry Marie Brackenridge, Maria Gowen Brooks, James Fenimore Cooper, Timothy Flint, Joseph Holt Ingraham, Edgar Allan Poe, William Davis Robinson, Vicente Rocafuerte, Orazio de Atellis Santangelo, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, Richard Penn Smith, Jose Alvarez de Toledo, and Lorenzo de Zavala.

In this project, I use a rhetorical-cultural approach to examine the multiple and often-contradictory messages circulating in contemporary American culture about the event of childbirth. Though many feminist scholars have shown how professional obstetrics view of physiological birth shapes medical practice and womens experiences in hospitals, few have asked what the American public is learning about birth outside of the hospital, or why that knowledge might matter. In order to fill that gap, I trace a dominant narrative that positions institutionalized biomedical knowledge and technology as the exclusive producers of health and safety for birthing women and their babies in popular film and television, in the making of medical research and policy, and in the way the insurance industry frames women as consumers or recipients. I argue that it is not just in the delivery room that this ideology gets communicated, nor are birthing women the only ones affected by its messages. Rather, my analysis illustrates how this narrative has seeped into the fabric of how American society as a whole understands and engages with medicine, womens bodies, and science. In the final chapter, in order to explore a growing resistance to this ideology, I turn to the discursive construction of birth in online media. Read alongside the mainstream narrative, the rhetoric in these online spaces illustrates how the stakes of this debate are not just about who gets to decide where and how women should have their babies, but ultimately over who gets to interpret and apply science. The battle over birth in this country is, as this dissertation shows, also a battle over the publics understanding of institutionalized medicines exclusive claims to scientific knowledge. By exposing the ways that narratives about and within that system function to sustain it, and illuminating the ways that the organizing power of new media is generating resistance to that system, this project seeks to intervene in conversations about the cultural meanings of childbirth, about meaningful and ethical health care, and, ultimately, about the production and circulation of knowledge about science, medicine, and womens bodies.

My thesis explores the history of Roller Derby, its modern revival, and the way that it changes the lives of the women who play it. From October 2009 to March 2011, I conducted ethnographic research and interviews with the Red Stick Roller Derby in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. My perspective is that of an observer turned player, and the piece centers around my own story of personal transformation. This work is part cultural history, part ethnography, and part memoir, written from an explicitly feminist perspective.

This dissertation offers a materialist theory of fantasy as the literature of estranged cognition, an entirely novel perspective that challenges all of the existing criticism on fantasy literature by proposing an outlook that emphasizes not impossibility, but infinite possibility. During the late-Victorian period, the form of the fairy tale shifted from the literary fairy tale to fantasy. Three formal characteristics reveal that fantasy literature derives from the fairy tale: an indication, thematically or formally, that another dimension has been entered; the making and remaking of genresstoriesin dialectically overdetermined configurations; and a textual conflation between physics and ethics that results in estranged cognition. The making and remaking of genres provides a point of contact between SF and the fairy tale, resulting in radical fantasy. In radical fantasy the reality effect of the fairy tale becomes most obvious, because the reality effect of the tale is determined by scientific, empirical reality. So the fairy tale, through radical fantasy, begins to exhibit something like a cognition effect. But no matter how rigorous fantasy worlds may be, they are bound, like the fairy tale, by an ethical dimension that limits the constructed, rational basis of the tale. Fantasy estranges cognition by positing an infinite possibility that challenges the limits of even the most imaginative scientific rigor. Estranged cognition exposes the true limits of what can be thought and in this way points towards political understandings that look through and past both particulars and wholes. This dissertation pursues estranged cognition as it manifests in the work of Joanna Russ and Samuel Delany, culminating in the final chapter, which synthesizes the entirety of my findings through a reading of China Miévilles BAS-LAG Trilogy. There estranged cognition uncovers a hidden textual promise of a better future, one not bound by particulars or wholes, a truly new way of organizing our collective political situation.

This dissertation argues that the American dream is a large-scale cultural myth, and that through an analysis of the dreams mythic structure we can locate a paradigm according to which both American literature and American culture are organized. The American dream has maintained unique relevance across the historical, regional, and cultural diversity of the American nation, in part because it always remains abstract and resists firm definition. Nevertheless, by breaking the broad myth into its most basic elemental parts we can begin to see patterns across the many distinctive versions of the American dream, such that we can identify the American dream as a generic category. This project therefore proceeds by analyzing the most basic narrative features of the American dream: its actor or hero, its setting or universe, and its primary action. Through an analysis of the figure of the self-made man, the frontier as American spatial metaphor, and the action of upward mobility, this dissertation locates common features across myriad versions of this American dream myth in order to establish the American dream as a pervasive organizing ideal within American culture. This dissertation focuses its study on American fiction of the twentieth century, where the American dream finds its clearest articulations, and it has special recourse to nineteenth-century and early American history and culture as the ground for this modern sense of the American dream. Finally, I end with a discussion of American literature of the last decade, in which I discuss prevalent contemporary attitudes about the American dream in order to assess its current condition. Ultimately, this dissertation suggests that the American dream, because it is a genuine cultural myth, both organizes American cultural experience and structures American literature about that experience.

In An African American Discourse Community in Black & White: The New Orleans Tribune, an archival study of the first black-owned daily newspaper in the United States, I argue that the newspaper rhetorically constructed a literate African American discourse community worthy of citizenship and equal political rights within the public sphere of Reconstruction United States. Although contemporaneous media in the South depicted blacks as both unable to read and write and as culturally illiterate, I demonstrate how articles across the lifespan of the Tribune represented, as well as encouraged and enabled, multiple literacies within the African American community. I ultimately argue that the newspaper created an identity as citizen for free and emancipated blacks alike through its inclusion of evidence of blacks education and knowledge of historical texts; black mens economic and agricultural literacies and black womens domestic skills; and the communitys understanding of civics. Scholars within periodical studies, who have focused primarily on Victorian Britain, have argued that periodicals provide a unique space for historically oppressed populations to enter public discourse. This project links literacy studies, periodical studies, and African American studies by extending this reasoning to the literacy practices of African Americans and by investigating how the staff of the New Orleans Tribune sought entrance to public discourse but also circulated a counterdiscourse that challenged dominant stereotypes of blacks. Simultaneously, this project questions how the lack of scholarly work on the Tribune, the most important Negro newspaper of the Civil War era, continues to remind researchers that the erasure of African American resistance and agency is not unique to Reconstruction, but is replicated through tellings of history and accessibility of archives within the academy today. An African American Discourse Community in Black & White: The New Orleans Tribune uses the newspaper to retell the history of African American literacy in Reconstruction New Orleans as one of agency and oppositionality. Ultimately, I argue that the Tribune used self-representations of blacks literacy practices to rhetorically construct an African American discourse community that was worthy of citizenship and therefore suffrage.

Reading the celebrated Narrative (1845) of Frederick Douglass (1817-95) as well as his second autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) alongside the theories of freedom including Immanuel Kants and G. W. F. Hegels among others, this dissertation examines the process through which the young American slave Douglass discovers the idea of freedom and turns it into the primary object of his pursuit to the point that he stakes his life in his famed battle with the overseer Edward Covey. The experience of hearing other slaves voicessuch as Aunt Hesters cries and slave songsopens his eyes to the darkest reality of Southern slavery, constructing in Douglasss mind a material core that drives him to find some explanation for it, which he gradually comprehends by his continuous efforts to carefully overhear what slaveholders are saying and to learn to read. The fanstasmatic manifestation of Douglasss irrepressible aspiration for freedom in the form of a flash in his consciousness after he is utterly subjected to Covey and his subsequent apostrophe to the sloops on the Chesapeake Bay are in significant ways comparable to Kants conceptualization of the moral law of freedom in terms of the starry heavens and the voice of reason as well as the Kantian aesthetics of the sublime. Unlike Kant, who delimits the act of freedom solely within the minds transformation of its own disposition, Douglass stresses in his account of the fight with Covey that such an existential transformation is completed by an action in the real world. Douglasss description of his victory over the overseer shares with the Hegelian dialectic, especially the acclaimed dialectic of master and slave, several crucial threads including an emphasis on irreducible material elements involved in the reversal, elements which he closely relates to the 'fact' of his freedom. At the same time, Douglass diverges from the Hegelian theory of freedom on important points such as the primacy of the state over individual liberty among others.