Making Feminism Matter Again analyzes new shifts in gender and their social representations in feminist theory. I take as my point of departure the crisis of feminism and the loss of its explanatory and transformative effectivity in the wake of the cultural turn, which, I argue, was a class development in feminism brought on by the economic crisis of profit in capitalism in the late 20th century. I question its main assumptions of gender, articulated in texts by Derrida, Foucault, Negri, Fraser, Butler, Gibson-Graham, Sandoval, Probyn, Wiegman, Felski and others, for the way they culturally rewrite materialist concepts such as class, division of labor, ideology, and history and represent cultural shifts in gender as constitutive of material changeand ultimately as progressfor women within capitalism. Making Feminism Matter Again re-examines the historical significance of cultural shifts, including shifts in feminist theory as well as new gendered forms of work (caring and service labor), family, consumption, diet, clothing, sexuality, and love. In analyzing gender now, I demonstrate that culturalism analytically dissolves gender into autonomous differences and ethics, and uses cultural values to obscure over the crisis of transnational capitalisms class relations and deepening economic exploitation of women. As a result, cultural feminisms are not an intervention but an affirmation of the way things are. I argue for a historical materialist theory of gender in the tradition of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Alexandra Kollontai, Eleanor Leacock, and such contemporary critics as Angela Davis, Delia Aguilar, Elizabeth Armstrong, and Teresa Ebert, which shows that permutations in gender are not new because the wage-labor/capital relations that exploit women have not changed. Instead the changes are an updating of gender to adjust women to changes in the division of labor under which surplus-value is extracted. In the intersection of labor theory and cultural theory, Making Feminism Matter Again maps the material relations of gender now. This map is also a materialist re-mapping of feminist theory and the development of a new model for a materialist analytics of gender as a way to contribute to restoring the explanatory and transformative effectivity of feminism now.

Ghost Images: Representations of Second-Generation Memory in Contemporary Childrens Literature, studies how texts produced for and about children represent the childs unique capacity to remember events that preceded her/his birth in order to address questions of how traumatic historical events should be remembered and mourned. Drawing on such theorists and critics as Augustine, Maurice Halbwachs, Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin, Paul Ricoeur, and Marianne Hirsch, I argue that second-generation memory may be defined, first, by its position at the critical intersection between collective and individually-experienced memory, and second, by its reliance upon the mimetic faculty. Insofar as such an order of memory depends heavily on intergenerational relationships between witnesses and their children, and insofar as it depends upon a capacity for mimetic thought and action (which, according to Benjamin, is most dramatically evidenced in the figure of the child) I elaborate of this definition and its implications by performing close readings of recently published texts produced for and/or about children, such as Helen Epsteins Children of the Holocaust, Zlata Filipovics Zlatas Diary, Marsha Forchuk Skrypuchs The Hunger, Judy Blumes Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself, and M. Night Shyamalans feature film, The Sixth Sense. In my analyses of these respective texts, I elaborate on how second-generation memory is shaped by the political discourses of diasporic and national communities, the relationship between the intergenerational and intertextuality, and dominant cultural notions of childhood. Moreover, I consider how the proliferation of texts such as these during the last quarter of the twentieth century may be indicative of a general cultural inclination to memorialize often without romanticizing past traumatic events, an inclination that has been largely influenced by the development of the new media, multicultural discourse, and the effects of globalization.

This project examines the relationship between mid 18th/early 19th century feminism and didacticism through the work of one of the late 18th century's most celebrated feminist writers, Mary Wollstonecraft. It is my contention that Wollstonecraft's work is representative of the ways in which women writers of this period manipulated didactic conventions and strategies to further feminist goals. Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, often recognized as feminism's "manifesto," is generally regarded as the text that defines and delimits the scope of Wollstonecraft's feminist project. Yet Wollstonecraft's didactic texts, although generally dismissed in feminist critical contexts, further define and elaborate on her feminist project by promoting resistance to 18th century discourses concerning women's 'proper sphere.' Reading Wollstonecraft's work in relation to 18th century didactic traditions, I argue that Wollstonecraft appropriates and revises the work of 18th century writers on the subject of women's education such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Dr. John Gregory, epitomizing a feminist didactic approach later (re)deployed by Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte. In the first chapter, I (re)read Wollstonecraft's Vindication through the lens of Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of authoritative discourse, generating a theoretical framework for understanding Wollstonecraft's feminist discourse as appropriation. I suggest that Vindication enacts the same discursive strategies as Wollstonecraft's didactic texts in its appropriation of established 18th century masculine discourses. In Chapters II and III, I situate Wollstonecraft's didactic texts, The Female Reader, Original Stories, and Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, in relation to didactic texts and traditions that shaped them, arguing that Wollstonecraft appropriates these texts and traditions in order to establish a feminist pedagogical approach. Chapters IV and V examine the continuities between Wollstonecraft's didactic approach and the work of Austen and Bronte. They, like Wollstonecraft, borrow from and appropriate earlier didactic texts and traditions in order to construct their feminist projects. The very different ways in which Austen and Bronte (re)work these traditions, I suggest, reveals a shift in feminist thought from the late 18th through the mid 19th centuries.

This dissertation examines stories of transformation integral to representations of nineteenth-century American evangelical literacy instruction: transformations of literacy students into Christians and transformations of literate Christians into critics of authority. In particular, I describe how nineteenth-century evangelical literacy education was represented as a powerful engine of change for the literacy student and the students community in novels, letter writing manuals, and tract society literature. As I read these texts, the historical representations of evangelical literacy instruction present this instruction as a two-step process of transformation in which, first, the student is transformed and, second, the student affects transformations on the people in his/her community . In unearthing these stories of transformation I am able to construct an overlooked history in which literacy and the literary intertwine with evangelical Protestantism. This history is valuable not only for what it tells us about the past, but it also sheds light on the assumptions we make today about the transformative potential of literacy education. I demonstrate, for instance, that these narratives of transformation have present-day analogues in secular, scholarly debates about transforming composition students into activists and policy-makers. In particular, I examine the metaphors and narratives composition scholars use to characterize the means by which composition courses are thought to prepare students to engage with public spheres.

In this study I argue that Victorian writers Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, and Walter Pater participated more fully than has previously been acknowledged in the aesthetic and ethical concerns surrounding romantic irony as it was articulated by philosophers such as Friedrich Schlegel and Søren Kierkegaard. In opposition to a twentieth-century critical trend that has tended to applaud German romanticism for its progressive insights, and dismiss nineteenth-century British texts as regressive, I show how three key Victorian texts recognized, articulated, and sought to negotiate the phenomenon of irony. More specifically, I show that the ironic features of Carlyles The French Revolution: A History, Eliots Romola, and Paters Denys LAuxerrois are closely connected to the authors concerns with, and attempts to formulate, a model of ethics in the face of the metaphysical indeterminacy that is a central feature of romantic irony. In Carlyles The French Revolution: A History, I show how the narrator maps a gulf between language and referent onto a gulf between the social classes represented by the Sansculottes and the Girondin. This association of semiotic and political fragmentation suggests that for Carlyle, irony remained an external phenomenon, which may help explain why he sought an external solution to the chaos of the revolution by invoking the military force of the hero. In Eliots Romola, I suggest that the sudden appearance of allegory toward the end of this otherwise realist novel serves as an indirect presentation of the heroines ethical transcendence. The temporal nature of allegory reflects the novels formulation of ethics as a process of forming character through repeated habits of action and thoughta process that recalls Kierkegaards association of repetition with ethical choice. In Paters Denys LAuxerrois I show that the ability of art objects to conjure up living presence is presented ironically through a series of framing devices. This irony is closely connected to Paters formulation of ethics as a matter of character-building through aesthetic exposure, but like Eliot and Kierkegaard, Pater presents this ethical model in an indirect aesthetic mode. This study helps deepen critical understanding of irony, ethics, and representation in Victorian texts.

The following dissertation, Excavating the Ghetto Action Cycle (1991-1996): A Case Study for a Cycle-based Approach to Genre Theory, traces an historical, cultural and theoretical genealogy for the ghetto action cycle. This controversial cycle, which was initiated by the success of films like Boyz N the Hood and Menace II Society, participated in the periods broad cultural debates about race, class, crime and youth. As film cycles are strongly shaped by audience desire, financial viability, current events and studio whims, I argue that they retain the marks of their historical, socioeconomic and generic contexts more precisely than genres, which, because of their longevity and heterogeneity, can be unwieldy objects of study. My dissertation therefore advances a cycle-based approach to genre theory, illuminating the significance of the film cycle, its function within popular culture and its centrality to genre studies. Structured by the belief that viewers have a wide range of interpretive choices in any viewing situation, my dissertation employs multiple paradigms for reading the ghetto action cycleprincipally, the gangster genre, the 1930s Dead End Kids cycle, the 1950s juvenile delinquent teenpic cycle and the 1970s blaxploitation cycle. Each chapter is also a specific application of a cycle-based approach to genre studies, emphasizing in the historicity of genre formations and theorizing about the significance and function of the film cycle in defining genres, articulating social problems, shaping subcultures and exploiting contemporary prejudices. Furthermore, all of the cycles examined were conceived during key moments of transition in American historythe Progressive movement of the 1910s and 1920s, the beginnings of Americas involvement in WWII, the birth of the teenager, the 1970s Black Nationalist movement, and the drug and gang banger crises of the early 1990s. Thus, close readings, not just of the films, but of the films in the context of their cycles, offer new ways of understanding how the popular imagination interprets moments of social change, and how the film industry seeks to capitalize upon these interpretations.

Inventing a Universe examines the creative and critical writing of an internet fan fiction archive. First, I suggest that persistent theories of fan writing, including the influential notion of fans as textual poachers, have not adequately made visible the work of reading and writing that goes in at such sites. I reframe internet fan fiction as the work of amateur writers drawing on composition studies work on discourse communities and student writing to offer new ways of reading these texts and textual practices. Second, analyzing the discourse conventions and texts of a particular fan fiction archive, Different Colored Pens, I argue that members of this site share an explicit collaborative project of using fan fiction to help one another improve as readers and writers. This dissertation, which is among the first academic efforts to focus on and analyze fan fiction feedback practices specifically, will contribute to the rich and growing literature on the ways that online communities of amateur writers, including fan fiction writers, collaboratively develop their writing skills.

Postcolonial gothic fiction arises in response to certain social, historical, or political conditions. Postcolonial fiction adapts a British narrative form that is highly attuned to the distinction and collapse between home and not home and the familiar and the foreign. The appearance of the gothic in postcolonial fiction seems a response to the failure of national politics that are riven by sectarian, gender, class, and caste divisions. Postcolonial gothic is one way in which literature can respond to increasing problematic questions of the postcolonial domestic terrain: questions concerning legitimate origins; rightful inhabitants; usurpation and occupation; and nostalgia for an impossible nationalist politics are all understood in the postcolonial gothic as national questions that are asked of the everyday, domestic realm. This dissertation argues that the postcolonial employment of the gothic does four distinct things in works by al-Tayeb Salih, J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie. First, it forms a distopic representation that emerges when the idealist project of the national allegorical romance fails. Second, the postcolonial gothic is interested in the representation of the unheimlich nature of home as both dwelling and nation. If colonialism created a home away from home and metaphorized this spatial division in psychoanalysis through the relationship of the heimlich to the unheimlich, then part of the postcolonial gothics agenda is unveiling that behind the construction of hominess abroad lies something fundamentally unhomely. Third, postcolonial gothic employs a gothic historical sensibility, or a sense of pastness in the present. Fourth, if the gothic is the narrative mode by which Britain frightened itself about cultural degeneration, the loss of racial or cultural purity, the racial other, sexual subversion and the threat that colonial-era usurpation and violence might one day return, then postcolonial gothic deploys the gothic as a mode of frightening itself with images of transgressive women who threaten to expose the dark underbelly of their own historical and political contexts.

Invention of an Infidel examines Herman Melvilles prose fiction written in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Specifically addressing Moby-Dick, Benito Cereno, and The Confidence-Man, I argue that these imaginative works attempt to expose the catastrophic associations between the U.S.s domestic problemssuch as Negro slave revolt and Indian insurrectionand the U.S.s broader global interventions in politics and commerce. I show that it was through invention, through historical discovery and re-making, that Melville was able to characterize new and intense forces of domination and regulation over human populations, property, and networks of exchange that accompanied American interests in opening and liberalizing commerce. Melvilles heretical inventions, I further show, were not necessarily limited to religious and theological contexts, as many previous critics have presupposed, but rather had developed simultaneously in relation to a dominant U.S. discourse that conflated the religious notions of redemption and election with liberal and secular expressions of American power. These expressions, or what I call doctrines of empire, were often evinced in the discourse of the American sublime and American transcendentalism. Writing in the midst of and attempting to provide a literary understanding of the intensification and transnational reach of American power during the nineteenth century, Melvilles heretical inventions make possible a theorization of American power that, I argue, is important for studies of the U.S. and its geopolitical influence over the globe in our own moment.

This dissertation recovers Shakespeare's Sir John Falstaff as a politically radical character, linked to Jack Cade and the plebian revolutionaries of 2 Henry VI, and to 16th-century radical-egalitarian movements including Anabaptism and the "Family of Love." Working from the earliest texts dealing with Sir John Oldcastle, Falstaff's historical precedent, this work explores the radical potential of reform beginning with the work of the late-14th-century Oxford theologian John Wyclif. Thought to have inspired the 1381 Peasants' Rebellion, Wyclif's writings on dominion were directed at the organized church, but had social implications that Wyclif himself was unwilling to confront. Burned in 1417 for the combined crimes of heresy and treason, the historical Oldcastle either was or was not involved with an abortive rising against Henry V, and this work argues that the instability between Oldcastle as loyal Lancastrian subject and social revolutionary characterizes all subsequent representations of Oldcastle, from John Bale's prototype martyrology to Shakespeare's histories. Historically locating the appropriation of Oldcastle as the prototype Protestant martyr in a time of widespread destruction of traditional holy images, this work examines the works of the controversialists John Bale and John Foxe, with their accompanying woodcut illustrations, to argue for a continuity between the logic of reformed martyrdom and that of Protestant iconoclasm in a shared notion of ordeal and confession. In these polemical works, the testimony of the martyr on his pyre is valorized while the icon is revealed by fire or hammer to be mere matter. Working from Slavoj iek's claim that political identity is often founded on the fetishistic disavowal of a shared guilt, this work argues that the two parts of Henry IV, in their insistent metadramatic reminders of Oldcastle's treason and execution, function to disturb the audience's interpellation as subjects of Tudor-Protestant power. This is done in order to put the audience in the position of choosing between two modes of social life, represented by the essential kingship of Henry V on one hand, and on the other by the frightening social hybridity and radical utopianism of Falstaff.