When new technologies are integrated with older media, potential viewers are introduced to these changes in extra-filmic contexts that make this transition visible. In four case studies I argue that the human body acts as a visible interface between machine and images in these moments to create an interactive mode of spectatorship. This is a process manifest in two forms: as a machine-body interaction that places the human body within the mechanisms of image-creation and as a means of intervention to make new technologies and new images familiar by asserting the spectator's physical presence in their plane of being. This assertion is an insertion, a comingling of the body of the image with the body of the spectator in a kinetic relationship. My first two case studies use late 19th- and early 20th century American periodicals to argue that kinetoscope images, motion picture images, and x-ray images, all described as shadow pictures in the popular press, were discursively used as models of thinking via representations of the way the human body and mind were integrated with machines to capture thought. The images produced suggest that moving images functioned as a form of evidence for the unseeable not only in their ability to represent the unseen, but also in representations of thinking that reflect similar kinetic properties. Based on the context I sketch in my first two case studies, I conclude my work in the silent era by considering how Hugo Münsterberg's neo-Kantian idealism coupled with his work in experimental psychology considers the human body as a form of evidence for the unseeable. This highlights how the origins of American film theory worked within a negotiation between materialism and idealism via recourse to the human body as a primary site from which to consider the mechanisms of cinematic style. Moving to the twenty-first century in my final case study, I argue that, like the discursive materials surrounding early-cinema, Michael Haneke's films represent a corporeality that is joined with the apparatus via the use of video technology that portrays a shortened divide between spectator and on-screen actor by engendering the ability to replay events.

It has become commonplace among both Melville and Wordsworth critics to recognize a basic ambiguity or contradictoriness in each artists writing. In this project, I find the roots of that tension in each artists concept of the imagination and the process of poetic creation. More importantly, I find that Melvilles concept of art, as reflected in his magnum opus Moby-Dick and substantiated in his poetry, reveals a basic affinity with Wordsworths Imagination. Specifically, my project traces the lingering elements of Wordsworths concept of the poetic process in Melvilles writing, particularly focusing on two important and complex relationships in that creative process: 1) the implicit paradox of activity and passivity in a poetics that assumes at its heart inspiration, and Wordsworths particular devotion to preserving rather than reconciling that paradox; and 2) the role of society in a creative process that seeks to privilege individual genius while ensuring the social efficacy of the workings of that genius. Here emerging at the center of my studynot surprisinglyis an engagement with The Whale, in which I offer a reading of Moby-Dick as a text that, at least in part, is occupied with the process and position of the artist. In paying particular attention to the evidence of a close relationship with Wordsworth in Melvilles conception of art, I am not as interested in the question of literary influence as I am in demonstrating that Melville struggled with many of the same questions regarding art and creation that are evident in Wordsworths own writing. In seeking connections between Melvilles literature, particularly his poetry, and Wordsworth, my transcontinental project reveals a concern with the role of the artist in societya question of the responsibility of the artist that is importantly enduring, despite the years and distance between the writers.

Screen Combat interrogates how the cultural mythology of the Second World War as the Good War surfaces in the American war film by examining the change in the aesthetics of combat sequences over time. By juxtaposing 1940s documentary and fiction films with contemporary cinema and video games, this dissertation argues that the World War II combat genre is not the conservative, coherent, classical genre that previous studies have assumed it to be. Rather, combat films and video games are complex, polysemic texts that challenge our assumptions about Hollywood filmmaking and mainstream American media. This dissertation contends that the combat sequences of World War II films give voice to a counter-narrative of the war, breaking away from the typical plots of noble sacrifice and dedicated heroism to show explosive images of devastation and annihilation. Even seemingly conventional cinematic histories of the warmovies like Destination Tokyo (1943) and Pearl Harbor (2001) and video games like Call of Duty (2003)contain jarring and exhilarating combat sequences that undercut our usual notion of the Second World War as a morally righteous undertaking and replace it with a dangerously fascinating portrait of awesome destruction. It is in these moments of action that the contradictions of war come bubbling to the surface, convulsing and even rupturing the body of the text as it seeks to simultaneously contain and unleash the violence of battle. In combat-centered films and video games, heterogeneous messages about the experience of war converge in the body of the spectator/player, who is caught up in both the spectacle of fantasy and the visceral sensation of being there on the front lines. Beyond the realism of historical fidelity or visual mimesis, these texts activate a corporeal realism that exists at the very base of specular experiencethat of bodily sensation.

This dissertation examines a widely practiced but often under-valued and under-examined component of teaching: the comments that teachers write on students papers. I explore the intellectual and pedagogical work of written comments and the role of the teacher as the reader of student texts. In the first half, I focus on teachers as readers of student writing. I trace what I call a pedagogy of practical criticismwhich operates primarily through close attention to student textsthrough a group of teachers including I.A. Richards, Reuben Brower, Theodore Baird, William E. Coles, Jr., Mina Shaughnessy, and David Bartholomae. I also examine the common argument that teachers should restrain their authority when reading and responding to students papers, and I argue that we should consider the positive, productive role of authority in teaching. I analyze scholarship on the issues of authority and appropriation, and I use student papers to look at how teachers negotiate their own authority in their response. In the second half, I focus on students as readers of teachers response, with emphasis on the difficulties students face in interpreting what their teachers have written. I examine teachers response in the context of other texts that bear commentary, such as William Blakes marginalia and Jewish biblical commentaries, paying special attention to the ways in which these texts embody both stasis, in the form of the words fixed on the page, and change, which happens through the dynamic and unpredictable work of readers. I foreground the potential difficulty of the more flexible kind of reading that comments often demand of students in asking them to change their own work or to think about it differently. I also examine the difficulty created by the differences between the knowledge and experience of, on one hand, the teachers who write the comments and, on the other hand, the students who must interpret them. I analyze a number of student texts with comments, and I consider the potential for learning that these comments offeras well as reasons why that potential may not always be fulfilled when students revise.

This dissertation is a study of the aesthetic, political, and ethical dimensions of the essay form as it passes into cinema particularly the modern cinema in the aftermath of the Second World War from literary and philosophic sources. Taking Jean-Luc Godard as my main case, but encompassing other important figures as well (including Agnès Varda, Chris Marker, and Guy Debord), I show how the cinematic essay is uniquely equipped to conduct an open-ended investigation into the powers and limits of film and other audio-visual manners of expression. I provide an analysis of the cinematic essay that illuminates its working principles in two crucial respects. First, whereas essay films have typically been described in taxonomic terms that is, through classification schemes that hinge on reflective voiceover commentary, found footage montage, and hybrid combinations of fiction and documentary I articulate a more supple and dynamic sense of the essayistic through a detailed reading of Montaigne. As I treat it, the essay form emerges in complex acts of self-portraiture, citation, and a range of stylistic maneuvers that exhibit an impulse toward dialogical exchange. Second, I use Godards prolific body of work to establish the essay as a fundamentally intergeneric and intermedial phenomenon. Godard figures as a privileged case in my argument because, as I show, he self-consciously draws on essayistic traditions from a broad spectrum of linguistic and pictorial media as he carries out experiments between film, television, and video. Through close engagements with his works, I show that the essayistic, far from being a mere descriptive label, is crucial to our understanding of many of the most intricate features of his practice: how he retools antecedent materials and discourses; how he combines critical and creative faculties; how he confronts his own agency as both an author and spectator; how he perpetually revises his own earlier output; how he inhabits his work and achieves a consubstantial presence with the sights and sounds he handles; how he tests out ideas without offering a direct argument; and how he longingly pursues a dialogue with a co-operative viewer according to conditions of perceptual sharedness.

In the late 1980s, historian Hayden White suggested the possibility of forms of historical thought unique to filmed history. White proposed the study of historiophoty, an imagistic alternative to written history. Subsequently, much scholarly attention has been paid to the category of History Film. Yet popular concerns for historical re-presentation and heritage have not fully addressed aesthetic effects of prior history films and emergent imagistic-historiographic practices. This dissertation identifies and elaborates one such alternative historiographic practice on film, via inter-medial study attending to British and American history films, an instance of multi-platform digital historiography, and an animated film a category of film often overlooked in history film studies. Central to this dissertation is Gilles Deleuzes development of varieties of the Movement Image. Deleuzes Movement Image includes the discursive image, a form which has not yet broken the coherence of sensori-motor connections between the object perceived and the affective response of the viewer. Related to the discursive image, I propose that the descriptive image can capture what the larger category representation and the cinema-specific spectacle cannot. Drawing from literary and art-historical conceptions of the differences between descriptive and narrative forms, I propose that in the history film, the descriptive image functions as a meta-critical aesthetic, insisting that viewers perceive naturalized relationships as instead contingent. I argue that, rather than a mature form of realism, the descriptive image is a form of critical realism. Descriptive images are characterized by: long takes of long shots; the co-presence and co-equivalence of objects; a point of view neither neutral nor attributable to a character; and expressions of scope or forms for framing that assert that the given view is only one view from the set of possible views. Thus I examine exemplary texts that demonstrate a difference between narrative understanding and descriptive understanding. These texts, despite their material differences, similarly present mixed historiographic forms, and enable us to see what studies of history on film, in their interest in re-presentation over presentation, have often missed: descriptive images allow us to differentiate the event of the film from an inadequate copy of an historical event.

The Art of Citizenship examines the largely forgotten literary tradition that emerged as part of the womens suffrage movement in the United States, exploring through these texts and their history the relationship between literature, pedagogy, and social change. It argues that suffrage literature and its performances constituted what I have labeled social pedagogy, or pedagogy as social action, a project that included both intentional and unintentional educational aspects. The study focuses on the genres of suffrage literature that could be performed at suffrage meetings and elsewhere (the plays, pageants, poems, and songs) because the claiming of public spaces that occurs in such performances reinforces the lessons about womens rights and roles to be found in the texts themselves, thus adding another dimension to their pedagogy. It also considers the larger rhetorical context within which this literature existed, examining the forms of criticism suffragists faced and the ways suffrage writers engaged with this criticism. In part, the study is an archival project, a continuation and extension of earlier feminist recovery work that reclaims womens literary texts and womens history. It significantly expands the currently known body of suffrage literature, much of which was written and performed by women, by examining many texts that have not at this time been reprinted or collected in anthologies. The study is also an exploration of the ways suffragists understood and theorized gender, performance, and pedagogy, often anticipating the ideas and theories of second and third wave feminists and proponents of critical pedagogy. It argues that in their efforts to gain enfranchisement for women, suffrage writers and their writing played a pedagogical as well as an aesthetic role, offering images of female enfranchisement as logical and natural, challenging notions of separate spheres, and generally inviting discourse about womens rights and roles. In doing so, they negotiated normative gender patterns in order to ensure that their words could find an audience, yet also invited American men and women to consider alternative possibilities for gender identity and expression.

This dissertation connects Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison in the context of a radical 1930s culture through their shared term action and explains the prominent appearance of action in Invisible Man as a vestige of Ellisons radical beginnings. Chapters clarify the emergence of Burkes and Ellisons writings in the 1930s, cluster appearances of action in relation to other key terms, assess political motives, and counter readings and appropriations of their work that ignore, reduce, or redirect such political elements. Attending particularly to Burkes first editions of Permanence and Change and Attitudes toward History, as well as to uncollected writings in the period, the dissertation draws out Burkes communistic attitude, commitments to organized politics as a literary and rhetorical critic, and wariness toward American philosophical pragmatism and John Dewey. It traces radical concerns and tropes from Ellisons early writings to drafts of his novel and places Ellisons positive reception of Burkes paper at the third American Writers Congress in 1939 alongside the influence of Richard Wright and Langston Hughes. The dissertation argues that Burke and Ellison conceived themselves as cultural participants in a project to transform social relations and shows how recent scholarship concerning these writers, especially work seeking to claim them from a neopragmatist perspective, domesticates markers of their 1930s political imaginary.

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary examination of the history and theory of adolescence. I draw on a variety of materials, from both Britain and the United States, including nineteenth- and early twentieth-century newspapers and periodicals, literary texts, educational treatises, advertisements, pamphlets, and medical discourse which reveal the term and the category of adolescence as it has been put into service by fields like medicine, psychology, education, and public policy. Methodologically, I use this range of materials to look for patterns, tracing not only the word and concept of adolescence, but the construction and circulation of social meanings associated with adolescence. Queer theory understands categories of gender and sexuality as unstable, shifting, malleable, contextualand this project understands that theorized complexity as belonging to the past as well as the present, in the movement of adolescence as a term and a concept. Among constructivist studies of adolescence, scholars often cite G. Stanley Halls exhaustive two-volume work Adolescence (1904) as a point of origin, the beginning of what we recognize today as adolescence. This project maps out a trajectory of fragmented, multi-purposed conceptualizations of adolescence, one that precedes Hall and continues after him, a mapping that brings to light the surprising movement and instability of this trajectory over time. If we understand language and meaning as having a certain flexibility, as moving with each iteration and reiteration, then my framing historical question is not whether adolescence existed in earlier centuries, but how the concept existed, and more specifically, how it existed in shifting and interconnected discourses, such as nineteenth-century American newspapers and British sex education pamphlets from the 1930s and 40s. This methodology allows me to speak to the perplexing question of how language constitutes social realities and modes of knowledge. My research encompasses a wide range of materials and historical moments to explore the ideological dimensions of adolescence, ones that circulate and reappear in very specific, located contexts. This project brings to light a nonlinear history that reframes present assumptions about adolescence and opens up the category as a powerful site for work in queer theory, cultural studies, and literary studies.

This dissertation explores intersections between queer theory and pedagogy for the teaching of undergraduateswith particular attention to the teaching of writing. Queer theory has made significant contributions to the ways we understand gender, sexuality, identity, discourse and material bodies. My dissertation extends the work of queer theory, opening its insights to the practices of teaching while also considering teaching as a way to reflect back on the central questions of queer theory. Some scholars have called the intersections between queer theory and teaching queer pedagogy, though this term is still fraught, still in the process of being understood, and just beginning to be written about in terms of teaching practices and methodology. This work, grounded both in queer theory and in my experience of a specific writing course, is part of this generative beginning. In this dissertation I explore, in depth, what I see as the crucial next steps in investigating what queer pedagogies might look like, who can enact them, and how they may be powerful methods in the teaching of undergraduate writing. My work puts some pressure on the previous emphasis on identity politics in scholarship on queer pedagogies. Over the past fifteen years, a series of notable texts emerged in thinking about the relationship between teaching and queer studies; these early texts are primarily identity-based and construct limiting theoretical notions of identity itself. However, my work in queer theory and my own pedagogical experiences have led me to think of identity as always, to some degree, fluid and unstable. I argue that queer pedagogies, when enacted in the spirit of queer theory, can offer more than a way of conceptualizing identity politics in the classroom and can become queer methodologies, queer practices of teaching. I understand queer pedagogies as approaches, as theories of teaching that can be practiced by teachers and students occupying multiple, shifting, and varied subject positions. My dissertation offers these very practices, drawing from work in composition studies, from queer theory, and from the work of students.