This thesis argues that the ways in which trans-ness functions within telemediated spaces disrupts the conventions of new media studies that would assert reality is established primarily through visual engagement. In Tom Chos collection of short stories, Look Whos Morphing, the reader is confronted with characters and situations that are transgender, transcultural, and transhuman. By presenting characters who embody multiple forms of trans-ness and who cross the boundaries between fictional stories, play with the uneasy distinction between narrative self and self in the world, and move between the biological and technological, Cho pushes the reader to confront the bodys mutability. Given the ways in which the characters in Chos work destabilize our realities, I argue that they work as well against commonly held assumptions about bodily authenticity and integrity. I suggest finally that due to the persistent shifts, crosses, and changes that Chos characters undergo both within and between stories, we are forced to imagine these characters without reference to regimes of visibility.

This thesis explores contemporary debates regarding the artistic and philosophical responses to global climate change through a close reading of Andrei Tarkovskys 1979 science fiction epic Stalker. I read Tarkovskys film, which was shot in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, as an investigation of the time and space of environmental catastrophe and argue that today it can be productively read as a film about climate change because of its fascination with the invisible and its persistent refusal to depict the catastrophe with which it is concerned. In this way, my thesis takes up Stalker as a kind of hinge text or conduit through which we can compare the nuclear criticism of the Cold War and todays climate change criticism (especially that of Bruno Latour and Srinivas Aravamudan) in order to examine continuities the relationship between catastrophe and artistic representation as well as the politics of making visible invisible crises. My thesis concludes that is precisely through withholding an image of catastrophe that Tarkovsky is able to effectively represent an environmental disaster in its fullness and that this artistic strategy seems increasingly important for thinkers in the humanities who are attempting to understand global climate change.

The first of Eliza Haywoods dramas, The Fair Captive remains a widely overlooked work in her oeuvre. Yet this play engages in a tradition of feminocentric Islamicate dramas in order to reflect on current cultural concerns surrounding the monarchy and the collapse of the South Sea Bubble. By pitting the corporeal threat of the Ottoman male against the psychological threat of the Christian male, Haywood emphasizes the substitutive nature of the patriarchal system underlining British society. In this paper, I argue that Haywood attempts to rethink this system of substitution through a political allegory, one that employs the sensual sphere of the harem to criticize the chaos of a globalized financial system as well as the injustices of a patriarchal system that deprived women of public credibility. Addressing Haywoods three female characters, I examine how Haywood critiques a social order that would exchange kings for politicians, money for stocks, and women for power and contend that Haywood offers an alternative ideology of internal integrity as a form of resistance against such substitution.

This paper recovers the subjectivity of the Moor, in order to better understand the presentation of racial difference in the play in terms of the playâs understanding of visual evidence. Othelloâs aggressive hermeneutic demonstrates how empricism can undo itself, and foster an epistemological breakdown. The result is madness, and the notion of Othelloâs racial inferiority functions as a cooperating delusion. This analysis of Othelloâs hermeneutic crisis reveals the limits of empirical thought and âscientificâ inquiry in the recovery of truth.

This dissertation examines the representation of magical objects in Victorian literature. The Victorian period is often characterized as a time of increased secularity. Scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists in the period viewed Britain as a progressive culture, set apart from the so-called primitive cultures outside of Europe that still held animistic beliefs about the souls of objects. This dissertation argues that, on the contrary, magical objects pervaded Victorian culture not only as an integral part of the Victorian imagination but also as a foundational aspect of fiction writing. Surveying a variety of genres within and beyond fiction, I present two ideas about magical objects that seem counterintuitive to standard representations of nineteenth-century England. First, magical objects are intertextual vehicles that connect unlikely genres of writing. The speaking pens, wish-granting lamps, living dolls, cursed diamonds, and occult mirrors that I study arise out of folklore, both exotic and natively British. They are subsequently alluded to in various texts, including nonfictional works such as Edwin Streeters histories of diamonds, Oliver Wendell Holmess writings on photography, and David Brewsters scientific treatises. Their presence in these nonfictional works are far from incongruous; rather, they form some of the most easily accessible cultural touchstones for both writer and reader. Second, I argue that, within fictional genres, especially the realist novel, magical objects are mobilized to reflect the process of writing. Each of the canonical authors I examine uses magical objects to negotiate a delicate balance between mimetic realism and fantastical imagination. Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, and George Eliot, while composing slightly different iterations of the realist novel, have made magical objects the governing structure of their books: the animated doll lays out the parameters for characters behaviors; the cursed diamond activates plots of adventure and detection; and the magic mirror acts as a portal into the imagined world of the novel. I conclude that the realist novel, though it may appear to eschew the fantasy of animated and agentive things, in fact relies on these things for its world-building.

This project challenges the conventional assumption that representations of subjectivity in modernist fiction, while innovative in their own right, were ultimately limited by overriding concerns with determinacy, order, and coherence. This view has been widely adopted by postmodern critics, many of whom rely upon a "straw-man modernism" (a term I borrow from Marjorie Perloff) in order to legitimize postmodernism as a descriptive artistic category and substantiate the existence of a post/modern divide. This project argues that in fact representations of subjectivity in modernist fiction anticipate postmodern theory in ways that have not been sufficiently explored and that highlight continuity rather than rupture. It analyzes six novels published between 1904 and 1941 that articulate subjectivity as "in process," a term used by Julia Kristeva to describe identity as constituted by linguistic, ideological, and social processes rather than ontological fixities. I argue that the central modality in each of these novels is deconstructive, in the sense that each uncovers the processes through which the subject is interpellated into larger discourses oscillating between order and disjunction. Each novel, therefore, represents subjectivity as radically indeterminate, decentered, and fragmented. Ultimately, this project suggests that from its earliest moment modernist fiction was concerned with the "crisis of representation" that would not be theorized until well after modernism had been declared over. This reading not only calls into question the notion that postmodernism represents an overcoming of modernism's alleged limitations, but reappraises modernist fiction in its own right as the seminal expression of twentieth-century subjectivity. Taken together, the novels that comprise this study reflect the complexity and multiformity of modernist fiction's concern with subjectivity as it intersects with issues of ideology, race, spatiality, violence, and other factors. The version of modernist fiction thus arrived at looks much different than the one described by Hassan, McHale, and many other postmodern critics. The authors covered make no attempts to envision new coherent versions of subjectivity or recover a challenged or lost transcendental ego. They not only depict and confront the fragmented self, but maintain an intentional open-endedness that explicitly rejects any sense of closure.

Ideologies of monolingualism sustain three interrelated and seemingly fundamental assumptions about language: (1) native speaker usage is authentic and thus ideal, (2) a person's birthplace correlates with proficiency, and (3) the plurality of languages and varieties results in incomprehensibility. Although the persistence of monolingualism is a central concern for this dissertation, rather than merely dismissing or resisting the logics of monolingualism, this dissertation explores how the practices of English in global contexts, characterized by the movement of people and language resources and the constitution of postnational imaginaries, provides new ways of thinking about the historical and contemporary persistence of monolingual normativity. Therefore, although discourses of nationalism have historically sustained the exceptionalist logics of monolingualism, emerging postnational forms of social organization and language practice invite us to see authenticity as a reconstitutable discourse, national belonging as a mobile practice, and incomprehensibility as a subversive resource. Thus, this dissertation argues that the resilience of monolingualism inhibits us from seeing English language proficiency as a discursive formation: rather than a measure of communicative competence, proficiency must be reimagined as reflective of one's ability to autonomously transgress normative boundaries and communicative conventions. Drawing on a hybrid methodology that incorporates historiography; metacritique of existing scholarship; analyses of various artifacts, including linguistic landscapes, poetry, and popular culture; and theorization of classroom practice; this dissertation insists that, as an increasing number of people around the world use English, as it becomes a global resource increasingly dissociated with any single national imaginary, we are positioned to reconsider what it means to be a proficient user of English. In short, to be proficient at English is to be a "sovereign" user of English: not only able to use English correctly, but able to use English incorrectly without being pathologized for doing so.

This project considers the literary debts of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene to a handful of Victorian artists, mostly protestant, with special emphasis on Charles Dickens. Chapter 1 introduces the novelists and addresses objections to my thesis. Chapter 2 is a literature review on the English Catholic literary renaissance at the turn of the twentieth century. Chapters 3 and 4 develop a theory and definition of the Catholic novel, focusing on the problem of literary and philosophical realism, Flannery O'Connor's conception of "anagogical vision," and Jacques Maritain's writings on art and the novel as a literary form. Chapters 5 and 6 in turn analyze several books, both fiction and non-fiction, by Waugh and Greene.

Voices of Exile: Reimagining a Polyvocal American South, focuses on the phenomenon of community formation and reformation, particularly the perpetual reimaginings of the South in Southern studies and literatures. This project argues that it is time for the South to be reimagined once more--to move away from traditional discussions of the South along a black/white divide and toward a more pluralistic understanding of this region. In my work, I create a genealogy of what J. Anthony Paredes calls a "New, New South" by recovering the neglected voices that have always been there, but that need to be (re)incorporated into the Southern dialectic. Through a cross-cultural reading of works by American Indian, African American, and Anglo-American writers, I explore a polyvocal South in which regional and ethnic identities are continually contested and reshaped. I pair literary texts that (re)imagine key historical moments of community formation with primary documents of the historical moment being addressed. Literary texts and authors explored in this project include: Diane Glancy's Pushing the Bear, William Melvin Kelley's A Different Drummer, LeAnne Howe's Shell Shaker, and William Faulkner's Wilderness stories and Go Down, Moses. My project's aim is to look at the South as a community or narrative of polyvocality, tearing down the idea of a master narrative or "bifurcated" South, and trading it in for a "non-traditional" South which is more representative of America--a multicultural, multivocal community.

This dissertation examines the manner in which contemporary Native women writers reveal the various traumas North American Indigenous individuals and communities have inherited from a colonial past. The two main chapters focus on two genres--poetry and fiction--and closely examine writings by Deborah Miranda (Esselen and Chumash), Ester Belin (Navajo), Kimberly Blaeser (Ojibwe), Eden Robinson (Haisla), and Betty Louise Bell (Cherokee). My discussion is tribally specific and takes into account the different historical and cultural influences surrounding each text. Using this approach, I develop two methods for analyzing contemporary writing by Native women of Canada and the United States. Through an analysis of Robinson's Monkey Beach (2000) and Bell's Faces in the Moon (1994), I propose that Native women are symbolically healing the wounds of the pasts through the narrative journeys of the protagonists. In these two books, Robinson and Bell write about intergenerational traumas, or traumas that have been inherited from the specific colonial pasts of their Native communities. These traumas originate deep within families and communities and stem directly from governmental attempts at cultural extinction, including the various Indian Acts in Canada (1868, 1876) and the Allotment Act (1887) in the United States. In developing an approach to the poetics of Native women, I examine three collections: Blaeser's Absentee Indians (2002), Belin's From the Belly of My Beauty (1999), and Miranda's Indian Cartography (1999). These collections reveal the consequences of both land loss and the dramatic changes that have taken place in Native communities across North America, but they also reveal the ways Native women navigate the tragedy and beauty of their histories. Through their fiction and poetry, these writers are exposing the continued existence of colonialism within their communities and are also expressing a fresh sense of hope and healing for many Native individuals and communities dealing with similar traumas. Indigenous women of the United States and Canada are telling their own stories and the stories of their communities for the first time with honesty and a significant sense of what they have faced as Native women.