Queer Utopian Geographies and Cold War Poetry intervenes in the general narrative about Cold War culture, made even more famous by such recent popular shows like Mad Men and Pan Am, that describes the era as a repressed society in desperate need of liberation. While indeed Cold War America was a time of paranoia and loyalty oaths, even before the Stonewall Riots of 1969 gay men and lesbians found subtle ways to resist popular media and government discourse that perpetuated the myth that the homosexual was the anti-citizen. A number of gay men and lesbians traveled extensively to escape this Cold War culture, and it is through the trope of geography in the terrain of Cold War poetry that readers recognize that resistance is able to occur under authoritys nose and outside closely controlled places. This forces us to confront the assumption that resistance needs to be violent and highly visible in order to be successful. For instance, my project argues that the poetry of W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Frank OHara, and Allen Ginsberg represents utopian concepts. Not only do the poets depict geographical space as offering utopian possibility, but they also reveal how daily moments and experiences provide hope, what I refer to as utopian practice throughout the project. Furthermore, these practices and spaces typically conjure queer specters of the past and these hauntings also point to a hopeful future. This dissertation claims that, while scholars and readers cannot ignore the negativity of Cold War homophobia, these poets actively worked to reshape the world at the literal level and through lyric subjectivity.

Mercury of the Waves: Modern Cryptology and U.S. Literature Henry Veggian University of Pittsburgh, 2005 The doctoral dissertation examines United States literary and institutional history during the period 1900-1973. The study demonstrates how cryptology was detached from its philological residence over three phases (the amateur, institutional, and professional). In the amateur phase, which was regionally specific to the Midwest, the science was characterized by social reformist debate. In the second, institutional phase, the amateur version of cryptology was institutionalized by the United States federal government following WWI to imitate a specific institutional model (that of the French Bureau du Chiffre). During the third, professional phase, the prior two were enhanced during the interwar period by linguists, mechanical engineers, literary modernists, and cryptologists. Running parallel to this narrative is a modern American literary genealogy that, beginning with Henry Adams and extending through Thomas Pynchon, engaged cryptology during that same era. The dissertation locates their discourse within Vichian humanism, and in doing so it first explains how modern literature (and the American novel in particular), its practices, and institutions contributed discursive rhetoric, hermeneutical methods, and institutional models to the emergent 20th century U.S. security state; secondly, it argues that a particular genealogical style that spans the writings of Henry Adams, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, and Thomas Pynchon elaborated an diverse rhetorical discourse by which to respond to that assemblage of new institutional entities, and without which that assemblage would be incoherent.

This dissertation examines the relationship between time and technology in American literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It focuses principally on the work of Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, William Faulkner and Ralph Ellison, in the context of various historical and philosophical accounts of technology. It begins with the Leo Marx's analysis of American literature as being always concerned with the moment when the machine violently enters into the garden. The dominant American concept of technology asserts that technology is progress (which is not the same as endorsing technological progress); in Richard Heilbroner's classic formulation, "machines make history." This teleological drive within technology is ultimately eschatological: the world and the very self stand in peril of being turned into automatons. Whether or not the eschatos ends with the automation or liberation of the self, the internal teleological drive of technology threatens to end time, that is, the continuation of meaningful events, something which the mainstream of American literary criticism has failed to grasp, by focusing on technology as a contemporary crisis, rather than analyzing it as being constitutive of life itself. That is, attempts to resist technological eschatologies typically end up becoming technological eschatologies themselves, with Leo Marx serving as the perfect example. An important tradition within American literature, however, has articulated an anti-teleological, anti-eschatological account of technology, one which denies the reality of progress in favor of change. This tradition includes the works of Herman Melville (including Moby Dick, Typee, Omoo, the Confidence Man and Clarel) and Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man and the essays, collected and uncollected), with William Faulkner's works (especially Light in August, the Snopes books, Absalom, Absalom and Pylon) being more ambiguously included in this tradition. Lewis Mumford, in opposition to the mainstream of literary criticism, which has always endorsed an eschatological vision of technology, eventually approached Melville and Ellison's anti-eschatological position. These works present a vision which is a viable alternative to both "progressive" ideologies which advance the mechanization of humanity and reactionary anti-technological ideologies. The dissertation argues that the Ellisonian-Melvillean anti-eschatological vision of technology precedes and is related to the critiques of progress advanced by certain contemporary theorists of biology and historians of technology, including George Basilla, Arnold Pacey, Richard Lewontin and Stephen Gould, and that this unified rejection of the very idea of progress is intellectually necessary and politically desirable. The dissertation identifies and participates in a critique not of the desirability of American progress so much as of the reality of American progress, and of the complicity of American ideologies of progress with racist traditions.

By establishing a crucial figural relation between image and text in the cinema, this dissertation offers a detailed analysis of the uses of writing through select canonical works of a significant period in the history of the German cinema. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's theory of allegory and Gilles Deleuze's conceptions of the cinematic image, as well as a Derridean definition of writing, I argue that instances of written text in images of the German cinema are social hieroglyphs rendered as allegorical gestures, which inscribe questions of authority in the form of grammatological constellations within the movement of images. These hieroglyphic configurations, spelled out as writing on the screen, stand in reference to specific modalities which affirm the presence of a larger organizational regime of truth. Instances of writing thus constitute the inscriptions through which such structures of power acquire legibility and, conversely, become visible. Ultimately, this figural regime delineates questions of the political constitution of the state because the struggle for authority and its legitimacy as an organizational system become embodied in allegorical forms of writing that inscribe the body politic into filmic texts as subject positions. This approach is predicated on a subjunctive dimension that redefines the intrinsic relation of the text to its "outside." Chapters discuss the figure of authority in "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" and "Kameradschaft," circularity in Fritz Lang's "M" and his "Mabuse" films, titles and writing in early Weimar film censorship decisions, the star figure of Emil Jannings in the Nazi film "Ohm Krüger," and the postwar films "Die Mörder Sind Unter Uns" and "Rotation." An epilogue investigates the reconfigurations of writing on the screen in R.W. Fassbinder's "Die Dritte Generation" (1979) and the 1998 hacker film "23". In all of these case studies, I contend that writing in film remains significant when the image as such must be augmented by gestures toward a figural language.

My project takes up a variety of fictional and non-fictional texts about a kind of work which attracted the attention of American novelists Herman Melville, Harry Halyard, and Helen E. Brown; historian Obed Macy; and journalist J. Ross Browne, among others. In my Introduction, I argue that these whaling narratives helped to further develop and perpetuate an already existing fantasy of masculine physical labor which imagines the United States working class men to be ideal, heroic Americans. This fantasy was so compelling and palpable that, surprisingly enough, the New England whalemen could be persistently claimed as characteristically and emblematically American, even though they worked on hierarchically-stratified floating factories, were frequently denied their Constitutional rights by maritime law, and hardly ever spent any time on American soil. In my second chapter, I scrutinize the emerging assumption of an ideological fantasy of masculine physical labor that was specifically American and interrogate how certain kinds of physical labor, farming and whaling among them, were cast as particularly American in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Chapter 3 demonstrates that there was something about the work of whaling that resisted these kinds of nationalistic appropriations, and I present a close analysis of Crèvecoeur, Cooper, and Melvilles whaling narratives. My fourth chapter further explores this resistance, and I read Melvilles Moby-Dick alongside J. Ross Brownes Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, arguing that both Melville and Brownedespite their texts formal differencesshare an intellectual project of configuring certain aspects of the collective, physical labor of whaling as artistically generative. Chapter 5 addresses both reactionary and progressive depictions of whaling wives with regard to domesticity and nationality. My last chapter examines how some separatist-minded Nantucket Islanders demonstrated that federalism was contested not just in the antebellum South, but in other areas of the United States as well. Taken together, all of these chapters address different aspects of the complex and multifaceted identity of the American whalemen, but they also show how a particularly resilient ideological fantasy of masculine American labor develops and gains power, perpetuating itself across time.

Working with Fredric Jamesons understanding of genre as a formal sedimentation of an ideology, this study investigates the historicity of the detective narrative, what role it plays in bourgeois, capitalist culture, what ways it mediates historical processes, and what knowledge of these processes it preserves. I begin with the problem of the detective narratives origins. This is a complex and ultimately insoluble problem linked to the limits of historical perspective and compounded by the tendency of genres to erase their own origins. I argue that any critical reading of the detective story beginning with the notion that real crime and working class unrest are the specters that the detective story seeks to exorcise misapprehends the real class struggle that is evidenced in, but also disguised by, the detective story: the struggle between the ascendant (though never assuredly so) bourgeoisie and the receding (though, again, never assuredly so) aristocratic and post-feudal ruling classes. Instead, I argue that it is this class struggle that is apparent in the detective narratives special structurethe double structure by which it can pose any-origin-whatever as a moment of history and construct that history forward while appearing to uncover it backward. The detective narrative erases precisely the problem of the bourgeoisies lack of origins (from a feudal perspective) and counterfeits history. For this reason, I locate the detective narratives beginnings in specific sites where the transfer of power from traditional institutions to bourgeois institutions or institutions reformed by the bourgeoisie, including the Chancery court (in Charles Dickens Bleak House), the construction of the New Poor Laws of 1834 (in Wilkie Collins The Dead Secret), and marriage and inheritance in Bleak House and Collins The Moonstone. Ending with a study of the commonly acknowledged first detective novel, The Moonstone, I conclude that this novel and the generic paradigm of the detective narrative it exemplifies succeed in encrypting the historical discontinuity between post-feudal modes of production and capitalism and that, ultimately, crime is just an alibi for the work of historical reconstruction that the detective narrative carries out.

Student Writing, Politics, and Style, 1962-1979 examines personal writings composed by American college students during the 1960s and 70s, a period that corresponds to important developments in U.S. postwar university student activism and in the modern disciplinary history of composition studies. I contend that students experimentation with multiple genres of personal writing during this period disturbs a dominant historical narrative in composition and rhetoric that characterizes the theories and pedagogies of personal writing widely circulating in the sixties as expressive. Looking closely at student-produced memoirs, journals, personal essays, and commencement orations, I argue that students in the sixties approached personal writing not simply to determine the meaning of their experiences as individuals. Rather, the student writers I examine understood personal writing genres as useful for reflecting on the possibility of meaning and for thinking about their complex identities as both individuals and members of collectives. The dissertation offers a way of reading student writing in relation to its historical context and furthermore shows how students work both with and against expectations to construct identities in writing.

The dissertation considers Irish films through the valence of movement and migration to conceptualize a cinema that can account for how films function locally and transnationally. I consider various forms of migration in films produced in Ireland to interrogate how identity and the nation are presented. Considering forms of migration opens a different approach to the films that enables questioning of the myths of the nation-state within globalized capital and culture. In Ireland, the land has given shape to the physical boundaries of imagined identity; land is understood as a material trace denoting a linear history of invasion, conquest, and ultimately independence an evolution from colonial oppression to postcolonial identity. Movement and migration make the boundaries defining subjectivity permeable by demonstrating how place, identity, language, and consciousness are located in the intermezzo. Using a case study approach that considers diverse films, including big budget, small budget, documentary and popular genre films, I demonstrate how changes in conceptions of national cinema and identity occur on aesthetic and epistemological levels, resulting in multiple points of entry for transnational audiences. I examine the movements of people, the landscape, and storytelling as forms of mobility. Analyses of the films and their context focus on exiles, internal émigrés, nomads, disaffected young people, and Travellers to shift the consideration of migration from emigration toward a conception of epistemological mobility. A double consciousness is elicited though the use of legends derived from earlier Irish history, redefining the relationship between myth and nation. The resultant fluctuating and mobile sign systems refuse strict adherence to any one mode of narration or style, often breaking down boundaries between reality and fantasy. I discuss Irish films in terms of censorship, funding and distribution, arguing that these issues must inflect an understanding of the dispersed form this cinema exhibits. The transformations to genre conventions and meanings are an effect of the necessary movement toward international co-productions. The dissertation culminates in a discussion of how the heterogeneous body of recent films shifts, metamorphoses, and defies definition, indicating transformations in the time, space, and body of the nation.

<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-indent: 0in" class="MsoNormal"><font size="3"><font face="Times New Roman">A close examination of the Shakespearean material in approximately two hundred British and American literary textbooks from the mid nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries reveals that the professionalization of the American professoriate influenced the formation of English literature as a field in American colleges and universities.<span>&#x00A0; </span>Professionalization changed the character of the study of English literature from one centered around moral instruction dependent on an a-contextual framing of literary material to one characterized by specialized studies dependent on interpretation.<span>&#x00A0; </span>The representation of pedagogy in these textbooks is an index of the effects of this professionalization on the developing professoriate and field of English literature.<span>&#x00A0; </span>This dissertation also explores the connections between pedagogy, research, and field formation.<span>&#x00A0;&#x00A0; </span></font></font></p><p style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-indent: 0in" class="MsoNormal"><font size="3"><font face="Times New Roman"></font></font></p><p style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"><font size="3"><font face="Times New Roman">Chapter One identifies these institutional changes in American higher education through archival research examining the print history of the Variorum Shakespeare series, begun by Shakespearean scholar, editor, and autodidact Horace Howard Furness and eventually taken up by academic institutions, most notably the University of Pennsylvania, and ultimately the Modern Language Association.<span>&#x00A0; </span>Chapter Two examines the implicit and explicit changes in pedagogical theories and practices through the representation of Shakespeare&rsquo;s work in literary textbooks printed between approximately 1850 and 1875.<span>&#x00A0; </span>Chapter Three continues this work with literary textbooks printed between approximately 1875 and 1930, focusing on the textbooks produced by prolific textbook author and future president of Delaware College (1888-1896), Albert Newton Raub.<span>&#x00A0; </span>Chapter Four extends this work by performing a curricular history of English at Delaware College between approximately 1850 and 1930 through a detailed examination of archival sources.<span>&#x00A0; </span>The conclusion draws an analogy between this historical study of pedagogy and disciplinary formation and composition in the present moment.<span>&#x00A0; </span></font></font></p>

"Modernist Pedagogies: Conrad, Woolf, Pound, and the Reading Public" challenges the widely held belief that modernist writers were uninterested in reaching the emerging reading public that developed as a result of the 1870 Education Act and subsequent reforms in Britain. I contend that Conrad, Woolf, and Pound were largely optimistic that, with a particular type of guidance, the reading public was capable of engaging with difficult texts. Conrad's prefaces, Woolf's lectures and BBC broadcasts, and Ezra Pound's How To Read and ABC of Reading offer varied pedagogical motivations and methods with implications for not only how we teach these major authors but also how we teach reading and writing at the university level. By challenging prevailing understandings of the modernists' attitudes toward the reading public, this study offers a more complex rendering of the modernists' relationships with the expanded reading public, thereby enabling a fuller understanding of the modernist project.