Thesis--Université de Paris IV, 1976. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 837-882) and index.

Frank Norris's novel McTeague can be read as an intense reflection on the limitations of language surrounding fluid sexualities in late-nineteenth century America. Through a queer theoretical lens, I examine the ways in which Norris collapses his characters and narrative in order to demonstrate those limits. Trina and McTeague suffer acutely from their inability to articulate their sexualities, and the narrator of the novel does little to compensate for the characters\' failure to speak. The novel, which is a collection of broken genres, further exposes the fact that various kinds of rigid narrative forms cannot sufficiently frame or articulate fluid sexualities. Through character, narrative, and genre breakdown, Norris reflects how the nineteenth century's lack of language regarding those who occupy a variety of sexualities can tear people and language apart. / Master of Arts

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My dissertation, The Endless Roar in which We Live: The Figure of Noise in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Fiction is the first extended study that locates an intersection between sound studies and literary studies in order to examine noise as it defines spaces and places, and the characters that live and work in them, in American literature from the second half of the nineteenth century through the beginning of the twentieth century. I evaluate noise in a sampling of American fiction, and consider how the imagined sounds of fiction echo nineteenth-century soundscapes and underscore contemporary discernment of noises – and sometimes the lack of noises – in the national consciousness. I consider the street noise that the upper classes wished away, the factory noise that so many women workers spent a lifetime hearing, and the resounding noise of the United States’ expansion westward. Conversely, I also consider how authors and characters respond to the noises that penetrate their ears and create their soundscapes. Together, these considerations shape my argument that sounds help to construct and characterize localities, just as certain places construct particular sounds. Moreover, however, I argue that noise creates spaces wherein identities – such as those of gender, class, and ethnicity – also often tied to place, are discovered, defined, and challenged. In many ways, classifications of noise are subjective and varied, depending on who makes and who hears the noise, where and why the noise is produced, and how and by whom is the noise interpreted. Considering noise as malleable and interpretable based on context allows me to most effectively examine noise as a facilitator of identity formation.

This dissertation argues that the crucial quality of American literary naturalism is the polemicism of its major authors and texts. Scholars have long been attuned to the “rebellious” nature of naturalism. Indeed, following the charge of H. L. Mencken (for whom naturalism constituted an aesthetic assault on the pious vacuities of Howellsian social realism), critics have been apt to frame naturalism as the national literature of disobedience. What is less than clear, however, is what, exactly, naturalism is supposed to be rebelling against. In a century of criticism, naturalism has constituted an assault on “machine industrialism” (Parrington), romantic imagination (Trilling), literary realism (Pizer), sentimentality (Lehan), regionalism and local color fiction (Campbell), feminization (Seltzer), capitalism (Benn Michaels), European aestheticism (Dudley), and patriarchal hegemony (Fleissner). My thesis builds on the assumption that the “real object” of naturalism’s rebellion is less definitive than the antinomian spirit itself. The naturalists, in short, were polemicists: naturalism is defined less by a coherent and stable philosophical orientation than by an attitude, a posture of aggressive controversy, which happens to cluster loosely around particular philosophical themes. Moreover, the conspicuous polemicism of the original naturalist project has been registered and extended in the critical construction of the genre over the past century. Naturalism has always depended upon polemical reconstruction by its critics, who were themselves feeding upon the palpable polemicism of Norris, Dreiser, et. al. In chapter one, I argue that the naturalists (and their critics) have adopted a self-effacing polemical rhetoric to establish the genre as the “central marginal” figure in the American canon. By emphasizing their own otherness to the American mainstream, the naturalists were, in effect, claiming it. Then, in close examinations of works by Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Richard Wright, I argue that the naturalists used their fiction to explore some of the most controversial political and cultural issues in modern American life. Scholars have long noticed how naturalism draws on the scientific theories of Darwin, Spencer, Sumner, Huxley, and others to challenge the prevailing Judeo-Christian cosmology. But the naturalists also charted the basic co-ordinates of a wide range of issues. So, my second chapter considers Frank Norris’s The Octopus in relation to emerging discourses of environmentalism and nascent anxieties over ecological despoliation. Chapter three considers the relationship between abortion and censorship in Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, and argues that the “tragedy” of Dreiser’s text hinges upon our understanding how its protagonist, Clyde Griffiths, is himself a work of art. In chapter four, I argue that Native Son’s chilling protagonist, Bigger Thomas, represents a distinctly modern figure for terror, and that the novel elaborates a disturbing complimentarity between terrorism and lynching as the crime and punishment that exist outside the confines of the law. While my project considers each of these polemical debates within the cultural and intellectual climates in which they emerged, it is also an attempt to engage with these ideas in their own spirit—that is, to situate naturalistic novels, polemically, within the highly fraught contexts they helped to invent.

This dissertation argues that the crucial quality of American literary naturalism is the polemicism of its major authors and texts. Scholars have long been attuned to the “rebellious” nature of naturalism. Indeed, following the charge of H. L. Mencken (for whom naturalism constituted an aesthetic assault on the pious vacuities of Howellsian social realism), critics have been apt to frame naturalism as the national literature of disobedience. What is less than clear, however, is what, exactly, naturalism is supposed to be rebelling against. In a century of criticism, naturalism has constituted an assault on “machine industrialism” (Parrington), romantic imagination (Trilling), literary realism (Pizer), sentimentality (Lehan), regionalism and local color fiction (Campbell), feminization (Seltzer), capitalism (Benn Michaels), European aestheticism (Dudley), and patriarchal hegemony (Fleissner). My thesis builds on the assumption that the “real object” of naturalism’s rebellion is less definitive than the antinomian spirit itself. The naturalists, in short, were polemicists: naturalism is defined less by a coherent and stable philosophical orientation than by an attitude, a posture of aggressive controversy, which happens to cluster loosely around particular philosophical themes. Moreover, the conspicuous polemicism of the original naturalist project has been registered and extended in the critical construction of the genre over the past century. Naturalism has always depended upon polemical reconstruction by its critics, who were themselves feeding upon the palpable polemicism of Norris, Dreiser, et. al. In chapter one, I argue that the naturalists (and their critics) have adopted a self-effacing polemical rhetoric to establish the genre as the “central marginal” figure in the American canon. By emphasizing their own otherness to the American mainstream, the naturalists were, in effect, claiming it. Then, in close examinations of works by Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Richard Wright, I argue that the naturalists used their fiction to explore some of the most controversial political and cultural issues in modern American life. Scholars have long noticed how naturalism draws on the scientific theories of Darwin, Spencer, Sumner, Huxley, and others to challenge the prevailing Judeo-Christian cosmology. But the naturalists also charted the basic co-ordinates of a wide range of issues. So, my second chapter considers Frank Norris’s The Octopus in relation to emerging discourses of environmentalism and nascent anxieties over ecological despoliation. Chapter three considers the relationship between abortion and censorship in Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, and argues that the “tragedy” of Dreiser’s text hinges upon our understanding how its protagonist, Clyde Griffiths, is himself a work of art. In chapter four, I argue that Native Son’s chilling protagonist, Bigger Thomas, represents a distinctly modern figure for terror, and that the novel elaborates a disturbing complimentarity between terrorism and lynching as the crime and punishment that exist outside the confines of the law. While my project considers each of these polemical debates within the cultural and intellectual climates in which they emerged, it is also an attempt to engage with these ideas in their own spirit—that is, to situate naturalistic novels, polemically, within the highly fraught contexts they helped to invent.

Frank Norris uses the sixth sense in his writings as a creative device, explaining the illusory characteristics of life mainly in six works: The Responsibilities of the Novelist, Blix, Vandover and the Brute, McTeague, The octopus, and The Pit. In The Octopus, Vanamee, a character fashioned after Norris's friend Bruce Porter, becomes the focal point for the author's elucidation of the sixth sense, and also of related powers such as telepathy, hypnosis, and transmigration, all related to a moral natural order. In the other works the sixth sense is consistently utilized by Norris's special characters in correctly perceiving unknown knowledge. It is conclusive that Norris acknowledges and accepts the mysterious as a reality and attempts to explain it.

"This work examines the fundamentalist controversy in Texas from 1920 until 1929. Stressing the role of J. Frank Norris as the state's fundamentalist leader, it studies the manifestations of the controversy in both the religious and the secular institutions of the state. Since the movement met little organized resistance in Texas, the fundamentalists won significant victories. The study is organized topically. The first part is a general introduction to the controversy on both the state and national level. The second part portrays Norris as the leader of fundamentalist forces. The third and fourth parts examine the conflict within the Protestant denominations especially among the Baptists and Methodists and its impact upon secular institutions. "-- leaf 1

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