No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2005. / Supervisor: Lisa Moore. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Not available / text

This dissertation examines sensation in twentieth-century narratives of London and argues that vulnerability is a constitutive experience of the post-imperial city. Sensations of vulnerability in London arise because of the built environment of the city: its status as an imperial center and a global capital create important intersections of local, national, and global concerns which render the city itself vulnerable. I chart the trajectory of vulnerability as an affective history of London that is documented in cultural texts ranging from fiction and film to political debates and legal materials. Since the sensational experiences of the present partly arise from the materials of the past embedded in the landscape, affective histories create new ways of understanding history as a spatial experience. The narrated sensations of the city make vulnerability legible as a persistent feature of twentieth-century London life. I begin with a modernist, imperial London, in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and in Parliamentary debates from the same year (1925). Ambivalence about London's dual status as a local site and as a national and international capital is a response to London's vulnerable position at the end of the Great War. Next, I turn to World War Two London and Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day. I discuss intimacy as an important national feature in narratives of London during the crisis of this war. National narratives about intimacy constructed by Winston Churchill and heard on BBC radio respond directly to London's defensive vulnerability. My third chapter concerns Margaret Thatcher's 1980s London and the crucial role autonomy plays in constructing London as an invulnerable, international financial and civic capital. Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming-Pool Library documents Londoners' attempts to make sense of their autonomy in a postimperial capital. My final chapter examines sensations of social and political belonging in contemporary London through reading Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things alongside legal documents about immigration. I contend that reading cultural texts affectively creates counter-histories of the city that accommodate a deeper range of experiences than do traditional histories and offers to literary studies a new way of understanding the relationship between official and unofficial histories. / text

At the end of Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon (1977), Milkman travels to the fictional town of Shalimar, convinced that he is about to reclaim his family's lost inheritance. When he arrives, however, he is sorely disappointed. Instead of the “bags of gold” he was promised, he finds only “Nothing. Nothing at all.” Milkman’s recovery-that-is-not-one encapsulates the simple yet fraught question at the center of this dissertation: How to plot the inheritance not of positive but negative property? Deploying a palimpsestic reading practice, I bring together novels and films, from the twentieth century to the present, that each cohere around this central dilemma: Can the hegemonic form of the British realist novel—the inheritance plot—be rewritten to depict, instead, forms of intergenerational dispossession? In 1973 Raymond Williams surveyed novelistic production in Britain in the nineteenth century concluding that almost ninety percent constitute an “inheritance plot.” This is, according to Williams, any plot in which narrative closure is secured with the intergenerational transfer of property, thereby sedimenting the underlying assumption of a definite relation between economic entitlement and biological property. If, however, nineteenth-century realism naturalized the transmission of wealth, right, and title, “The Inheritance Plot” examines how it has since been refused and mis-used to represent, instead, the inheritance of loss, exile, dispossession, debt, statelessness, and racial trauma. The question, then, that drives my project hinges on a set of productive contradictions: Can the very form that underwrote economic exclusion and juridical alienation be repurposed to trace what Denise Ferriera da Silva calls the oxymoron of “negative accumulation”? Over four chapters, I bring together the fiction of George Schuyler, Willa Cather, Alan Hollinghurst, Helen Oyeyemi, Jordan Peele, Ephraim Asili, Raquel Salas Rivera, and Giannina Braschi, among others, to offer a literary history of the disinherited. Subsequently, I show how each text imaginatively repurposes and rewrites an “inheritance plot” in the attempt to make sense of the intergenerational violence of chattel slavery, empire, and colonialism, while simultaneously exposing the violent fictions that underwrite genealogical regimes of ownership. In tandem, through drawing on Black and Indigenous feminisms, alongside social reproduction and queer theory, I argue that the negativation of the “inheritance plot” has ethical and political significance. In my reading, the inheritance of nothing is—paradoxically—a narrative non-event with a dual function. For instance, Milkman’s inheritance-that-is-not-one serves is both a diagnosis of historical trauma, and it is the sign of a radical reimagination of the world that doesn’t yet lie in succession.