This dissertation pinpoints imaginative patterns that people within the diaspora have used and now use to navigate highly untenable domestic circumstances. In focusing on this aspect of psychological survival, we can trace domestic behaviors back to existential questions that trouble individuals in the New World African Diaspora: questions of self-knowledge amidst internalized racism, questions that seek to realign one's history and future after migration, questions about the colonial and personal mother. These types of questions which frame my examination of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Loida Maritza Pérez's Geographies of Home and Andrea Levy's Small Island, direct us toward psychic and physical tensions that preoccupy Black Women writers and their characters. In the second chapter of this dissertation, my textual analysis of The Bluest Eye engages with how Morrison orders an existential logic of a young girl's development through her experience with private violation and public racial violence. In the third chapter, I argue that Loida Maritza Pérez's Geographies of Home is an examination of the psychologies of a mother and her daughters, as revealed by the omniscient narrator, which discloses the complex interplay of illusion/reality, inward turn/outward turn, belief/unbelief which characterizes the immigrant's uncertain survival. In my fourth chapter, Andrea Levy's Small Island, two Jamaicans, Hortense and Gilbert grow up in early twentieth century, colonial Jamaica and later immigrate to WWII England. Through these two characters, Levy demonstrates how the dynamic of the existential uncertainty inherent in the colonial relationship consistently holds in tension two important concepts: help and humiliation. Ultimately, I assert that recognizing existential uncertainty in the New World African Diaspora not only highlights the acute sense of unpredictability that plagues African American, Caribbean and Black British individuals, but points to a genealogy of psychic oppression that persists for these people groups. This dissertation calls for a witnessing of a family's traumatic history in a way that envisions the future healing and reconciliation of psychic wounds. This project expands scholarship on the harrowing psychic genealogies that link African-American, Caribbean and Black British domestic environments and establishes a relevant existential vocabulary for diasporic experiences of violence, wounding and self-questioning.

Early in her reign, in response to Parliament's formal requests that she marry and secure the succession, Elizabeth calls herself the "mother of England." Her metaphorical maternity signals a rhetorical transaction between Elizabeth and her people that stretches across time, space, and genre; writers respond to Elizabeth by modifying the metaphor in order to shape her behavior. Conceptual blending theory, developed by cognitive scientists Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, provides language to articulate the complexities of Elizabeth's metaphor—to understand how language, culture, and cognition interact to create and modify meaning. Furthering the work of critics who analyze Elizabeth's self-presentation and in light of Amy Cook's work with conceptual blending theory and theater, this dissertation examines Elizabeth's maternal metaphor in her speeches and considers Sidney's Arcadia (c. 1581-82, 1584; published in 1590), Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (c. 1588), and Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) as examples of responses to and explorations of Elizabeth's mother–queen blend. By manipulating the mother–queen metaphor in various ways, these writers urge Elizabeth to fulfill her responsibilities as a figurative mother: first, through actual marriage and motherhood, and later, as Elizabeth's age led to infertility, by naming an heir. Elizabeth's attempts to control her image through metaphor were thwarted by the very nature of her method. This examination of her metaphor in the context of imaginative writing reveals the malleability of Elizabeth's carefully crafted image.

Aphoristic thoughts must be distinguished from their articulation in aphorisms, for they are found in all other genres of discourse as well. Within these discourses they present non-discursive points, i.e. points where the mind interrupts the linear progression of the text in order to stop and contemplate a momentary end of thinking. This study seeks to isolate the thought from thinking. It does so in a series of reflections on German, French and English aphoristic texts. These reflections explore a viable alternative to the contextualist paradigms of literary criticism, history, and philosophy. Instead of reintegrating the isolated thought in an extended historical narrative or critical argument, this method seeks to respond to it with another thought. The "context" of the thinker's thought is not a genre, a literal text, or field of inquiry, but a world that is only rarely textual in a literal sense. Unlike the disciplines to which most serious reflection is devoted, the aphoristic utterance makes sense outside a formal discipline. One motif around which the independent sections of this study are arranged are Goethe's and Nietzsche's thoughtful wanderer, exposed to the elements outside. Another is Nietzsche's gay or cheerful science, in which ultimately nihilistic ideals like certainty, consistency and truth are diagnosed, treated with and replaced by the wit, partiality and idiosyncracy of the aphorist. In addition, the study discusses aspects of the scholarship, addresses the problem of the aphoristic collection, and attempts an inventory of aphoristic ends.

In Theorizing Asian America Lingyan Yang articulates the urgently needed theory, politics, methods, and ethics of Asian American Feminist Cultural Criticism and Literature in the global and diasporic context, turning every theoretical aporia into political possibilities and every political impossibility into theoretical contestations. Yang compares and connects the texts and thoughts of the Asian American and the Asian diasporic postcolonial women intellectuals, which have inaugurated, defined, shaped and re-directed the intellectual history of Asian America, the inter-disciplinary history of Asian American Studies, and the feminist history of theorizing Asian American women and Asian American women theorizing. She defines Asian American and Asian diasporic women's cultural criticism and literature in English as that which is authored by North American women intellectuals and writers of Asian origin, specifically East Asian, Southeast Asian, South Asian American and Asian diasporic, who were born in or have immigrated to, migrated to, or resided in North America, whose works have been published by, consumed by and circulating in the First World. On the disputed nationality of Asian American Studies, Yang questions Asian American cultural nationalism's problematic binary between the domestic Asian America and the global and diasporic postcoloniality. She re-conceptualizes the limits and boundaries of the idealism of Asian American communities by exposing the complicity between the logos of the community and the logos of the racialist, gendered and classed capitalist nation through reading Kogawa's Obasan and Ghosh's The Shadow Lines. Drawing from Foucault, Gramsci, Spivak and Said, she is the first to articulate a worldly Asian American feminist intellectual ethics. Writing about a wide range of critical possibilities and contradictions, Yang raises the important questions on interdisciplinarity, institutionalization, community, and representation, taking neither theory nor politics lightly. She insists on the inclusive, engaged, progressive, decolonized and feminist humanism in theorizing the unsettling relationships between theory and politics, theory and practice, theory and minor/other discourses. Theorizing Asian America will be a unique contribution to contemporary critical cultural theories in general, and Asian American cultural criticism, postcoloniality, feminist theories, diaspora and ethnic studies in particular.

Book Illustration and Intersemiotic Translation in Early Modern England establishes new terms for assessing the effects of woodcut image reproduction on literary meaning in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century printed books. Specifically, this project considers the recycling of illustrations in England and across continental Europe that afforded vernacular readers a transnational advantage of shared visual language. As early modern printers and illustrators traced, copied, and reprinted images, translators shifted verbal signifiers for new audiences. Each chapter examines the ways in which illustration can inflect form and genre in emblem, lyric, and epic poetry, respectively. Drawing on critical methods of literary and translation studies, book history, and illustration, this project contributes to an interdisciplinary understanding of illustrated poetry and the ways in which the production of pictures significantly affects textual reception. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2018. / March 19, 2018. / Includes bibliographical references. / A. E. B. Coldiron, Professor Directing Dissertation; Stephanie Leitch, University Representative; Gary Taylor, Committee Member; Bruce Boehrer, Committee Member.

In my dissertation, "(W)rites of Passing: The Performance of Identity in Fiction and Personal Narratives," I explore the literary, historical, psychological and cultural dimensions of passing, particularly as it relates to race and class. Through the works of Arnold van Gennep, Stephen Greenblatt, and Victor Turner, I have discovered intriguing comparisons between the forms of "class-passing" presented in 16th and 18th century British novels with 20th and 21st century "race passing" novels. In much of my work on race passing and African American literature, I argue that while racial passing may have brought certain socio-economic benefits to those who passed (whether temporarily or permanently,) it also invariably forced them to engage in what I would describe as exercises of restraint. These exercises of restraint might manifest themselves in various forms of cultural impotency ranging from a loss and/or repression of emotional expressivity to a more extreme decision to be voluntarily childless---a forced barrenness, if you will. One of the main questions my research attempts to answer is: "Does the act of passing, whether it be through race or class, reinforce the very hierarchy it seems to subvert?" Also, if in fact race and/or class are identities that are performative, then what role does the audience play in permitting individuals to pass? In an attempt to answer these and other questions, I apply performance theory as a lens to provide a clearer and perhaps alternative perspective to the ways in which passing is both implicit (through the individual's choice to pass) and complicit (through the audience's suspension of disbelief.) My research questions how much responsibility the audience carries in the passing individual's effort to pass successfully. At the same time, I discuss how the performance element of improvisation is absolutely necessary in the process and act of passing. What I have defined as the "process of passing" is a variation of Arnold van Gennep's Rites de Passage: a performance ritual with "distinct phases in the social processes whereby groups [and individuals] become adjusted to internal changes, and adopt them to their external environment." Van Gennep's three phases of separation, transition and incorporation that define a rite of passage serve as the foundation of my definition of the process of passing.

This book speaks for the view that the human body, "with its miracle of order," as Whitehead says, is the basis of both passion and intellectual clarity in the construction of texts by readers and writers alike. Critically, its antecedents are the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics which, in spite of being ignored by classicists of the old humanism, or alleged "humanities," have changed forever our sense of the relations between subjects and events, disorder and order in real life. And yet my ideas are equally derived from the work of poets and artists, scientists of feeling, who have proven in all eras, and not without risk, that the mind is not a transcendental authority but an occasion that constructs and reconstructs itself from the changing materials of sense and through the most precise recognitions of order inherent among them. The chapters are as follows: (I) "The Idea of Faith": a repudiation of classical dualism via a critique of Santayana's Scepticism and Animal Faith. (II) "Risking Belief: An 'Allegory of Reading' thinspace": an interpretation of the final scene of A Midsummer Night's Dream as a critique of the classical ideal of rational love. (III) "IF ...: Getting Beyond the Dynamics of Contradiction in Wallace Stevens' 'Palace of the Babies' thinspace": a demonstration of how textual ambiguities unthinkable to classical poetics are resolved through coenesthesis in the reader. (IV) "Wallace Stevens Reading: The Idea of Acoustic Order in 'The Idea of Order at Key West' thinspace": an argument via a computer-aided study of Stevens' vocal performance in favor of the idea that the grammar of a text is generated not from an extrinsic "competence" but within the act of enunciation itself. (V) "The Exquisite Corpse of Charles Baudelaire: The Female Imaginative Sublime in a Post-materialist Phenomenology of Experience": a demonstration of how Baudelaire, in cultivating "flowers from evil" subverts his narrators' and even his own male-dominant, idealist poetics with one rooted in the physical as represented not only by the artificiality of modern life about which he is candid, but by an underlying, creative vitality in the female erotic.

<p>This dissertation argues that nineteenth-century novelists depended on aesthetically unremarkable—or plain—women characters to establish the realist novel as the genre of the British middle class by mapping class values onto plain women’s bodies. By creating female characters with an unremarkable appearance, novelists train readers in the skills necessary to read the realist novel by focusing on interiority rather than materiality. I theorize plainness as a middle ground between beautiful and ugly that allowed authors to define a morality distinct from the upper and lower classes; plain heroines’ unremarkable exteriors embodied middle-class British values of authenticity, restraint, and morality. More than merely the non-beautiful, plainness delineated a very specific kind of moral and classed female subjectivity.</p> <p>The aesthetic of plainness allowed novelists to engage with cultural discussions of modern female subjectivity, for in creating plain female characters, novelists wrote against idealized depictions of passive women. To accentuate a female character’s inner life, plainness in novels functions primarily through comparison, through networks of represented women. Whereas the literary angel-whore binary has been well-established, I am interested in how the presence of a plain woman—neither angel nor monster—complicates our understanding of heroines in novels. The progressive potential of plain woman speaks to a contemporary movement that rebukes the misogynistic trope of distrusting a woman’s surface and instead portrays plain women with deep feeling and individuated identities.</p>

This study reconsiders power dynamics and authorial style through a study of the structure of interruptions. By considering this everyday occurrence as an aesthetic phenomenon, literary critics can more fully understand the relationships inherent in drama, itself a relational art form. This dissertation illuminates how the everyday becomes aesthetic and how the aesthetic helps us to comprehend the everyday. Interruptions are ubiquitous both in everyday life as well as within literature. While sociologists and linguists have studied them in their quotidian occurrences, literary and performance scholars have almost completely ignored their aesthetic iterations. Some recent studies into this structure evaluate poetry and prose, but rarely consider drama, and even in the studies of prose and poetry, interruptions are deployed as a structure inherently understood. This dissertation offers a fuller consideration and evaluation by studying interruptions through their comprising elements and their distinctive types. This study examines early modern drama as an exemplary, influential moment of dramatic output, focusing on the works of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and John Fletcher. Through an informed neo-formalism, this dissertation reveals two significant aspects of interruptive structures. First, interruptions demonstrate dynamic power relationships not only among characters within a play, but also between an audience and a performer or a reader and a text. Second, interruption usages indicate aspects of authorial style, emphasizing a playwright’s use and control of a text and its implications/expectations. The chapters of the dissertation explore four types of internal interruptions, or those which an author writes into the text. Chapter Two examines dialogic microinterruptions, which are specific moments within dialogue where a conversant speaks out of turn. Through exemplary scenes within Volpone, The Tempest, and The Humorous Lieutenant, the chapter develops an understanding of both the shifting power relationships among the characters and how the playwrights approach those shifts in building character and community. Chapter Three examines another type of internal microinterruption, the self-interruption. By considering the methodology and rhetoric of stopping oneself on stage, the chapter reveals the emotional, manipulative, and comedic usages of the structure, while developing a reading of each author’s approach to interiority and character. The final two chapters focus on macrointerruptions, or those that disrupt larger governing structures within a text. Chapter Four explores dramaturgical macrointerruptions through audience expectations of structure. Through Jonson’s Grex in Every Man Out, Shakespeare’s surprise reveal of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, and Fletcher’s exposition in The Chances, each playwright explores the possibilities of rupturing dramatic structures and the effects that such ruptures create for audiences. The final chapter examines interruption of theatrical conventions, specifically through the convention of male to female crossdressing. As this type of crossdressing was not as prevalent as female to male in the period, it presents an already interrupted convention, that the authors, in plays such as Epicene and The Loyal Subject, further complicate through the relationship between the convention and the expectation. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2018. / April 10, 2018. / Dialogue, Dramaturgy, Fletcher, Interruption, Jonson, Shakespeare / Includes bibliographical references. / Gary Taylor, Professor Directing Dissertation; Kris Salata, University Representative; S. E. Gontarski, Committee Member; Terri Bourus, Committee Member.

This dissertation argues that certain late-medieval British travelers intended more than simply to journey from place to place. Their travel writing reveals that they had other goals to accomplish, beyond the expected ones of seeing a new place or visiting a particular holy site. I am using three traveler-authors and their works: William Wey’s The Itineraries of William Wey (1458-62), Gerald of Wales’s The Description of Wales and The Journey Through Wales (c. 1191), and Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe (c.1436). This study begins with two chapters devoted to the nature of travel and travel writing in the Middle Ages, and an introduction of the three travelers. Why and how did people travel, and why did they leave written accounts? I will address two important discussions in the field—the idea of curiosity as a motivator for medieval travelers, and the debate best described as “communitas vs. the individual.” Chapters 3-5 will then address the individual authors. While all three certainly traveled for religious reasons such as pilgrimage or Crusade recruitment, each had multiple objectives for having their travels committed to paper. William Wey wanted to give helpful advice to others, and provide a substitute pilgrimage experience for those back in England who were unable to make the journey themselves. Gerald of Wales was traveling with high-ranking churchmen to encourage the Welsh to go on Crusade, but his ultimate goal was that of self-promotion, both for his literary travails and his future employment opportunities. Margery Kempe didn’t begin her travels with a specific goal in mind, other than to visit popular pilgrimage sites. However, once abroad, she develops a female fellowship—something she often lacked at home, and something she did not find amongst her travel companions. The conclusion will summarize my assessment of each author’s account, proving that each formed his/her identity through travel and travel writing. I will also address what they ultimately gained or lost by writing their accounts. Wey successfully guides future pilgrims, actual and virtual. Gerald hopes to highlight his own worth, but never gains the position he desires. Kempe is the most successful, finally finding a welcoming, feminine sphere. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester 2016. / May 10, 2016. / Gerald of Wales, Margery Kempe, Travel, William Wey / Includes bibliographical references. / David F. Johnson, Professor Directing Dissertation; Charles Brewer, University Representative; Anne Coldiron, Committee Member; David Gants, Committee Member; Nancy Bradley Warren, Committee Member.