By drawing upon aspects of critical geography to explore three writers' representations of urban space and subject formation, American Ethni/Cities develops and advocates for a new methodological approach to the study of literature. Predicated on theories devised by Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Edward Soja, Gil Valentine and other geographically-minded thinkers, this spatially conscious literary practice has the potential to enhance one's understanding of literary texts, power dynamics, identity construction, and the spaces one inhabits. Each of the chapters comprising this study aims to demonstrate what this interdisciplinary partnership between geography and literature can reveal. By focusing on Cahan's representation of Jewish immigrants living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Wright's depiction of black migrants adjusting to life in the industrial North, and Baldwin's exploration of masculinity as a socio-spatial construct, each respective case-study draws attention to the relationship between spatial production and subject formation. The overarching hope of American Ethni/Cities is that others will find this inter-disciplinary partnership productive and will subsequently make it their own, thereby producing even greater understandings of how power works in the spaces we read about, create, and inhabit in our own daily lives.

How has the concept of masculinity been revised and adapted by different writers over the course of the early to mid-20th century? How and why did the authors respond to the question of masculinity differently? To answer these questions, this dissertation navigates the contested nature of masculinity in works spanning the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. I juxtapose two to three writers and their selected works in each chapter divided by the authors’ race and ethnicity: William Dean Howells’ The Rise of Silas Lapham and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Richard Wright by focusing on Up from Slavery, The Souls of Black Folk, and Native Son respectively; Mike Gold’s Jews without Money and Nathanael West’s A Cool Million: The Dismantling of Lemuel; Younghill Kang’s East Goes West: and Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart. The writers I examine present masculinities that deviate from hegemonic masculinity, challenge and/or reinforce the definition and parameters of hegemonic masculinity, and develop models of masculinity that meet the needs of their specific historical moments. I argue that juxtaposing different modalities of masculinity construction and exploring the multifaceted treatment of American masculinity afford a more comprehensive perspective about the avenues through which masculinity is made manifest. My examination of multiple masculinities reveals the processes of establishing, maintaining, and contesting hegemonic masculinity. Moreover, tracking historical changes in masculinities uncovers how a set of essentialized traits, though changing, have transformed into and manifested as a privileged form of masculinity. / English

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This thesis explores the limits of fictional language by studying the work of Jewish American writer-critics, novelists who significantly engaged with literary criticism, and critics who experimented with the novel or short fiction. These writer-critics all believed in Literature: they believed that literature could effect social change and educate the masses; or they believed in literature as an art-form, one that exposed the myths underlying American society, or that revealed something fundamental about the human condition. Yet it is because they believed so stridently in the concept of Literature that they turned to non-fiction. Writing fiction exposed problems that Literature could not resolve. They describe being haunted by “preoccupations” that they could not exhaust in fiction alone. They apologetically refer to their critical texts as “by-products” of their creative writing. Writer-critics were forced to decide what the limits of fiction were, and they adopted other types of writing to supplement these unexpected gaps in fiction's power. This dissertation contains four chapters and an introduction. The introduction establishes the methodological difficulties in writing about author-critics, and introduces a set of principles to guide the study. Chapter 1 approaches Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917). I argue that many of the novel's difficulties result from Cahan's desire to present the way that ideology shades our understanding of reality while minimizing direct narratorial intrusions. Chapter 2 studies how politics affected the work of Mike Gold, Moishe Nadir, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. In all three writers, literature emerges as a kind of ersatz-politics, a space for the dispossessed to imagine the political. In the end, the political novel only reinforces the fictionality. Chapter 3 is a study of Leslie Fiedler's problematic novel, The Second Stone. While critics have seen the novel as a kind of game, I propose reading the novel as an earnest expression of Fiedler's vision of literature as a conversation. Chapter 4 turns to Cynthia Ozick and Susan Sontag. A cumulative reading of their fiction and criticism shows the deep twinning of their fiction and critical thought. For both writers true knowledge comes only through the imagination. / Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

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