In this dissertation I argue that Jewish women have served as cynosures of change in Jewish culture, and American Jewish culture in particular. The-turn-of-the-century representations of Jewish women in America that I have chosen to explore exemplify the paradox of the "unhampered child of liberty"--they were generally portrayed as having unconstrained equality but also described as children, thus implicitly reinforcing the child/parent power imbalance, including control over the discourse. The women that I write about, Rosa Sonneschein, Molly Picon, and Rose Pastor Stokes, had some access to the arenas in which the struggle for control over representation could take place. At the same time that these active women had some power to project their messages, however, because those messages advocated change, they were regularly put in the position of transgressing the status quo. They became the literal embodiment of change. The strategy that I have chosen to illustrate this concept highlights differences within the American Jewish community at the same time that it points out the particular commonalities of identity and change. The first chapter, an analysis of the 1895 magazine The American Jewess, attempts to understand the symbolic process of constructing and representing identity within the Jewish community, especially the liberal Jewish women's community and argues that the discourse moves toward containment. Other chapters, while also concerned with representation in popular texts such as newspapers, biography, and fiction, moves beyond an immediate audience of American Jews to European Jews as well as, in chapter three, American non-Jews. "Unhampered Child of Liberty" is an attempt to add to the growing scholarship about Jewish American women and representation by attempting to move toward a theory of identity and change in which Jewish American women carry the load of being the subjects around which important discussions of and decisions within both religious and secular Jewish culture turn.

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary interpretation of modernism that argues the problem of memory is a central theoretical link between the diverse cultures, genres, and forms of experimental twentieth century art and literature. The dissertation reads the literary history of modernism and the philosophical redefinition of memory offered by writers such as Freud and Nietzsche in the light of contemporary theorists of memory associated with Holocaust and trauma studies. I locate Virginia Woolf's work in the context of a London beset not only by the losses of the Great War but also by the burden of memorializing the war's losses. I show how the experience of transnational exile—a predominant, formative phenomenon in the twentieth century culture—is accounted for in the work of one of America's seemingly most provincial modern poets, Wallace Stevens. My recontextualization of Stevens takes the specific form of a comparison between his poetry and the artwork of Marcel Duchamp. When rigorously and exhaustively explored by Beckett, the limits of representation call out, on the one hand, for new forms while on the other hand his work for the theater complicates any attempt to reconstitute or reconfigure the past. I argue that this locates his drama in the context of the Holocaust. I describe a particular way in which memory is figured by the literary work, or I analyze a particular way in which memory is figured in twentieth century culture that the artist critiques or counteracts. I use the term "gesture of memory" to distinguish between these figurations and the notion of stable memories either held in the mind or inscribed in collective forms like monuments. I contend that each writer recognizes, on the one hand, that in the wake of events like World War One and the Holocaust the duty of the artist is to make viable an aesthetic of critique, undermining collective forms of memory. However, each writer recognizes this critique does not obviate the need to memorialize. I thus define the gestural as that which exists in the middle-ground between purposeful memorial inscription and the withholding of this determinate shape typical of modernist art.

This dissertation investigates the radical black feminist theatre of the 1940s through the 1970s, focusing on the work of playwrights Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, and Sonia Sanchez. Each of these artists critically intervened in the discourses of gender, race, and class during the civil rights movement, and, later, the Black Power and Arts movements. Using archival and historical research, I argue that there was a vibrant, radical black feminist theatre movement throughout the twentieth century that sought equal representation for African Americans and a voice for black women. Chapters Two and Three add to the growing body of scholarship that situates Alice Childress as a major figure within the black left and the Communist Party. Through archival research and readings of her work, I demonstrate how Childress scripted dignified, humorous, and realistic portrayals of working class black women. Childress illustrated the theory of "triple jeopardy," the idea circulated within black radical circles that working class African American women were triply oppressed due to their class, race, and gender. Through her experimental forms and daring content, Childress revised racist stereotypes of, for instance, the black female domestic worker, into full-fledged characters. The manner in which African Americans were represented—artistically and politically—was her greatest concern. In Chapter Two, I argue that Childress's body of work can be viewed as an alternative feminist chronicle of African American women through its scripting of the working class black woman, specifically in her play Florence (1949) and her experimental novel of monologues, Like One of the Family (1956). Childress wrote, "I concentrate on portraying the have-nots in a have society, those seldom singled out by mass media, except as source material for derogatory humor." Her focus on the ordinary is anti-bourgeois in its refusal to participate in racial uplift stories lionizing the successful black middle class. In Chapter Three, I focus on Trouble in Mind. While this play has been hitherto regarded as formally conservative, I argue that, to the contrary, Childress uses innovative Brechtian structures. Childress employs radical formal experimentation to forcefully argue for black self-determination in the arts, well before the artists of the Black Arts Movement would. Chapter Four, "The White Problem: White Supremacy and Black Masculinity in the Work of Lorraine Hansberry," focuses on Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun and Les Blancs and the playwright's critical interventions into the racial discourses of whiteness, black masculinity, and their intersections, in the civil rights era. By focusing on Hansberry's critique of whiteness and patriarchal white supremacy, this essay redresses a gap in scholarship on Hansberry. I argue that Hansberry was one of the central assessors of whiteness and black masculinity in the civil rights-era United States. Hansberry's representation of black men across her career attempts to find common ground for progressive black masculinity and black feminism to work together to defeat the white supremacist patriarchy detrimental to all African Americans. Moving into the Black Power era, my final chapter posits an alternative model to current scholarship on gender ideology within the Black Arts and Power movements. Rather than envisioning a movement led by men who repressed women, or considering women as marginal figures fighting from the periphery to address questions of feminism, gender, women's issues, and sexuality, I ask, what happens if we center such feminist concerns in our narrative of the Black Arts Movement? Using works by Alice Childress and Sonia Sanchez, I demonstrate that black feminists in this time not only critiqued the masculinist rhetoric of much Black Arts writing, but also proposed a community-centered alternative model of black nationalism. This feminist model was grounded in love and support between black women and men, and advanced by black feminists as imperative for the success of the black nation's political goals.

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Dissertasie ingehandig by die Faculty of Arts ter vervulling van die vereistes vir die graad Magister Artium in Afrikaans aan die Universiteit van Zululand, South Africa, 1999. / Hierdie studie behels ‘n ondersoek na jeugliteratuur, wat gesien word as verhale met eiesoortige kenmerke wat moet voldoen aan die sielkundige behoeftes van die tiener. Die doelwit is 'n ondersoek na die vernuwing van maatskaplike norme in Afrikaanse jeugliteratuur vanaf 1985 tot 1995. Hoewel maatskaplike norme ‘n sisteem vorm wat as gehee! deur die lede van die samelewing beheer moet word, kan die verhouding tussen verskillende rassegroepe uitgesonder word as die maatskaplike norm wat vir dekades ln groot bron van probleme in die Suid-Afrikaanse samelewing was, en nog steeds nie volkome opgelos is nie. Daar word dan in hierdie studie gekyk na die uitbeelding van die verhouding tussen verskillende rassegroepe in Afrikaanse jeugliteratuur, en die hipotese wat getoets word, is dat die veranderde norme in die samelewing gereflekteer sal word in literatuur vir jongmense ten einde hulle te help om as volwaardige volwassenes op te tree. Daar word tot die gevolgtrekking gekom dat daar nie in enigeen van die verhale wat ontleed is, enige negatiewe rassistiese voorstellings van swart of ander karakters op grand van rasseverskille voorkom nie. Die Suid-Afrikaanse samelewing word uitgebeeld as ongemtegreerd en daar word ook erkenning gegee aan die feit dat daar grense en ongelykhede bestaan tussen mense op grand van politieke en sosiale faktore. Daar word egter ook aan die ander kant erkenning gegee aan die nadelige gevolge van hierdie politieke stelsel, en dit is vera! belangrik dat karakters uit verskillende rasse- en sosiale groepe as innerlik gelykwaardig uitgebeeld word. Daar word klem gele op die sielsgenootskap tussen mense en die feit dat ons almal op die psigiese vlak dieselfde probleme en behoeftes het, en dat mense, ongeag hulle velkleur, mekaar kan help in die groeiproses tot groter lewenskennis en selfinsig.

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In a series of writings in the 1950s and 1960s, Theodor W. Adorno shaped German debates about art's role in coming to terms with genocide. Questioning the capacity of traditional aesthetic forms to convey such horror and, even more, the morality of using the Holocaust as artistic content he specifically directed his critique towards lyric poetry, famously stating that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” The reactions to Adorno's statement and its later modifications have ranged from sharp criticism to agreement with his central premises that the rupture in the continuum of German history must not be forgotten, and that the limits of traditional aesthetic evaluation do not extend to that kind of suffering. One category of lyric poetry, however, has only rarely been evoked in discussions of the problem raised by Adorno—that produced by the victims themselves while the events of the Holocaust unfolded. German literary and cultural critics have for the most part neglected poetry written in the camps. Lacking an appropriate interpretive framework, they have often viewed these texts as aesthetically “inferior” and deemed them to be inadmissible representations of the Holocaust. This dissertation hopes to correct the narrowly-defined aesthetic valuations currently in place and proposes instead to study camp poetry as valuable repositories of memory. It introduces German poetry from the Theresienstadt concentration camp, places the texts within their specific environment and historic context, and introduces a critical framework for their analysis. In this way, the dissertation does not only examine the role of poetry in the construction and perpetuation of historical memory, but it investigates as well the mechanisms by which texts are canonized and forgotten.

Between Profits and Primitivism: Rehabilitating White Middle-Class Manhood in America, 1880–1917 uses primary sources in literature and the social sciences to locate and analyze changing discourses, images, and scientific representations of middle-class manhood and masculinity. The first chapter examines the construction of a specific white, middle-class male body. I argue that despite the attention-grabbing muscle men of the period, the middle-class sought a particular type of body, one that emphasized symmetry over swelling muscles and efficiency over superfluous beauty. Through their exercise manuals, I examine the ways physical educators sought to make a science out of streamlining “flabby businessmen.” My second chapter focuses on two works of fiction by Theodore Dreiser, The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914). Through my reading of these often overlooked novels, I investigate men's dependence on the new consumer culture. I link this dependence to financial trusts and new market economies which incorporated men of finance into dependent combinations that relied heavily on image. Chapter three explores the role of gender in the construction of the subconscious. I look at the ways hysterical symptomology influenced the construction of the subconscious, as well as contemporary understandings of mystical or supernatural experience in the work of William James and his circle. I argue that James adopted many hysteric symptoms in his characterization of the unconscious in order to “locate” a primitive essence within white intellectual men. My last chapter examines how turn-of-the-century supernatural fiction was influenced by new psychological theories—especially the idea that the unconscious housed a more primitive self Using the stories of Henry James, Jack London and William Dean Howells, I argue that the supernatural experience becomes a place for white educated men to have strenuous, often senorially intense experiences, and to be irrational subjects. My work illustrates the ways in which the massive cultural and social transitions between 1880 and 1917 de-naturalized definitions of manhood and created a national conversation that self-consciously fashioned gender. What I find most intriguing is how often this conversation constructed men as problematic and in need of some physical, mental, or supernatural reconstruction.