This thesis analyzes groundbreaking experimental texts by Asian American writers that employ genre-bending formal innovations to resist the uneasy containment of social hierarchies and aesthetic categories. After a brief discussion of Monica Youn’s 2019 poem, “Study of Two Figures (Pasiphaë/Sado),” I trace such experimentation back to the late twentieth century, focusing on two other texts that explore similar strategies of literary experimentation and that present themselves as novels but, as Youn does with poetry, resist that classification at the same time. The experimental expansions of form in both Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee (1982) and Pamela Lu’s Pamela: A Novel (1998) defy categorization and the containments of genre. Further, the formal resistances of both texts repudiate social categorizations on the basis of ethnic, racial, and gender containment. The hybrid forms of Dictee and Pamela: A Novel act as corollaries for resistance to the racial and gender markers constructed by society to contain Asian American identities.

<p>Although the fiction written by women in English-Canada since the 1960's has experimented widely with literary form, a remarkably consistent set of - literary archetypes of masculinity emerges from their work. I have named the three particularly vivid and pervasive images of men on which I focus, the Hunter, the Adult Adolescent, and the Wounded Warlock. My project is essentially a sketching out of these beings, a contouring of their recurring literary reality.</p> <p>Toril Moi rightly criticizes the project of evaluating literary images of women in terms of their true or false relation to 'real life' as one that "resolutely refuses to consider textual production as a highly complex, 'overdetermined' process with many different and conflicting literary and nonliterary determinants" (Moi 45). In looking at the images of men that dominate Canadian women's writing, I do not wish to claim that these images are 'true' or 'false', but simply that they exist in the literature.</p> <p>My critical approach here is essentially one of description. My descriptions are original in that they are not applications of previously-defined archetypes of personality as in, for example, the work of Carl Jung. No description is, however, free of context, and in describing the images of men that emerge from this fiction, I draw repeatedly upon several feminist and philosophical texts for inspiration and clarification. Susan Griffin's exploration of the 'pornographic mind', Martin Buber's religious ontology of the "I-Thou", JeanPaul Sartre's articulation of the meaning of the Look, and Christopher Lasch's discussion of narcissism, have been particularly useful.</p> <p>Although my dissertation does not attempt to engage directly the large question of the relation of the artistic image to life, I do suggest indirectly, by drawing upon thinkers whose subject is not primarily literature, but indeed 'the real world', that the images of men I define have some connection with that real world. My conclusion briefly raises, therefore, some ethical as well as aesthetic questions about the implications of their existence.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The image has been essential to American poetry since at least the early 20th century, when modernists like H.D., Williams, and Pound made images the charged heart of their poetics. But the image as a concept, as that which we see when we say caribou, is as ancient as human thought­. Not all images, though, spring from material truths, like the material truth of an animal. Images are social, like doctor, and if they are social, they are political. They are shaped by experience and reinforced by culture. In a capitalist culture, images become alienated from the material they claim to represent; they are simulacra in the theoretical sense, a representation of a thing that never existed. As such, images can be wielded as weapons: to harm, to intimidate. These reified images are trafficked as truth, and they alter what is real as people bend the world to make it fit their image of it. The poems in The Only Way Out Is Through are an intervention and an inquiry into this process. “Sonnets from Decivilization” is a crown of sonnets in the tradition of Claude McKay, Edwin Denby, Ted Berrigan, Wanda Coleman, Jack Agüeros, and Terrance Hayes. What is common between these poets is their engagement with American hegemony through the poetics of the sonnet. In the American sonnet, distinct from the Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnet forms, notions of the state and of belonging are always-already present, influencing the affect of negotiations between speaker and state. An alien in the eyes of the United States government, the speaker of the sonnets engages with the unreal and the real that constitutes the image of, and images from, America. The first part of “The Image World” is a journey to the realm of images, a place that is both interior and external, personal because shared. The unreality of a familiar landscape is relayed through understatement from a vacated voice. Joseph Ceravolo, Bernadette Mayer, Fred Moten, and Anne Carson help inform the approach. “The Applications” uses the rhetoric of bureaucracy to show how personhood is distorted when citizens and aliens are required to make their experiences and desires legible to the language of power. The narrative resonates when the reader is able to place their own experience into the blank spaces between the words, and sites where language breaks down entirely is where the reader is able transcend, along with the speaker, the commodified function of language and exist, however briefly, in meaningful senselessness. Hoa Nguyen and Alice Notley are key influences. The final section, the second part of “The Image World,” is a vision for a future that resists the oppressive powers that have brought our world to the crises we are currently living through. The speaker of this section is the addressed of the first section, collapsing reader and speaker into the same entity. This coming to voice speaks to the necessity of articulating possible futures, of creating new images, of returning to materials truths, together, the only way out, through.

Niagara is a work of magical realism, incorporating elements of historical and experimental fiction. The novel is inhabited by the problematic moguls and politicians who shaped American settlement, the burgeoning subculture of freight train hoppers that post their travels on the internet, and an author turned ghost who can no longer remember his past work.

This thesis is concerned with the two AIDS-era novels of Gary Indiana, a long-neglected yet essential literary figure who, as the critic Christian Lorentzen has argued, “connects the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in ways readers and critics are only beginning to apprehend” (xii). Beginning chronologically with a study of Indiana’s first two novels, Horse Crazy (1989) and Gone Tomorrow (1993), this thesis attempts to realize Lorentzen’s call to action, attending particularly to the ways in which Indiana’s novels write the neoliberal subject. More than exploring life under the AIDS crisis and embodying a radical queer approach to narrative, I contend, through the repurposed frame of noir and thematic explorations of kitsch, the novels of Gary Indiana radically interrogate neoliberal subjectivities, offering a remarkably stark vision of interior lives completely colonized by capitalism, commodified subjects incapable of intimacy.

This project explores the ways in which key literary texts reproduce, undermine, or otherwise engage with cultural narratives of the so-called Bible Belt. Noting that the evangelicalism that dominated the South by the turn of the twentieth century was, for much of the antebellum period, a relatively marginal and sometimes subversive movement in a comparatively irreligious region, I argue that widely disseminated images and narratives instilled a false sense of nostalgia for an incomplete version of the South’s religious heritage. My introductory chapter demonstrates how the South’s commemorated “Old Time” religion was not especially old, and how this modernist construct of an idealized past helped galvanize Southern evangelicalism into a religion that more readily accommodated racial hegemony in the present. The following three chapters examine Faulkner’s Light in August, O’Connor’s Wise Blood, and Hurston’s Jonah’s Gourd Vine and Moses, Man of the Mountain. I find that each of these novels embeds traces of forgotten religious dissidence. The modern nostalgia for a purer old-time religion, my readings suggest, says less about the history of religion in the South than it does about New-South efforts to merge evangelical and “Southern” values, thereby suppressing any residual opposition between them.

Through their editorial arrangements of African-American, Euro-American and European poetry, fiction and news, Frederick Douglass’s anti-slavery periodicals (The North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper) imagine a cosmopolitan discourse that predates the segregated realities of the antebellum United States. In spite of Southern blockades against the infiltration of Northern texts, Douglass’s material space uniquely capitalized on the limited restrictions of his reprinting culture to relocate the voice of the ‘outraged slave’ onto a global stage. From the poems of Phillis Wheatley and William Cowper to Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Douglass’s own novella “The Heroic Slave,” this project considers how Douglass’s literary inclusions—and exclusions—complicate our static considerations of the historicized Douglass and exhibit his savvy insertions of black print into an exclusive, transatlantic nineteenth-century print culture.

This thesis examines the use of interior narrative techniques such as free indirect discourse and internal monologue in two of James McBride’s neo-slave narratives, Song Yet Sung (2008) and The Good Lord Bird (2013). Very limited critical attention has been given to these neo-slave narratives that illustrate McBrides attention to characterization and focalized narration. In these narratives McBride builds upon the revelations he explores in his bestselling memoir, The Color of Water (1996, 2006), where he learns to disassociate race and character. What he discovers about not only his mother, but also himself, inspires his re-imagination of the people who lived during the antebellum period. His use of interior narrative techniques deviates from his peers’ conventional approach to the neo-slave narrative. His exploration of the psyche demonstrates a focalized attention to the individual, rather than a characterization of the community, which is typically portrayed in neo-slave narratives. In conclusion, this thesis argues that James McBride’s neo-slave narratives reveal his interest in deconstructing the hierarchal positioning of whites and blacks during the antebellum period in order to communicate that although African Americans were the intended victims, slave masters and mistresses were oppressed by the ideologies of slavery as well.

This thesis examines the birth, rise in popularity, and evolution of the video essay, a subgenre of the essay found recently in online literary journals. Chapter one provides a brief history of the alphabetic essay as it expands to include photo essays, audio essays, and essay-films. The second chapter outlines the history of the online literary journal and John Bresland’s role in the introduction of the video essay as it appears in online journals. Chapter three contains an examination of the way image, text, and sound function in video essays and the tools and strategies essayists are using to create them. The fourth chapter is composed of three case studies of Bresland’s work in an attempt to analyze the continuing evolution and breadth of the form.

This thesis explores the trickster character through the lens of his role as a cultural hero. The two characters that I chose to examine are from North American myth, specifically Winnebago Hare and Brer Rabbit. These two characters represent the duality of the trickster while simultaneously embodying the lauded abilities of the hero. Through their actions these two characters shape culture through the very action of disrupting societal norms.