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A version of the life of Christ.

A version of the life of Christ.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Lehigh University, 2009. / Adviser: Elizabeth Fifer.

Thesis (M.A.)--Lehigh University, 2009. / Adviser: Rosemary J. Mundhenk.

Thesis (M.A.)--Lehigh University, 2009. / Adviser: Beth Dolan.

<p> This dissertation examines the Possibilities for creating social change through literary criticism by focusing on three American critics: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Frank Lentricchia, and Edward Said. All three wrote Politically minded literary criticism during the 1980's and 1990's, decades that witnessed a broad-ranging attempt to roll back the change and turbulence associated with the 1960's. With regard to criticism, this attempt amounted to a challenge to literary theory, which was a radical way of thinking that crystallized in the 60's and early 70's and often carried revolutionary social hopes with it. As I suggest in the introduction, we are currently living in a moment in which the radical hopes fostered by literary theory co-exist uneasily with the counterrevolutionary movements of the 80's: the hopes and impulses still exist, but they have no adequate social outlets. Looking back to the 80's, I hope, will help clarify our moment, and Possibly Provide some resources for contemporary criticism. </p><p> My goal in each chapter is twofold: first, to understand the critic on his terms, second, to Put the criticism in dialogue with another body of literary or critical work in order to suggest its broader ramifications. With Henry Louis Gates, Jr., I argue that his effort to move African American literature and criticism into the mainstream of American literary study led him to maintain a view of race as an essence. Comparing his critical work with Hortense Spillers' Proves this Point, but also suggests that a more radical view of race remains in Gates' work. Frank Lentricchia tried to base a Political Program on the intimate experience of Pleasure that he felt when reading Poetry. Putting Philip Roth in conversation with Lentricchia reveals the impossibility of Lentricchia's Program, but also a different and more socially Productive Path for Lentricchia's interest in Pleasure. Edward Said tried to create spaces in his criticism where antagonism could be overcome. Reading Bharati Mukherjee's novel <u>Jasmine</u> (1989) next to Said suggests how useful Said's model can be, but also reminds us that Said only suggested, rather than applied, this model in his work.</p>

<p> In this project, I focus on the function of the &ldquo;amtal,&rdquo; or test of definition or destruction, in Frank Herbert's <i>Dune</i>. It is my argument that these tests &ldquo;to destruction&rdquo; determine not only the limits or defects of the person being tested, but also&mdash;and more crucially&mdash;the very limits and defects of the definition of humanity in three specific cultural spheres within the novel: the Bene Gesserit, the Fremen, and the Faufreluches. The definitions of &ldquo;amtal&rdquo; as well as &ldquo;humanity,&rdquo; like all definitions, are somewhat fluid, changing depending on usage, cultural context, and the political and social needs of the society which uses them. Accordingly, <i>Dune</i> remains an instructive text for thinking through contemporary and controversial notions about the limits of humanism and, consequently, of animalism and posthumanism. </p>

<p> On a metaphoric level, the zombie is an extremely malleable and dynamic figure because it can act as a template for exploring the hazy definitions of humanity. The trope of the zombie I trace in this dissertation is the performance of an absence: the zombie as fragmented and incomplete human. I examine examples of the zombie in American literature across the last century that reify the absence of something crucial in the ontological makeup of a complete human, a component I term `the absent quale.' In the first two chapters, I establish the trope of the zombie as a figure that lacks a particular quale essential to humanity. Chapter One examines H. P. Lovecraft's zombies in "Herbert West: Reanimator" (1921&ndash;22) in the context of scientific materialism, which denies the existence of the soul. By 1959, when Robert Heinlein wrote his time travel classic "All You Zombies&mdash;," the figure of the zombie as an embodied absence was so established in popular culture that Heinlein's narrator uses the word "zombies" as a metaphor; Chapter Two reads the figurative zombie as a characterization of the fragmented along the temporal dimension. In Chapter Three, I consider Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg's "The Song the Zombie Sang" (1970) alongside Walter Benjamin's influential essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," using the latter's concept of the aura to denote a sort of material analogue to the human soul. I argue in Chapter Four that the bricolage of popular culture motifs that Robin Becker's zombie rehearses throughout <i>Brains: A Zombie Memoir</i> (2010) enacts the postmodern estrangement from an authentic dimension of being. Expanding on this theme, Chapter Five explores the ways in which popular culture dictates reality for the living and the undead members of the pre- and post-apocalyptic American society Colson Whitehead describes in <i>Zone One</i> (2011). </p>