This thesis analyzes James Baldwin's essays as a method for understanding racial identity and authenticity. By using Vetta Sanders-Thompson's racial identification parameters, I suggest that Baldwin's struggle with his identity as a black American is crucial to deposing the idea of a monolithic black experience, which opens up new ways of analyzing African American literature.

Abstract The "Defective" Generation: Disability in Modernist Literature aims to provide an analysis of how Anglo-American authors in the early twentieth century conceived of, utilized, and portrayed disability in their fiction. Building on the existing scholarship in the field of Disability Studies, I argue that modernists revise the tradition of representation to make disabilities a generational trait rather than a sign of individual deviance. In novel after novel, multiple characters exhibit some form of illness or impairment, which appears as both cause and effect of the instabilities and traumas of modernity. Like many of their predecessors, then, these authors portray diverse health conditions as "defects" rather than natural variations in the human body, and most draw little distinction between the types of "disorders" they represent. This perspective, however, becomes particularly destructive in the era leading up to the Holocaust, when eugenical attitudes would lead to the murder or sterilization of over a million people with disabilities. Modernists also continue to exploit disability's potential for metaphor and sometimes evoke traditional stereotypes. Unlike traditional representations, however, these works do not resolve what the authors perceive as the "problem" of disability by curing or eliminating it; instead, they portray characters struggling to lead fulfilling lives despite feeling limited by their health. Working against the public's conception of disability as solely a medical condition, many of these authors further depict the social forces that turn a perceived "difference" into a "disability." The project is arranged into four chapters. In the first, "Idiots and Other Degenerates: Disability at the Dawn of Modernism," I use Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent to illustrate how disability becomes characteristic of a generation, primarily through the influence of degeneration theory. Mocking the popular conception of a society divided into the "fit" and "unfit," Conrad creates a circle of characters who judge others to be degenerate while ignoring their own similar traits. From that beginning, I move in chapter 2, "Modernist Style: The Inward Turn and Portrayals of Mental Illness," to an analysis of the effects of stylistic experimentation on depictions of disability in both Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night. The authors' use of multiple points of view in these works leads to a representation of both an individual's experience of psychosis and the stigma that can accompany such illness, and, like Conrad, both writers elide the differences between the seemingly able-bodied characters and those they deem disabled. These authors also offer a contrast in perceptions. Whereas Woolf treats shell shock and emotional instability largely as the unavoidable effects of World War I, Fitzgerald links both schizophrenia and alcoholism to decadent behavior, thus aligning himself with the public's perception of illness as a matter of intent. Moving from style to theme, in chapter 3, "Impaired Relationships: Physical Injury and the Pursuit of Romance," I explore the ways in which authors depict physical impairments as obstacles to personal relationships. Through a comparison of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and the "Nausicaa" chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses, I discuss the intersection of gender identity, disability, and romance. I argue against the critical consensus that Jake Barnes feels emasculated by his injury and that Gerty MacDowell is "doomed" to spinsterhood because she limps, contending that both authors allow their characters to maintain a sense of masculinity or femininity consistent with the hegemonic ideals of their time. While Hemingway presents Jake's wound as a physical disability that prevents his having the relationship he desires, Joyce uses Gerty's limp to mark her as an imperfect beauty in preference to an array of idealized iconic images, and in her encounter with Leopold Bloom grants her the sexual attention that she desires. In my final chapter, "African American Modernism and a Deadly Game of Blind Man's Buff," I shift focus from mainstream to African American modernism with an analysis of Richard Wright's Native Son,, addressing the author's use of folklore in relation to the metaphor of blindness. Posing the literally blind Mrs. Dalton as a revenant of the American colonists who ignored the humanity of those they enslaved and as a symbol of continuing oppression, Wright develops Bigger Thomas as both a trickster who exploits the "blindness" of others and a badman who rebels against it. My conclusion then addresses the use of disability metaphors, the attitudes those metaphors expose, and the authors' apparent agreement with or challenges to contemporary perceptions of disability. Although critics have previously analyzed specific works or certain aspects of disability representations during this era, this project seeks a more comprehensive discussion of disability in modernist fiction than currently exists. My hope is that it will enhance our understanding of both the period's literature and the harmful attitudes that existed at the time, which the work of Disability Studies has endeavored to overturn.

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MultipliCities: The Infrastructure of African American Literature, 1899-1996 explores intersections between black fiction and canonical sociology through two extended case studies focusing on the authors Richard Wright and Paul Beatty. The formation of disciplinary sociology in the early twentieth century had a profound influence on the production and reception of African American literature. Sociologists at the University of Chicago were among the first to teach black fiction and poetry in the academy, and institutionalized a social scientific framework for comprehending black culture. This framework, which assumes that black writing produces racial knowledge about black experience, continues to pressure contemporary African American authors through the demands of the publishing industry today. At the same time, though, African American authors throughout the twentieth century have resisted sociological expectations for their work and responded critically to the social scientific study of the black community more broadly. MultipliCities studies black writers whose fiction is specifically critical of sociological conceptions of black personhood and place. While Richard Wright's best-selling Native Son (1940) has been canonized as a type of sociological fiction, I read against this critical tradition for the ways in which his juvenile delinquent protagonist, Bigger Thomas, evades his production as a social scientific object. I locate further evidence for Wright's revision of sociological knowledge production in his final, posthumously published novel, A Father's Law (1960; 2008), in which the main character is a sociologist and a serial killer who violently deforms the mastery of the social scientific expert. In my second case study, I turn to contemporary novelist Paul Beatty's post-civil rights era novel The White Boy Shuffle (1996), which I read as a mock ethnography in its description of a postindustrial ghetto that exceeds the sociological imagination of the so-called "culture of poverty." Though rap music is often interpreted as evidence of the alleged impoverishment of inner-city black community, in my final chapter I read Beatty's "hip hop novel" as challenging the social scientific expectations for black popular culture that are part of the ongoing legacy of the canonical sociology of race. / text

The works of the nineteenth-century American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson continue to be inspiring particularly due to their empowering effect on the individual. It is especially Emerson's concepts of the sovereignty of the individual, the importance of self-definition, the view of life as a transitory flow, and the relationship between freedom and fate which can be practically and usefully applied in the life of an individual. It is possible, then, to understand and evaluate Emerson's works through the practical effects of his concepts, in other words through the prism of pragmatism. Emerson's empowering philosophy can be of use especially to disempowered groups such as African Americans. The Emersonian themes which are to be found in the works of various African-American non-fiction writers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr. and Cornel West testify to the relevance of Emerson for this minority group. In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Richard Wright's Native Son, two African-American novels, Emersonian principles are shown to be of utmost importance for the positive development of the protagonists.

This thesis seeks to understand how we read and understand the use of depictions of violence by examining its rhetorical presentation. Although the media gives us a mixed understanding of the way that experiencing violence secondarily (that is, through all types of media) affects us, scholarship in this area has proved clear connections between viewing/experiencing depictions of violence and raised levels of aggression. On the other hand, there is a clear difference between gratuitous depictions of violence and socially useful depictions of violence (i.e., the difference between a slasher movie and a holocaust movie) that that area of scholarship does not expressly take into account. I argue that the language of trauma studies has the ability to evaluate the impact of violent texts on audiences and that Kenneth Burke's Dramatistic Pentad has the ability the examine depictions of violence to uncover explicit and hidden ideologies that affect the presentation of the violence and, thus, our reception and interpretation of that violence. Working in conjunction, these two theories can help audience's understand depictions of violence on an ideological level and help them to assess the violence's potential traumatic impact on themselves and others within certain contexts. To demonstrate this theory of understanding violence, I make two short analyses of Native Son and The Lovely Bones and demonstrate an in-depth analysis of Fight Club and Blood Meridian in order to give an example of the type of reading I am advocating and its potential for understanding and interpreting depictions of violence in ways that uncover both social benefit and harm. In the end, I hope that this theory of reading violence might extend beyond the sample readings I have done and into other types of media, so that we can all understand the ways that violence is used rhetorically for social and political purposes and be able to both use it and interpret it responsibly.