Beginning in March of 1920, the Galveston coastwise longshoremen’s strike against the Morgan-Southern Pacific and Mallory steamship lines was a pivotal moment in the history of organized labor in Texas. Local and statewide business interests proved their willingness to use the state apparatus by calling on Governor William P. Hobby and the Texas National Guard to open the Port of Galveston. Despite this, the striking dockworkers maintained the moral support of many local citizens from a variety of social classes, including small merchants and officials of the Galveston municipal government. By February of 1921, however, the segregated locals representing the striking longshoremen had fallen victim to the divisive racial tactics of the shipping companies, who implemented the open-shop policy of non-discrimination in hiring on their docks. Further demonstrating the capital-state alliance, the Texas legislature passed Governor Hobby’s notorious Open Port Law in October 1920, making it virtually illegal for dockworkers and others to engage in strikes deemed harmful to commerce. This legislation and the nearly yearlong strike not only destroyed the coastwise longshore unions in Galveston, but ushered in a decade of repression from which Texas’s organized labor movement did not recover for many years.

The decades following two world wars, the European Holocaust and the threat of nuclear annihilation presented American authors with an occupational dilemma: catastrophic histories call out for recognition, but any representation of them risks adding violence to violence by falsifying the account or conflating historical acts of violence with their artificial doubles. This project reimagines the political aesthetics of postmodern American fiction through two major interventions. First, I identify an aesthetic structure of apposition--a parallel relationship between abstract works of art and the everyday world that I take from William Carlos Williams--that allows me to productively resolve a tension in the aesthetics of Hannah Arendt: because representation takes mimesis as a particular end, Arendt disqualifies representational art from politics, which she defines as open-ended action between human beings and not as end-centered state-craft. At the same time, Arendt claims that art is a product of thought, the cognitive activity she associates with political action over and against fabrication. My heterodox reading of Arendt shows that appositional narratives, like political actors, perform their own self-disclosure, beginning the open-ended chain of actions and reactions that Arendt identifies as the substantial form of politics and ethics. Second, I use my revision of Arendt to demonstrate that appositional narratives act politically through the very same metafictional tropes that critics often label as escapist or solipsistic. Rather than copy historical experience, appositional narratives reject illusionary representation and present themselves as actors, inciting their readers to respond with pluralistic, provisional judgment. Taking Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth and Toni Morrison--three central but rarely-juxtaposed postmodern novelists--as case studies, I show that we cannot properly assess the political implications of postmodern fiction without understanding the specific mechanisms of narrative apposition. Appositional works stand temporarily and self-consciously in the place of the world, displacing it in the experience of their readers. This narrative strategy provides a political alternative for novelists facing the ethical crises of postmodernity. Appositional narratives displace their readers' settled beliefs and press them to exercise their human capacity for judgment. They embrace their responsibility for the world by refusing to represent it. / text

Spanning the period from the early years of the Cold War to the early twenty-first century, Crossing Out argues that medical theories of gender variance which emerge in the middle of the twentieth century are bound by the Cold-War–era discursive limits within which they were articulated, and that the ideological content of those theories persists into late-century research and treatment protocols. I parallel these analyses with interrogations of literary representations of transgendered subjects. What emerges most powerfully from this analysis of literary works is their tendency to signify in excess of the medical foreclosures, even when they seem consistent with medical discourse. By reading these two discursive systems against each other, the dissertation demonstrates the ability of literary discourse to accommodate multifaceted subject positions which medical discourse is unable to articulate. Literature thus complicates the stories that medical culture tells, revealing complex and multivariate possibilities for transgendered identification absent from traditional medical accounts. In tracing these discursive intersections the dissertation draws on and extends Michel Foucault’s theory of subjugated knowledges and Judith Butler’s writings on the formation of gendered subjects. Chapter One establishes the Cold War context, and argues that there are significant continuities between 1950s theories of intersexuality and Cold War ideology. Chapter Two extends this analysis to take in theories of transsexualism that emerged in the same years, and analyzes the discursive excesses of a 1950s pulp novel representation of a transsexual. Chapter Three establishes that the ideological content of the medical theories remained virtually unchanged by the 1990s, and argues that multivalent literary representations of transgenderism from the same decade promise the emergence of unanticipated forms of gender identity that exceed medical norms. Chapter Four is concerned with transgendered children, as they are represented in medical writing and in young adult and children’s literature. Interrogating fiction which negotiates between established medical discourse and an emergent transgender discourse, the chapter argues that these works at once invite and subvert a pathologizing understanding of gender-variant children while simultaneously providing data that demands to be read through the lens of an emergent affirmative notion of trans-childhood.

This thesis discusses the theme of homosexuality presented in The Immoralist (1902) by André Gide and in Death in Venice (1912) by Thomas Mann. Evidence of homosexuality in the texts is substantiated in detail and the way in which the theme is approached, including how it fits into the structure of the narratives, is also examined. Given that these texts are quite complex, the resounding message of this theme can only be assessed through consideration of the novellas as whole works of art. Thus, the other major themes from each text are reviewed prior to reaching conclusions about the ‘intended’ message behind each work. This thesis proposes that The Immoralist centres on the search for the authentic self, while Death in Venice concerns the downfall of the artist from the height of dignity and fame. The role of homosexuality as a theme is gauged as it relates to these interpretations.

This thesis explores the psychological development of liminal characters in four late-twentieth-century British novels. Studies of Julian Barnes’s Flaubert's Parrot, A. S. Byatt’s Possession, Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, by using D. W. Winnicott’s transitional-objects theory and Jessica Benjamin’s intersubjective theory, show how characters who are little more than infants socially and psychologically attempt to transcend the transitional, liminal status defined by Victor Turner. With the aid of significant objects or equal other subjects, these characters, whose subjective self-constructions at the beginning of the novels have become stalled in an immature position of emotional development or been inhibited by dominating individuals, progress psychologically towards controlling their own subjectivity.

This thesis is a study of the narrative language of Elsa Beskow, Sweden's most famous children's writer of the early twentieth century. The overall aim of the thesis is to contribute to the understanding of why Beskow's stories are still among the most popular children's books in Sweden, more than a hundred years after her literary debut. My investigation is a quantitative study of word-class distribution, various syntactic features, and readability in four picture-books and four other stories. To begin with, Beskow's language is compared to that of other texts written for young readers, including children's fiction, a contemporary reading-book, and popular comic strips. The results indicate that Beskow has something in common with all of these materials, especially with children's fiction. However, she also has her own style, which is different from the children's fiction I compare with. For example, her sentences are comparatively long and often begin with a conjunction. Moreover, Beskow uses many address phrases and interjectional phrases, and the initial clause-constituent is often some other clause element than the subject. Additionally, Beskow's narrative language is compared to conversational language and to formal prose. The results show that Beskow moves along the whole scale, from conversation to formal writing, depending on what aspect of her language use is considered. In some cases, her style even falls outside of the scale. For example, placing the subject in initial position is less common in Beskow's writing than in both conversation and formal writing. Finally, the variation between Beskow's texts is examined. The analysis shows, among other things, that the oral influences on Beskow's style increased during the five decades she wrote stories.

Art Music for the acoustic piano has changed tremendously during the twentieth century. Some of the techniques and skills pianists need to master in order to be able to perform successfully twentieth-century art piano music include: a refined ability to discriminate varied layers of sonorities; sophisticated pedal combinations; a sometimes percussive technique; and superior control of complex metric and rhythmic passages. New combinations of patterns that require specific technical preparation pose substantial pianistic challenges. Todays pianist needs to master a variety of glissandi, chords, or single melody textures played directly on the strings inside the piano and to combine such techniques with sounds beyond the traditional piano sonorities. Besides technical preparation, pianists must also acquire sufficient knowledge of twentieth-century compositional techniques and analytical methods, as well as composers individual styles and their contributions to new ways of using the acoustic piano. This document focuses on selected twentieth-century piano compositions by Ravel, Debussy, Prokofiev, Bartk, Cowell, Cage, Holliger, Crumb, Corigliano, and Louie. These composers and their works are discussed with an emphasis on the new expressive, technical, artistic, pedagogical, and performance elements they introduce. The original technical exercises in Appendix A employ twentieth-century scales, harmonies, and progressions. These exercises will facilitate the development of technical skills related to the pieces considered here and to other twentieth-century piano repertoire. The interviews with John Corigliano and Alexina Louie provide uniquely insightful and provocative glimpses of the creative and technical issues involved with two remarkably original artistic conceptions in this repertoire. It is almost a truism to observe that much of the piano music of the twentieth century eschews convention and invents its own vocabulary and syntax. At the beginning of a new century, we are able to gain an historic perspective upon this body of repertoire. This document will lead to an increased awareness and understanding of selected twentieth-century piano repertoire. It suggests that twentieth-century piano compositions should assume an important and equal place with the more traditional music in the pianists repertoire and in the university and conservatoire curricula.

The murderess in the twenty-first century is a figure of particular cultural fascination; she is the subject of innumerable books, websites, documentaries and award-winning movies. With female violence reportedly on the increase, a rethinking of beliefs about women's natural propensity towards violent and aggressive behaviours is inevitable. Using the Victorian period as a central focus, this thesis explores the contradictory ideologies regarding women's violence and also suggests an alternative approach to the relationship between gender and violence in the future. A study of violent women in representation reveals how Victorian attitudes towards violence and femininity persist today. On the one hand, women have traditionally been cast as the naturally non-aggressive victims of violence rather than its perpetrators; on the other hand, the destructive potential of womanhood has been a cause of anxiety since the earliest Western mythology. I suggest that it is a desire to resolve this contradiction that has resulted in the proliferation of violent women in representation over the last one and a half centuries. In particular, an analysis of mid-nineteenth-century popular fiction indicates that the stronger the ideal of the angelic woman was, the greater the anxiety produced by her demonic antithesis. Wilkie Collins's Armadale and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret illustrate both the contradictory Victorian attitudes towards violent women and a need to reconcile the combination of good and bad femininity that the murderess represents. Revisiting the Victorian murderess in the late twentieth century provides a potential means for resolving this contradiction; specifically, it enables the violent woman to engage in a process of self-representation that was not available to her in the nineteenth century. Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace suggests that any insight into the murderess begins with listening to the previously silenced voice of the violent woman herself.

Appalshop, a multi-media and arts organization in Whitesburg, Kentucky emerged in 1969 at the crossroads of several different developments. It started as a War on Poverty program and its history exhibits the contradictory ideologies that fueled that effort and the political changes that forestalled it. The production company began in the midst of technological advances in media and is an early example of the democratization of technology and the potential of portable video equipment in affecting social change. Most importantly, its genesis is located within the context of a renewed interest in Appalachian history and culture and the related issues of negotiating regional cultural identity in the American national context. This one small organization in Eastern Kentucky provides a window to a wide slice of American history and culture in the midst of profound changes. Throughout the twentieth century the Appalachian region has been repeatedly characterized in mainstream American culture in an overtly negative light. Appalshop played an integral role in countering these characterizations and the stereotypes they generated and reinforced. Technology became more accessible the second half of the twentieth century. As a result, Appalshop was able to challenge these negative perceptions of the region in the national mind by placing cameras, printing capabilities, drama, and visual art in the hands of Appalachians. This allowed them to speak for themselves—first to each other and eventually to the nation. This dissertation focuses on the founding of the Community Film Workshop of Appalachia, the subsequent abandonment of the project by the federal government, the acquisition of control over its artistic output by artists and staff members, and its expansion between 1969 and 1984. It also addresses the significant role Appalshop played in the burgeoning Appalachian social movement context that emerged concurrently with its founding and its related role as a social change organization.

In Dharma Bums (1958), by Jack Kerouac, and Americana (1971), by Don DeLillo, the authors explore the complexity of selfhood as pertaining to individual identity and subjectivity in mid-twentieth century American culture and consciousness, paying specific attention to the relation that these concepts have with media, spatiality, and Buddhism. Although numerous critics provide extensive analyses of these texts, authors, and themes, no critic has paired these texts and authors, and investigated these particular themes in relation to selfhood. I argue that in Dharma Bums and Americana, Kerouac and DeLillo each investigate the influence of media, spatiality, and Buddhism on selfhood, as well as provide competing models of selfhood that offer either self-transformation or self-limitation.