This dissertation examines dog and idiot tropes—and, specifically, the conflation thereof—in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937), and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Or The Evening Redness in the West (1985). In addition to illustrating the key roles the idiot/dog figure plays in canonical works of twentieth-century U.S. fiction, it argues that this conflation is too often presumed to signify denigration (i.e. a social, political, and ethical exclusion) and degeneration (i.e. a biological threat). Around the turn of the century, the idiot/dog emerges as an aesthetic figure in conjunction with contemporaneous practices of dog breeding and eugenics, as well as co-extensive discourses of national progress and racial purity. In this context, literary idiot/dogs can be read as enciphering a violent historical subtext. Yet, rather than simply condemn this figure as a dehumanizing stereotype, this dissertation challenges such a reductive approach on the grounds that it risks reproducing a hermeneutic that is both ableist and speciesist. A new approach is proposed: reading for the tropological confusion of idiocy and caninity and the destabilizing affective and epistemological effects this poses for liberal subjectivity. Reading for tropological confusion in the fictions of Faulkner, Steinbeck, and McCarthy not only develops new interpretations of three canonical works; it unlocks the idiot/dog figure as a site of textual excess. In so doing, this dissertation makes original contributions to twentieth-century U.S. fiction scholarship, Disability Studies, Animal Studies, and biopolitical theory. The idiot/dog figure’s in/determination—a paradoxical embodiment of humanized canine animality and animalized human mental disability—catalyzes hermeneutic and affective uncertainties. Ultimately, both impinge upon questions of readers’ own abilities to: (i) fully parse the fictions idiot/dogs appear in, and (ii) self-reflexively understand themselves as autonomous, human(e) subjects. Each chapter carefully elaborates this figure’s centrality to the textual operations of, respectively, The Sound and the Fury, Of Mice and Men, and Blood Meridian in terms of their narrative and meta-narrative dimensions; this reveals under-examined continuities. By arguing for idiot/dogs’ disruptive potentials (i.e. affective, epistemological, and ethical), this dissertation bridges and extends previous Disability Studies and Animal Studies interventions that link literary representations to social and material contexts. Also, it further intervenes in these subfields by elaborating the biopolitical reasons for and ramifications of the idiot/dog figure’s emergence in twentieth-century Anglo-American fiction. Each chapter outlines how and why idiot/dog figures constitute a means for harmonizing readers’ experiences, thoughts, desires, and feelings with the normative U.S. social and symbolic order—a national order that hinges on recognitions and denials of human subjectivity, as well as on the production of subjectivity in which fiction is implicated. Ultimately, by closely analyzing literary idiot/dog figures, this dissertation contributes a biopolitical critique of the ontological production and governability of readerly subjects themselves. / Graduate / 2021-09-05

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Current medical discourse and endless media debates on obesity and health have rendered the fat body highly visible. However, the lived experiences of fat have to a large extent remained absent in these discourses. This thesis, therefore, expands and reconceptualizes notions of fatness and fat embodiments. Using semi-structured, in-depth interviewing with individuals of marginalized genders living in Sweden who identify as being fat, the thesis explores (1) the individuals’ perception of fat; how it is seen, felt, and known, (2) how their fat, gendered embodiments shape their identity and their ”being-in-the-world”, and (3) the coping strategies and/or opportunities for resistance available to deal with and/or challenge negative and stigmatizing experiences. Merging phenomenology, affect theory, and temporality theories, findings suggest that fat individuals experience struggles and hatred while navigating a thin world that excludes their fat flesh, resulting in feelings of hyperawareness, shame, and being out of place. Through everyday experiences in this intersubjective world, they are also constructed as being out of time, affecting their access to the present. Navigating conflicting demands of visibility/invisibility, embodying the innocent/guilty fatty, and embracing the body/disembodying from it, the author reflects on the implication of these findings for understandings of fat embodiments as multiple, ambiguous, shifting, and at times contradictory. The thesis offers thickened understandings of the significance of fat embodiments for challenging the ways in which power operates on bodies, for (re)conceptualizing normative notions of fatness, and for fat people themselves.

Working at the intersection of queer feminist affect studies and queer Indigenous studies, this thesis focuses on theorizations and enactments of queer Indigenous joy in Billy-Ray Belcourt's A History of My Brief Body, Gregory Scofield's Love Medicine and One Song, and Joshua Whitehead's Jonny Appleseed. It explores how these contemporary texts uniquely emphasize the relational queer Indigenous body’s tenacious capacity for care and love in order to enact more breathable, collective, and ultimately joyful modes of embodied life, even amid the stifling settler colonial present. I argue that, in doing so, these authors foster joy as a rebellious and healing affective orientation that opposes injurious colonial constructions of queer Indigenous embodiment and contributes to the future-bearing project of radical Indigenous resurgence. By examining these authors' invaluable interventions with joy, which is largely an under-acknowledged positive affect, this thesis aims to convey why the young but burgeoning field of queer Indigenous literature merits far more critical attention than it has received thus far.

This thesis is structured as a feminist creative endeavour, a practice of self-love that aims at exploring (my) depression as a cultural and social phenomenon caused mainly by an inability to correctly embody swedishness, a constant haunting of a colonial and Colombian past, and the affective dimensions of language. This text is based on autoethnographic material about the experiences of being a Colombian-born migrant in Sweden and uses mainly affect theory and decolonial theory to make sense of these experiences. The thesis showcases my temporal relation to both swedishness and colombianness and how that dimension influences the (re)production of my self, and the consequent “negative feelings” linked to depression I experience. Furthermore, as a creative endeavour following the tradition of WOC feminist writers, this thesis highlights how writing and theorizing can lead to healing.

This thesis examines readership communities on the social media application TikTok, and more specifically videos published under the hashtag SpicyBooks, where users discuss the literary genre of romance. Together with the closely related #BookTok, #SpicyBooks has had a profound impact on the book market. Correspondingly, the formation of readership communities on the app should be of interest to anyone who wishes to understand the changes of and within literacy among young adults. This study examines the top 130 featured videos under #SpicyBooks, which are thematically divided into categories analysed in three separate chapters. Taking its cue from affect theory, the thesis examines how the affect of shame is produced, represented and mediated in the videos. Furthermore, the study maps the various reader positions conjured by shame, and surveys how the video creators present themselves in the prevailing ideas and norms of aesthetic taste and social gender that circumscribes the literature discussed in the videos. By focusing on how the social media users and readers represent themselves, rather than how libraries and librarians can make themselves visible on social media, the study proposes a methodological shift, which might begin bridging the generational gap between libraries and their potential users.

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