This dissertation imagines certain contemporary literary oeuvres as perpetually shifting multi-layered palimpsests, their thematic and formal interconnections enacting both the repetitions of trauma and the necessary revisions of historiography, identity, and recovery. Across ethnicity, gender, and genre, my intratextual analyses reveal a cyclical dynamic that destabilizes plotting and the presumption of linear progress between past and future. Chapter One advocates for undisciplined humanities scholarship, drawing upon Jeffrey Williams's "posttheory generation," Shu-mei Shih's "technologies of recognition," and Theodor Adorno's "The Essay as Form." Chapter 2 considers form and reception via theories of intertextuality, intratextuality, and short story cycles. Linking politics and poetics, I suggest that these oeuvres invite consideration of gender, sexuality, and narrative, as well as the "spacetime" of genre. Chapter 3 explores the "serial unpredictability" of "trauma's palimpsests" as analogous to the disordered temporality of geomorphological relicts after impact to the earth. After discussing how these oeuvres mediate between realist and postmodern theories of language, I distinguish between personal and cultural as well as "event-based" and discursive theories of trauma. I emphasize the social nature of recovery, viewing intratextual reading as analogous to a witnessing relationship. Chapter 4 reads Louise Erdrich's "long story cycle," focusing on Tracks (1988) and Four Souls (2004), as emblematic of both traditional Native American forms of storytelling and postmodern witnessing. Drawing upon theories of tricksters, the roman-fleuve, and hypertext, I show that Erdrich's "story" is not a plot, but a performance of storytelling, historiography, and community formation. Chapter 5 argues that Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory (1982) is an essay cycle "impersonating an autobiography." Showing that the text's repetitions point to the discursive trauma of gay sexuality inextricable from ethnic loss, I illustrate how Rodriguez's narrative resists the plot of the coming out story. Chapter 6 posits Rodriguez's Brown (2002) as a "return story" that reprises his "long essay cycle." A close reading of the cubist self-portrait in "Peter's Avocado" reveals a metaphor for Rodriguez's multi-faceted identity and the structure of his writing. The dissertation concludes with "A Palinode on the Scholarly Real," where I reflect upon the structural relationship between autobiography and scholarship.

This dissertation articulates the ways in which space and place permeates grand national narratives as well as everyday events of "American" life, and captures how they are represented in literary texts. I am committed to exploring, through the lens of the cultural geography, the workings of representation in the "production of space" as simultaneously real, symbolic, and imaginary. Embedding my study in critical perspectives provided by New Americanist, postcolonial, and transnational studies, I aim at mediating simultaneously abstract and material lineaments of our social emplacement, and putting in historical contexts the material geography of the United States (and beyond) and its literary representation. Chapter I traces the main issues in current writing on space and attempts to produce a nuanced account of the instrumentality of space as a register of not only built forms but also of embedded ideologies. Chapter II addresses a more pluralistic notion of "southerness" envisioned in William Faulkner's Light in August by reading him as a different kind of "regionalist" who crosses regional and national boundaries while seemingly staying within his own fictional counties. Chapter III delves into what it means for displaced people to reclaim a secured placed called "home" in Toni Morrison's Paradise, and examines how the geography of exclusion is re-worked through a postethnic vision. Chapter IV scrutinizes how transnational migration and the flow of capital, labor, and cultures give American suburbs new faces and bring about tensions, opening up a national context to transnational frames of reference---"Third Worldization" of American suburbs in David Palumbo-Liu's words. My dissertation seeks to add to and extend the field of study because its focus on the spatial and representation shifts the axis of analysis, taking literature into new arenas not yet fully cognizant of its spatial critiques. In order to overcome both empty geography that requires only minimal material grounding and thus resists being represented as "place," and pure textuality impervious to cultural content, there should be, I would contend, a continuing special interest in understanding the ways that questions of difference are spatialized in new ways to map "American" sites of place formation.

This dissertation is a multiethnic exploration of the ways in which contending realisms in the 1930s and 40s attempted to remake "America" within the terrain of popular culture. Unlike in the late 19th century, when American realism was largely intended as a competing mode of representation with an emergent mass culture, the realist-inspired work of the 1930s and 40s I investigate---much of it affiliated with the Popular Front social movement---was produced by individuals who had grown up in a world in which there was virtually no space untouched by the culture industries. Thus I explore what their conscious stance toward mass culture, their authorial position in relation to the culture industries, and their at times unconscious incorporation of mass cultural forms into their realism tell us about the subjectivities they created. Central to this investigation is the relationship between these mass cultural realisms and emergent, official notions of American pluralism, notions embodied domestically in the phrase "We're the People" uttered by Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath. Many (but not all) of the cultural workers I cover worked within and against this idea of pluralism, intertwining class, race, and gender to create hybrid subjectivities not generally associated with American culture before the Second World War. Each chapter investigates these dynamics within very disparate instances of midcentury popular culture---in the contending, southern bestsellers of Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Mitchell, in the Hollywood-inspired boxing narratives of Nelson Algren and Clifford Odets, in the struggles of Carlos Bulosan and H. T. Tsiang within an orientalist literary market: and, finally, in the co-optation of Margaret Bourke-White's documentary methods by LIFE magazine. These fusions of realism and mass culture are important to understanding the re-definition of American pluralism at mid-century, as the tradition of American realism carried with it certain epistemologies of what should and should not be visible, and the mass culture of the era diffused that realist-based epistemology to an unprecedented degree, converting it, albeit temporarily, into a "common sense." I argue, ultimately, that the tradition of American realism both enabled and constrained a more inclusive notion of "the people."

This study examines commentary on the changes in work during the industrial revolution in the United States, 1820 to 1914, as a "workplace discourse," by male and female workers, reformers, politicians and writers of fiction (canonical and non-canonical). Their writings disclose a fierce social war over changes in work, the status of workers, working conditions and their cultural implications. The workplace conflict amounted to a second civil war, intricately implicated in the civil war over slavery and federal union. A rhetorical war until 1862, and then a long, bloody series of conflicts in the street, the cultural conflict over industrial work generated a burst of utopian schemes, in fiction and social commentary, between 1880 and 1910. Tracing this discourse shift, specifically in three utopian novels by Edward Ballamy, Ignatius Donnelly and Mark Twain, provides a context for re-reading the bible of American management, Frederick W. Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management, as a utopian text rather than as the applied science Taylor hoped and said the book was. In turn, Taylor's utopian project makes possible new readings of the novels as exciting, prescient social commentary. Together, these texts illuminate the first moments of the country's radical adoption of corporate solutions to social problems.

Dominick LaCapra argues that historians continue to interpret legal documents in a hierarchical fashion that marginalizes intellectual history, as fiction is perceived to be less important. This dissertation analyzes contemporary literary texts in the Americas that exploit such a narrow reading of documents in order to interrogate the way official history is constructed by introducing false forms of documents into their narratives. This type of literary text, or what I label “con-script,” is not only historical fiction, but also historicized fiction that problematizes its own historical construction. Many critics propose that the new historical novel revises historical interpretation, but there exists a gap between theory and textual practice. Adapted from E.L. Doctorow's notion of “false documents,” the con-script acts as an alternative that purposefully confuses fiction and nonfiction, providing tools to critically examine the authority maintained by official narratives. By revealing the fictive nature of these constructions, the con-script alerts readers to the manipulation of documents to maintain political authority and to misrepresent or silence marginalized groups. The recent revision of American Studies to include a hemispheric or Inter-American scope provides a context for applying such political claims within a transcultural framework. I compare texts from English, Spanish, and Portuguese America in order to identify shared strategies. After a survey of the historical novel's development across the Americas and a critical theory overview, I analyze three types of con-script. “The Art of Con-Fessing” juxtaposes texts from the three languages via Jay Cantor's The Death of Che Guevara, Augusto Roa Basto's Yo el Supremo, and Silviano Santiago's Em Liberdade. These false documents present themselves as apocryphal diaries written by revolutionary leaders or activists. The authors demythologize untouchable public figures through the gaps in their “own” personal writing. “Mediations of Media” features Ivan Ângelo's A Festa, Tomás Eloy Martínez's La novela de Perón, and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo. These journalists interrogate the role of media and political corruption within the construction of national identity; the false documents appear as newspaper clippings, magazine articles and media images. Finally, the subjective process of archiving is examined in “Con-Centering the Archive” via Aguinaldo Silva's No País das Sombras, Francisco Simón's El informe Mancini, and Susan Daitch's L.C.

An examination of fictional feature films produced in the United States between the mid-1950s to the end of the 1990s. The author argues that youth films comprise a genre of late twentieth-century American cinema, and that they reconstitute significant narrative and thematic characteristics of the novelistic Bildungsroman and its modern literary variants, the childhood initiation tale and the coming-of-age or the rites-of-passage story. The genre of modern youth films includes not only teen entertainments but also social problem films and more personal, quasi-autobiographical works by modern directors. Overall, youth films commonly dramatize situations and events that bear upon the child's initiation into new domains of psychosocial experience and the adolescent's and postadolescent's encounters with the pleasures and perils of modern life, thereby taking up the leitmotif of identity formation that is typically associated with twentieth-century literary fiction, autobiography and stage drama. A further argument is that the genre of youth films reflects the culturally and aesthetically eclectic character of contemporary American cinema. As a mass medium the American cinema promotes the cultural fantasies of a commercialistic society; but as an art form it shares with modern fiction and drama a capacity for social criticism, irony, and self-reflexivity. The study explores these dual faces of contemporary cinema by analyzing it's representations of American youth as symbols of generational and social change. Three significant phases in the history of youth films are discussed: Its cultural origins in youth melodramas of the 1950s; the ideologically revisionist films of the American Film Renaissance made between 1967 and 1977; the expanding range of subjects and themes in the genre during the period of the American Independent Film Movement from 1987 through 2000. Special emphasis is given to the theme of memory in youth films; the genre's multi-ethnic subjects and perspectives; and the impact of modern film aesthetics on film genre theory.

In this study I provide a close textual analysis of Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time (1855), Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Silent Partner (1871) and Louisa May Alcott's Work: A Story of Experience (1873). I place those texts within the social and political contexts of the mid-to-late nineteenth century--especially, the woman question and women's rights movement, slavery and abolition, workers' rights and industrialism, opportunities for employment and discussion of marriage reform. Particularly, I focus upon the way these four writers place their own narratives within the social and political debates of the time, the way they appropriate the rhetoric of social reformers, and especially with the ways they depict social problems and the possibilities of reform within their narratives. These writers, for whom the social issues of the day were intertwined with the debate about women's roles, test the separation of spheres and notions of domesticity by presenting protagonists who gain personal and political power only when they make private experience a matter of public record. Also at issue in these texts is the way in which the author's voice is mediated by audience concerns. Harriet Jacobs, for example, works with and against the expectations of her white, middle-class female readers as she describes her own life under slavery by both appealing to and criticizing the Christian morality of her feminist-abolitionist audience. At times, ambivalences of authorial voice in these texts replicate the ambivalent cultural expectations of the "true" versus "new" woman. I argue that access to public voice was a central concern of many social reformers of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, and in this study I examine the ways these authors imagine the possibilities of social reform by depicting that concern against private and public discourse.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1879-1958) was a best-selling author of the twenties and thirties and an arbiter of literary taste in America. As the most powerful voice on the Selection Committee of the Book-of-the-Month Club during its first thirty years, she helped discover and promote the careers of Pearl Buck, Isak Dinesen, and Richard Wright and brought many other important writers to the attention of the nation. In addition, she introduced the educational theories of Dr. Maria Montessori to the U.S., was the first president of the Adult Education Association, translated scholarly works from Italian, and wrote several highly-regarded books for children. Fisher's letters--including those to Buck, Willa Cather, Dinesen, W. E. B. Du Bois, Albert Einstein, Robert Frost, James Weldon Johnson, Margaret Mead, Margaret Sanger, James Thurber, E. B. White, Wright, and Anzia Yezierska--not only provide a wealth of information about the author herself, but also document major features of the cultural and literary landscape in the U.S. from 1900-1958. Among the subjects discussed in significant detail are: the "New Woman" and the suffrage movement, racial discrimination and the emergence of the N.A.A.C.P., the development of the national education system, both World Wars, the Depression, the rise of modernism in art, "local color" writing, book clubs, and the literary marketplace. The dissertation is comprised of an introductory essay on the correspondence and Fisher's place in the American literary canon, 185 letters which I have transcribed and annotated, a statement of editorial procedure, a chronology, and biographical profiles of the correspondents.

This dissertation explores works by 1.5 (immigrant or refugee children who were born in Viet Nam but spent their childhood in the U.S.) or second-generation Vietnamese Americans or Vietnamese living in the diaspora that are written in or translated into English, between the years of 1990 to 2003. Given the heterogeneity of authors whose works I examine, my dissertation analyzes the literature of this globalized Vietnamese community, paying particular attention to members who have made the U.S. their home yet may view themselves as transnational, diasporic subjects. My research is also based upon various genres of literature. I use texts such as autobiographies and memoirs as well as fictional novels, short stories, and poetry. They also include articles and essays from the internet and in various mainstream newspapers and “alternative” presses and journals. The reason for looking at different venues of documentation is due to the scarcity of published writings by 1.5 and second-generation Vietnamese American authors. By utilizing both internet sites and materials in print media and juxtaposing these documents with published books and anthologies, I show the contradictions, reveal the fissures, and disclose the multiplicity of voices of these 1.5 and second-generation Vietnamese American writers. Especially vital to this study is how writers who are part of the 1.5 or second-generation are invested in creating new models of representation for reading, writing, and understanding their respective communities. The reason that I study the ways in which these writers interrogate, negotiate, and re-define both themselves and communities in which they live is largely due to the perception of the dominant U.S. culture and its fixed view of Viet Nam and the Vietnamese people. The dominant U.S. cultural perception sees those living in Viet Nam and in the diaspora as representatives of a twenty-year war that was fought more than 25 years ago. In my research, I argue that these 1.5 and second-generation Vietnamese diasporic writers challenge this hegemonic image.

This dissertation focuses on American women's responses to the Western epic tradition and, more specifically, to the modern American epic tradition. I examine women poets' strategies of self-legitimation and their transformations of national narratives in this male-centered genre. I argue that the poems in my study do not merely reflect roles historically available to women but actively imagine new possibilities for women as agents in American history and creators of "usable" national pasts. Chapter One discusses the invisibility of women's texts in most scholarship on the American epic and outlines my approach to recovering women's efforts. Chapter Two focuses on Muriel Rukeyser's "The Book of the Dead" (1938). I examine Rukeyser's assertion of her authority as a woman in the making of American cultural traditions and her simultaneous examination of her position as a privileged poet attempting to represent the oppressed. Rukeyser represents women's agency in Popular Front causes by rewriting the male-centered version of the Osiris/Isis myth in Eliot's Waste Land. Chapter Three explores Gwendolyn Brooks' Annie Allen (1949) as a response to African American women's situation during and after World War II. I argue that Brooks' African American female hero should be read not only against the dominant Western heroic tradition but also against African American intellectuals' representations of heroism as a masculine quest for identity involving a journey away from home and family. Revising the notion of woman and domesticity as constraints on the male artist-hero, Brooks depicts her female hero as needing to resist the social script of romance. In Hard Country (1982), Sharon Doubiago, a white author with working-class origins, reveals the connection between America's genocidal history and the denial of all that the culture deems feminine. In Chapter Four, I maintain that Doubiago's strategic adoption of the marginal stance inaugurated in the 1855 "Song of Myself" enables her to write an anti-imperialist epic of the North American continent. Simultaneously, Doubiago resists Whitman's tendency to erase the subjectivities of societal "others." My conclusion discusses Adrienne Rich's move toward imagining a more inclusive epic tradition in her recent work.