This dissertation seeks to analyze Herman Melville's later novels— Pierre (1852), Israel Potter (1855) and The Confidence-Man (1857)—for their treatment of one of the most fundamental ethico-political problems of liberal democracy: namely, how to achieve a viable communal solidarity without attenuating the individual. Traditional liberal theorists have sought some sort of ahistorical universal common ground to reconcile the opposing claims of the individual and community such as the social contract, moral sentiment, and Reason. However, Melville's later novels urge us to reject such solutions. These novels not only cast doubts upon the essentialist claim of resolution but also call into question the viability of the very idea of “reconciling” the two opposing claims, for reconciliation is not only irrelevant but also detrimental in a liberal democratic society where values are diversified and fluid. Building upon the ideals of liberal democracy advocated by pragmatic thinkers such as John Dewey and Richard Rorty, the present study argues that what democracy demands is not “resolution” of conflicts by discovering ahistorical universal common ground but a culture that is sensitive to the contingency and complexity of political practice and, thereby, to the precariousness of the interdependent relationships between individual and community, variety and oneness, difference and identity. Melville's later novels help us cultivate a democratic attitude that is tentative, experimental, provisional, improvisatory, eclectic, and even contradictory. They offer not only critique of liberalism but also, through its narrative strategies, a textual community where effective democratic action—doing and experiencing democracy—takes place. Thus, against ideological criticisms that tend to see literary texts as mere reflections of socio-economic aspects of society, this dissertation seeks to demonstrate that literary texts can serve as an effective means of cultural transformation.

In this study, I trace the development of a pervasive but largely implicit subject in Jarrell's work: the relationship—usually antagonistic—between the individual and systems. Specifically, I discuss how Jarrell depicts the individual within the systems of the army, the family, and mass consumer culture. I contend that in both the army and consumer culture, the individual is either at odds with the system or entirely swallowed up by it because of its enormity and virtual omnipotence. Within the family, the story more complicated. In his early work, Jarrell typically depicts the child at war with his parents. However, in his late work, the conflicts between the child and his parents are largely resolved and the family provides a refuge from the terrors of the world. Each chapter of this study is comprised of three sections: Introduction, Poems and Stories, and Conclusion. In the introductions to Chapter 2, Chapter 3, and Chapter 4, I examine Jarrell's perception of the given entity that possesses systematized power. I cite from Jarrell's poetry, fiction, essays, and letters, and also from work by Jarrell's critics. In Poems and Stories in each of these chapters, I discuss specific works from Jarrell's oeuvre, including his books for children, that depict the individual “at war” with the entity at hand. In my Conclusion, I examine the response Jarrell advocates the individual make to being “at war” with the given entity that threatens to overwhelm him: in each instance Jarrell insists that one carry on in spite of one's powerlessness and recommends that one employ imagination to help one palliate one's inevitable suffering at one's powerlessness. In my Introduction to Chapter 5, I attempt to define Jarrell's perception of love, which, I argue, he believed able to reconcile the individual to his circumstances. In Poems and Stories in this chapter, I examine works that depict the individual so reconciled. Finally, in my Conclusion , I examine Jarrell's own last days and speculate as to whether or not love proved a reconciliatory power to him in the midst of a depression that may have culminated in suicide.

This dissertation considers Faulkner's white characters in terms of their whiteness, a racial signifier which has, historically, been both generally assumed and specifically codified to be a position of privilege in American culture, regardless of class or gender. However, class and gender differences among whites make for very different experiences of whiteness, particularly in the pre-Civil Rights-era South out of which Faulkner created his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. This dissertation addresses those differences and considers their impact on cultural conceptions of whiteness, and on the idea of Americanness itself. Chapter 1 examines The Unvanquished, “The Bear,” and The Sound and the Fury in order to understand the various ways in which white manhood reveals itself in Faulkner's fictional world. The central argument is that the white male characters of these novels are troubled by the expectations that adhere to white masculinity, and struggle to claim its privileges while simultaneously fearing that they can never measure up. Chapter 2 treats the white women characters of Sanctuary, Flags in the Dust, The Hamlet and The Town, and As I Lay Dying by focusing on the ways in which the white women in these novels challenge and deviate from the roles available to them as white women of the South in Faulkner's time. Chapter 3 considers the whiteness of mixed-race characters in Light in August, Intruder in the Dust and Go Down, Moses, and Absalom, Absalom! by noting, first, that they are considered black characters, even though there is whiteness in their backgrounds. Because these characters bear white heritage but not whiteness, they also force question into the nature of whiteness and its implications for Americanness. Chapter 4 looks at some of Faulkner's black characters in The Sound and the Fury, Requiem for a Nun, Go Down, Moses, and Flags in the Dust in order to gauge the representation of blackness from Faulkner's white perspective. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of the ways in which whiteness terrorizes non-whiteness, and, via analysis of some of Faulkner's non-fiction writing and speeches, argues that Faulkner wrote what he did, as he did, because he was white.

Abstract not available

"Representation and the Modern Female Subject" examines the socio-cultural work of the fictional woman painter in novels by women authors writing in or about the United States between the years 1870-1930. I focus on representations of women painters to explore the shift that occurs when women take control of their self-images. It is my contention that nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American women writers employ the self-reflexive figure of the painter heroine to promote an ideological and iconological awareness of the discursive and visual natures of gender construction. The second order act of gender- and self-making produced by the woman author writing the woman painter, who in turn produces ekphrastically rendered images, foregrounds the ways that gender is articulated in art, literature, and the popular media. These self-reflexive representations, therefore, anticipate questions raised by constructivists about how gender ideologies are produced, by whom, and to what effect. In this way, authors such as Lillie Devereux Blake, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Kate Chopin, Julia Magruder, Winnifred Eaton, and Jessie Fauset deconstruct hegemonic representations of womanhood or femininity, from the True Woman to the Gibson Girl, to enable a plurality of divergent, sometimes paradoxical, femininities. Implicitly, then, these authors suggest that gender is constructed and negotiated through language and image and, crucially, that women must take an active part in those processes if they are to obtain autonomy. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester, 2014. / October 27, 2014. / Includes bibliographical references. / Leigh Edwards, Professor Co-Directing Dissertation; Paul Outka, Professor Co-Directing Dissertation; Karen Bearor, University Representative; Andrew Epstein, Committee Member; Dennis Moore, Committee Member.

In this novel, a small Kansas town sits in the shadow of a corrupt meatpacking plant called Pig City, the region's only major employer. The town is reliant on the plant to give them a living, but resentful of it for sending them home poor, tired, and maimed. Their sadness erupts in the town, causing their children to develop strange powers: boys with wings, girls who can burn with a touch, kids who die and come back as ghosts. As the students of the town wait to graduate and begin working at the plant, trying to find love and wrestling with their odd gifts, the plant owner begins working with a boy genius to replace the workers with machines, a move that would kill the town once and for all. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2015. / February 20, 2015. / Includes bibliographical references. / Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Professor Directing Dissertation; Robert Romanchuk, University Representative; Mark Winegardner, Committee Member; Diane Roberts, Committee Member.

This dissertation examines English and American authors of the fin de siècle whose depiction of failed artists functions as a critique of the predominant modes of identity formation under capitalism. Scholars have tied the transatlantic aesthetic project of literary realism with the social project of the reform era, a political practice of small gains that served to reinforce the identities produced by the division of labor and the hoarding of capital. The late-century fictions presented here protested the conventions of reform fiction and the sociopolitical consequences of the movement, advocating the depoliticized practice of art as an alternative means of identification and a form of political engagement in its own right. Chapter One shows how Rebecca Harding Davis and Oscar Wilde envisioned the work of art--divorced from the identity of its producer--as the ideal body. Through the depiction of collective works of art that outlive their producers, Davis and Wilde assert the primacy of the work itself over authorial identity. The contemporary artist Banksy, an anonymous street writer whose works gesture towards a future society fueled by aesthetic participation, later employs the same aesthetic strategy in his critique of late capitalism. Chapter Two examines Kate Chopin and Thomas Hardy's response to the fragmentation of the fiction market in the eighteen-nineties. Their feeling that mass-produced art like photographs, popular sheet music, and especially reform fiction had hijacked the creative freedoms of the artistic sphere and its potential to offer an alternative mode of identity formation is present in their depictions of mimetic artist characters whose work reinscribes them into an increasingly professionalized and consumerist society. Chapter Three identifies a compromise formation in the fictions of George Gissing and Edith Wharton, who wrote explicitly about the artist's engagement in social and financial markets. Their novels envision the replacement of identities and communities formed through the production and reception of art by the rise of brand culture, wherein consumers identify with the imagined identities of corporations. This prescient vision is ultimately realized in the work of the American street writer turned entrepreneur and marketing guru, Shepard Fairey.

A biographical study of William Carlos Williams' development into a liberal democrat and a revolutionary poet. Using unpublished and newly discovered material, Williams' early politics, aesthetics, and conception of the artist's function in society are situated in the contexts which shaped them between 1883 and 1923: suburban Rutherford, New Jersey and bohemian New York. Both are detailed in light of the great changes American society underwent then, for Williams' confrontation with "modernity"--the transformation of America into an urban, centralized economy and government and a mass culture--generated his politics of "local government," his poetics of "contact," and his ambiguous conception of the artist as the paradigm of the free self, who must break free of society if he is to serve it. Seeing modernity turn immediate experience into mere "information," Williams grounded both his politics and poetics in nostalgia for the qualities of experience associated with small-community life. Even more threatening was the spread of government, business, and society into formerly local and private realms, for it threatened the conception of the autonomous individual so deeply rooted in him by both Rutherford and Greenwich Village. This study concludes that Williams' defense of autonomy and immediacy was founded even more on the supreme value he gave to art and the artist as on his individualist politics. Ironically, he was devoted to making art the quality of its experience the very basis of community, and yet the terms of his discourse about art's experience led him to despair at the possiblity of defeating modernity's. His early poetry is often caught between his intention to serve his community and its refusal to listen seriously, and between his demand that modernity make place for him and his need to retreat from it in order to preserve the immediacy of his art and his own momentary freedom. But although his individualism undercut his attempts to make poetry a social force, through his formal innovations he, more than any other American modernist, offers the means of making art "intrinsic" to life.

Dickinson's various poetic experiments are informed by her struggle with the complex relation between self and what twentieth-century philosophy calls “the Other.” But most critics misinterpret her poetic experimentation as a quest for the essential, authentic self. By drawing on a traditional definition of the lyric as a purely subjective form—marked by the self's exclusion of all others and the freedom from historical and ideological pressures—they conclude that Dickinson's lyric self signifies the solitary ego who has no relationship with the other as Other. Even much of feminist and new historicist criticism fails to fully explain Dickinson's poetry, and the lyric in general, because these approaches also rely on the traditional concept of the lyric subject. In contrast, I suggest that the consciousness constructed in the lyric space is not confined within a solitary monologism. It is, rather, engaged in a process of perpetual interchange that denies the sovereignty and independence of either the subject or the Other. Thus, I propose that we view the lyric subject not simply as a consciousness of something, but as a release from oneself or, more fundamentally, as a relationship with alterity. This new understanding of the lyric enables us to appreciate Dickinson's poetry for its own dynamics and tension in the self/Other relationship. Her acute sense of the otherness of the Other is conveyed by many aspects of her writing: the violent intensity of her expression, the accuracy and hardness of her language, and most significantly the nature of her perception. This sharp perception, combined with her poetic skill and ingenuity, leads to her characteristic style and poetic form. Dickinson attempts to preserve beings in their specificity and isolation, not subsume them under the general category of God, Truth, or Being. Her poetic experiments reveal the possibility of keeping the self while questioning it as it encounters the irreducible Other. I conclude that this possibility is essential when we attempt to understand ourselves and the world in this age of anti-humanism, multiculturalism, and pluralism.

Abstract not available