This novel tells the story of Sinatra Hawkins, a combat veteran of the Afghanistan War, who quests north as a personal favor to his drug-dealing, pornographer boss, Major Dufresne. In Chicago, Sinatra's narrative weaves with that of a young DJ, Ramsey Dufresne, who is trying to prevent her ex-lover, a mid-level acid dealer, Webb, from stealing money from a more powerful dealer, her father, Major. Webb intends to use the money to buy an extremely rare recording that has reached near mythical status among devotees of various electronic dance music scenes. Together, Ramsey and Sinatra journey to recover the stolen money before Webb hands it over to a darkweb agent selling info revealing the whereabouts of the recording, which may or may not even exist. After someone is murdered, they return to the place the novel began, New Orleans, where they both confront Major and some other homicidal bad guys who give chase over the last two-thirds of the book. In the process obtaining new, revelatory attentions regarding the traumas secretly guiding them. These characters are intended to loosely fit into the tradition of realism, ultimately, refracting the kinds of fringe characters not typically confronted in contemporary American literary fiction. The novel is, more topically, concerned with drug abuse, sex as industry, and police violence, among other problems encountered by society's fringe characters, while hearing passionate pleas from the young, struggling working class of artists and musicians yearning to bend themselves around the wheel of Commerce in search of a single thing they can comfortably call true. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2017. / February 23, 2017. / Afganistan War, Combat Veteran, Darkweb, EDM, Electronic Dance Music, Trance / Includes bibliographical references. / Mark Winegardner, Professor Directing Dissertation; James McNulty, University Representative; Bruce Horack, Committee Member; James Kimbrell, Committee Member.

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This dissertation explores how museums generated debates about the relationship between scientific knowledge and literary aesthetics in nineteenth-century America. Henry David Thoreau, William Wells Brown, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Edith Wharton were among the authors who reckoned with museums’ principles of inclusion and valuation, systems of classification and organization, and use of preserved objects to generate new knowledge. While literary scholars have tended to write about museum exhibits in relation to art and mass culture, this dissertation instead analyzes how scientific museums—and their implications for literature—contributed to popular constructions of scientific and technological change. Drawing on canonical literary texts, museum guidebooks, images, and the popular press, I show that museums shaped an emergent self-consciousness about the relationship between literary and scientific knowledge during an increasingly empirical, information-driven age. To capture the diversity of literary and popular representations of museums during the nineteenth century, each chapter of this dissertation is structured around a single museum. Chapter One shows how Brown and Nathaniel Hawthorne draw analogies between museum collecting, preservation, and literary authorship in their accounts of visits to the British Museum. Moving from history to innovation and from a British to an American national institution, Chapter Two examines how Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writings on originality and Whitman’s Civil War writings define the literary and political stakes of technological novelty in relation to the U.S. Patent Office gallery’s collection of patent models. Chapter Three shows how specimen collecting on behalf of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University informed discussions of empirical methods and shifting belief systems in Thoreau’s Walden and William James’s pragmatism. And Chapter Four takes up accounts of the dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History in Mark Twain’s short fiction and Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, both of which invoke the process of assembling fragmentary fossils to emphasize scientific fallibility and uncertainty. Taken together, these case studies demonstrate how writers used museums to contemplate the challenge of preserving knowledge and accounting for new discoveries during an era marked by technological change, proliferating information, and shifting paradigms for understanding the world. / 2023-12-01T00:00:00Z

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The dissertation uses "original relations" in two senses: in an overarching sense to indicate the writing project of the American Renaissance, the narrative/lyric practice (relating), and in a restrictive sense to indicate one element of the aesthetic, Emerson's project for alignment with the universe. From the intertextuality among writings of Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Poe, and Whitman, a cluster of topics emerges with stylistic implications, contributing to an aesthetic. The elements of this aesthetic are original relations, a rhetoric of fullness, a quest for unity, extra-vagance (the hyphenated term from Walden defamiliarizes the idea of extravagance, and tilts our perception toward a physical act of wandering beyond), contradiction, and magnificent failure. A major linguistic task of original relations in the larger sense is an engagement with inherited language, a breaking of forms. An important effect of the aesthetic is the transformation of assumptions of members of a majority establishment into perspectives of an alienated minority. A pantheistic cosmology as an image-forming absence or presence is one of the occasions for the conversation among the texts. A major problem in the intertextual conversation is the dilemma that the limits of epistemology place on ontology—of understanding the limits of seeming and being, and the double consciousness that artists develop to deal with this dilemma. Double consciousness allows minds to balance two orders of discourse in the vehicle of writing. The aesthetic discussed exists in interstices and penumbras among the elements, so the terms of the discussion overlap categories. By discovering that Emerson and Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe inhabit a common textual language more than they inhabit opposite philosophies, this project decenters existing critical gravity.

For KATAHDIN, a Mixed Blood young woman who grew up in non Native group foster homes, running is her safest means of escaping her anger and her lack of family, roots, and memory. This is the story of how Katahdin's ancestors help her find a home within, roots, and joy.

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