THIS FIERCE GEOMETRY: USES OF THE JUDEO-CHRISTIAN BIBLE IN THE ANTI-ABOLITIONIST AND ANTI-GAY RHETORIC OF THE UNITED STATES Michael J. Mazza, Ph.D. University of Pittsburgh, 2009 This dissertation examines the citational use of the Judeo-Christian Bible in two sociopolitical debates within the United States: first, the debate over the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century, and second, the contemporary debate over gay rights. This study incorporates two core theses. First, I argue that the contemporary religious right, in its anti-gay use of the Bible, is replicating the hermeneutical practices used by opponents of the abolitionist movement. My second thesis parallels the first: I argue that the contemporary activists who reclaim the Bible as a pro-gay instrument are standing in the same hermeneutical tradition as nineteenth-century Christian abolitionists. This study is thus about the acts of interpreting texts and putting those interpretations to use in the public sphere. The first chapter lays out the historical and conceptual groundwork for this study. Among the issues considered are the evolution of the biblical canon, the role of interpretive communities in biblical interpretation, and the matrix of human difference, privilege, and marginalization. The second chapter reviews more than thirty biblical passages used by anti-abolitionist activists in their public discourses. There is a comparative thrust to this chapter, because it juxtaposes this slavemasters Bible with the biblical passages used in anti-gay discourse. The third chapter is a comparative analysis of the biblical hermeneutics practiced by nineteenth-century abolitionists and contemporary pro-gay thinkers. In this chapter I identify seven general strategies which these two groups hold in common as each engages the biblical text. The fourth and final chapter considers the possible connections that link the hermeneutics of the American abolitionist and gay rights movements to three other currents of thought: first, the ubuntu theology of Desmond Tutu; second, the minjung theology of South Korea; and third, the philosophy of hermeneutics developed by Hans-Georg Gadamer. The study ends with a brief coda, which considers some of the political and cultural events of 2009 in light of the dissertations main ideas.

Chapter 1 Introduction sets forth the overarching theme. The United States in the 1950s experienced a reconfiguration of gender roles facilitated by depictions, in Hollywood film and magazine advertisements, of fashionable bodies that would mobilize the corporeal and ideological reconfiguration of emulating viewers. Chapter 2 Apartment for Peggy: Probing the Postwar Prototype examines the ways in which the post-World War II battle between the United States and Russia for global dominance gave rise to the glorification of domesticity and to the growth of infrastructures and institutions that supported it. Chapter 3 Underwear and the Red Scare examines the way in which film and advertising implicitly posited foundation garments as items of apparel that distinguished the American female from her Russian counterpart; secured her immovably as the faithful, housebound wife; and inscribed her body with national anxieties over communist invasion. Chapter 4 Platex, Peroxide, Playmate: Marilyn Monroe and Sexuality, Whiteness, and Class argues that the transgressively unsealed and un-buttressed body of Marilyn Monroe not only eliminated the perceived female need for post-coital commitment and the humiliating possibility of female refusal in response to sexual overtures from Everyman but also challenged postwar understandings of class, race (including whiteness and blondeness), gender, and ethnicity. Chapter 5 The Ex-G.I. in the Gray Flannel Suit examines the way that film and advertising attempted either to recuperate the enervated virility of the corporate conformist or to reeducate the war veteran returning from a military world of male camaraderie and adventure to a civilian world of female demands and domesticity. Chapter 6 Jimmy Stewart: The Man in the White Playtex Girdle argues that, in most of his postwar films, Stewart was the actor who most consistently embodied the returning veterans wound-incurring struggle to negotiate a reconciliation between conventionally male/female oppositions. Chapter 7 Conclusion: Into the Sixties surveys the 50s alternatives to gray-flannel conservatism that would set the stage for the protests of the coming decades.

This dissertation focuses on masculinity in discourses of nostalgia and nation in popular films and texts of the late 20th centurys millennial periodthe Bill Clinton years, from 1992-2001. As the 1990s progressed, masculinity crises and millennial anxieties intersected with an increasing fixation on nostalgic popular histories of World War II. The representative masculine figures proffered in Steven Spielberg films and Tom Hanks roles had critical relationships to cultural traumas surrounding race, reproduction and sexuality. Nostalgic narratives emerged as way to fortify the American nation-state and resolve its social problems. The WWII cultural trend, through the specter of tributes to a dying generation, used nostalgic texts and images to create imaginary American landscapes that centered as much on contemporary masculinity and the political and social perspective of the Boomer generation as it did on the prior one. The conceit of Clintons masculinity is used as the figural link between the male bodies represented in such popular 1990s films as Amistad, Saving Private Ryan and The Green Mile. Additional chapters focus on Tom Hanks star persona, the notion of boyhood, and the nexus between pop cultural imagery and representations of nostalgia.

What makes political cinema political? It used to be that the category of political cinema was understood to designate a body of work with a very determinate political orientation. When Comolli and Narboni wrote about political cinema in the late 1960s, they were writing about a cinematic practice defined by its opposition to the capitalist status quo and aiming at the transformation of the social world. But as Marxism has suffered a crisis over the last decades, so has the concept of a political cinema, which has since lost its specificity. I claim that since the late sixties there has been a shift in ideas and practices concerning political cinema: a class-oriented, anti-capitalist conception of politics has given way to a conception of politics that is primarily, though not exclusively, identity-oriented. I call this shift the ethnic turn in political cinema. The ethnic turn has not received much critical scrutiny from film scholars. It tends to be taken for granted as an advance in our thinking about society and a triumph in the fight against racism and Eurocentrism. The aim of my dissertation is to challenge this complacency by asking how ethnicity is constructedby whom, to the exclusion of what, for what purpose, and why now. Using case studies from Brazil and the United States, I examine the uses of racial and ethnic representation in explicitly political film over the last half century. Both nation-states have inherited a comparable history of African slavery, indigenous genocide, and formidable European immigration. But so far, there has been little comparative work examining the ways in which explicitly political films in these two countries have tried to make sense of racial oppression, how these representations have changed over time, and what those changes indicate about the shifting terms of both national and global debates over increasing social inequality. My dissertation addresses this lacuna.

In this study I argue that G. E. Moores philosophy of friendship developed in Achilles or Patroclus? and Principia Ethica, and the Great War, influenced the Bloomsbury Groups notions of friendship. I argue that these dual influences were central to Lawrence, Forster, and Woolfs representations of frustrated and melancholic friendship in their post-war novels: Women In Love, A Passage to India, and The Waves. Lawrence rejected Moores notion of friendship suggesting that after the Great War desexualized friendship was impossible. Forster and Woolf, however, both retained some aspect of Moores concept that friendship and the pleasure of human intercourse are among the most valuable things, which we can know or imagine (Principia Ethica 188-189). In A Passage to India and The Waves Forster and Woolf demonstrate the limitations of Moores philosophy in a modern context, but both suggest that friendship should be cultivated despite these limitations. In this study, therefore, I refute Leonard Woolfs notion that Moore influenced the Bloomsbury Group only in its earliest stages, and I suggest that the post-war modern novel is not completely devoid of the promise of satisfactory personal relationships.

This dissertation argues for the study of director Mike Nichols by elucidating his aesthetic, historical, social, and political importance. He ushered in the turn from Classical to New Hollywood, and studying his work illuminates unacknowledged similarities and differences in both periods. Furthermore, looking at the cultural significance of his oeuvre deepens our understanding of the cultural revolution of the 1960s, as well as key events in the ensuing five decades of American social history. By analyzing the methods for crafting scenarios that Nichols carried forward to the cinema from his seminal work in radio and theater, I generate new insight into the representation of the interpersonal on-screen, particularly through the lenses of gender and sexuality. There is no scholarship devoted to Nicholss study, and I look what his exclusion from debates in Cinema Studies tells us both about his films and about the dominant approaches and theoretical paradigms used to interpret the cinema, particularly regarding concepts such as character, performance, dialogue, the psychological, the human, and the social.

Learning was an important trope in the literature of the Victorian period, particularly to the extent that it shaped subjectivity. Alongside such textual elements as voice, character, and setting, the theme of learning responded to the historical and institutional forces exerted upon human existence in this phase of British history. In this period, a new consciousness of political and cultural possibility permeated the social field. This new consciousness was largely democratic and often made gestures towards the universal. Learning was a significant means through which many Victorian writers sought to negotiate the gap between individual experience and this larger social horizon.

This dissertation analyzes depictions of collecting and collectors in visual media, arguing that cultural conceptions which have long been reinforced by live-action film and animation are now being challenged by digital video games. The older notion of collectors as people dissociated from present-day society and unhealthily obsessed with either the past or the minutiae of inanimate objects are giving way to a new conception of the collector as an active manipulator of information in the present moment. The dissertation argues that this shift is partly influenced by the ontology of each media form. It focuses primarily on the rise of digital technology from the mid-1980s to the present, 1985 being the year the Nintendo Entertainment System was first introduced in the United States, reviving the flagging video game industry and posing a threat to the dominance of the cinema in visual entertainment media. Beginning with an overview of collecting in the Western hemisphere, it argues that popular stereotypes of collecting are out of step with the actuality of the practice. Analysis of the ontology of film links the tendency to portray the figure of the collector as a socially inept male, while the museum is a source of monsters and mystery. The animated film aligns itself with change and transformation and thus rejects the stasis implied by traditional notions of collection. The interactive nature of digital games embraces colleting as a game activity, making the player a collector of digital objects, and the game collection a positive indicator of progress in the game.

The dissertation examines 1950s, 60s, and 70s Mexican émigré cinema through aesthetic and political strategies that critically reassess national cinematic self-representation. I discuss multiple factors, including film texts, modes of production, immigration policies, historical discourses and cinematic scholarship in order to understand particular shifts in the images of Mexican national identity. While Mexican cinemas Golden Age (approx. 1935-55) is characterized by consistent and regularized images of Mexicos nationhood, I argue that the mid-twentieth century texts undermine homogeneous images of its national body. I explore the works of several émigré filmmakers as case studies that demonstrate how intellectual projects and mobile aesthetic strategies are produced from positions of exile. These films give rise to alternative political and social filmmaking practices other than dominant nationalist visual universes. For instance, I show that the films grotesque and surrealist predilections emerge from different national traditions and act as palimpsests without homogenizing their differences. While these modes utilize divergent intellectual and artistic forms, they simultaneously bring to the forefront tensions and discontinuities among national traditions that cannot be readily reconciled. In so doing, they fragment earlier Golden Age figurations of the Mexican people, particularly dominant tropes of rural and urban identities. I illustrate how these national traditions are in dialogue with the transatlantic influences that inform and underlie the émigré films of the era. By exploring their affinities to such avant-garde theoretical traditions as the theater of the absurd and popular European forms such as the Italian western, I contend that these works attempt to redefine national spectacle by seeking to map international practices onto regional mythologies, topographies and institutions. These films undermine myths of the nation-state that saturate Mexican cinema and popular culture, including notions of post-revolutionary popular unity and official modes of historical narration. I argue that mid-twentieth century filmmaking aptly illustrates contradictory political, social, and aesthetic impulses at work in the twentieth-century. In examining this era of filmmaking, I show how it anticipates contemporary Mexican cinemas reliance on exiled and dissident filmmakers (e.g. Guillermo del Toro and Arturo Ripstein) and their migratory artistic practices that participate in twenty-first century cultural and political thinking.

This dissertation is a study of Edgar Allan Poe that illustrates the values for originality and creativity that he sought to institute for literature, and the connections that these values have to literary criticism. This dissertation seeks to accomplish this, first, by performing close readings of Poes criticism and fiction especially the Marginalia, which is a cornerstone of this study in order to demonstrate the importance of discontinuity in Poes understanding of creativity and historical emergence. I argue that Poe attempted to figure the work of the creative imagination in literature and criticism as a temporal and spatial discontinuity in order to confront the mechanical entrainment produced by the new forms and technologies of mass print. Secondly, the readings performed in this dissertation address and respond to the problems raised recently by Poe studies, which question Poes relation to the US. This recent work on Poe claims that Poe scholarship has suffered in light of a-historical and foreign studies that have concealed Poes relation to history. Critics, therefore, have lately proposed a closer contextualization of Poes work to return him to his rightful place in history as an American author. In disclosing the ongoing intention of Poes writing to seek discontinuity from temporal entrainment, however, this dissertation illustrates how the contextualization of Poe within America proposed by recent Poe studies colludes with the practices that Poe confronted. Further, this dissertation illustrates the discontinuous as an affirmation of historical emergence rather than a desire for an a-historical withdrawal, as numerous contextualizing studies of Poe have done. The readings of Poe offered here serve to illustrate how recent Poe studies far from offering the authentic version of Poe that they promise actually function as an effect of the tendencies expressed in journalism that produce a static, linear-chronological conception of time. This dissertation concludes, therefore, that much recent work in Poe studies obscures Poes understanding of creation, as well as the value for literature and criticism that Poe tied to possibilities for historical emergence.