This dissertation investigates the way that feminist resistance is expressed in two Swedish and two German so-called New Woman novels from the turn of the twentieth century: Elin Wägner’s Pennskaftet (1910, Penwoman), Gabriele Reuter’s Aus guter Familie (1895, From a Good Family), Hilma Angered-Strandberg’s Lydia Vik (1904), and Grete Meisel-Hess’s Die Intellektuellen (1911). The theoretical apparatus is comprised by the work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Jacques Lacan, and Jessica Benjamin. By introducing a psychoanalytic and feminist perspective, this dissertation seeks to develop the possibilities for agency and resistance within the framework of Foucault’s theories. It investigates four textual and contextually grounded strategies of resistance that are prominent in these novels: individuality, openness, desire, and eugenics. This study demonstrates how Gabriele Reuter, Grete Meisel-Hess, and  Hilma Angered-Strandberg, inspired by the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche and Ellen Key, depict feminine individuality in relation to a scientific and philosophical discourse that specifically denied women individuality. The authors anchor individuality in a corporality that was similarly denied to women by a bourgeois and dogmatic Christian discourse. Openness and wit function as resistance strategies in Elin Wägner’s Pennskaftet. Humorous rejoinders and narrative comments can disarm a conservative. An open attitude towards the emancipation project could also help to resolve the conflicts between different feminist positions and between different women. Desire functions as an important resistance strategy in each of the novels examined. It is variously represented as a vital instinct, a desire for knowledge, and a sexual desire, as in Gabriele Reuter’s Aus guter Familie – or as a desire for suffrage, as in Pennskaftet, or for maternity legislation, as in Grete Meisel-Hess’s Die Intellektuellen. By formulating a notion of feminine desire, turn-of-the-century feminists were able both to seize control of sexuality from the church and to wrest morality from the grasp of the bourgeoisie. These resistance strategies could also have a biopolitical character: in Grete Meisel-Hess’s Die Intellektuellen, woman is placed at the service of humanity on eugenicist grounds, and her good qualities are seen as capable of promoting humanity’s progress. This dissertation shows that in these novels desire at the individual level serves to reinforce feminine subjectivity. Love is seen as associated with an intensified sense of life and as a precondition of creativity. At the social level, desire also functions as the basis for a feeling of solidarity among women that instils in them courage and an urge to persevere in the suffrage struggle, this latter a highly protracted process. In this way desire acquires political potential. A framing chapter on context provides the intellectual and philosophical backgrounds of the various strategies of resistance. It is followed by four analytical chapters, each of which addresses one novel.

In 1908, two Canadian women published first novels that became instant best-sellers. Nellie McClung's Sowing Seeds in Danny initially outsold Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, but by 1965 McClung's book had largely disappeared from Canadian consciousness. The popularity of Anne, on the other hand, has continued to the present, and Anne has received far more academic and critical attention, especially since 1985. It is only recently that Anne of Green Gables has been criticized for its ideology in the same manner as Sowing Seeds in Danny. The initial question that inspired this dissertation was why Sowing Seeds in Danny disappeared from public and critical awareness while Anne of Green Gables continued to sell well to the present day and to garner critical and popular attention into the twenty-first century. In light of the fact that both books have in recent years come under condemnation and stand charged with maternal feminism, imperial motherhood, eugenics, and racism, one must ask further why this has now happened to both Danny and Anne. What has changed? The hypothesis of the dissertation is that Danny's relatively speedy disappearance was partly due to a shift in Canadians' religious worldview over the twentieth century as church attendance and biblical literacy gradually declined. McClung's rhetorical strategies look back to the dominant Protestantism of the nineteenth century, in contrast to Montgomery's, which look forward to the twentieth-century's waning of religious faith. Although there is enough Christianity in Montgomery's novel to have made it acceptable to her largely Christian reading public at the beginning of the century, its presentation is subtle enough that it does not disturb or baffle a twenty-first-century reader in the way McClung's does. McClung's novel is so forthright in its presentation of Christianity, with its use of nineteenth-century tropes and conventions and with its moralising didacticism, that the delightful aspects of the novel were soon lost to an increasingly secular reading public. Likewise, the recent critical challenges to both novels spring from a worldview at odds with the predominantly Christian worldview of 1908. The goal of the dissertation has been to read Sowing Seeds in Danny and Anne of Green Gables within the religious contexts of a 1908 reader in order to avoid an unquestioning twenty-first-century censure of these novels, and to ascertain the reasons for their divergent popularity and recent critical condemnation.

In the early 20th century, there were few therapeutic options for mental illness and asylum numbers were rising. This pessimistic outlook favoured the rise of the eugenics movement. Heredity was assumed to be the principal cause of mental illness. Politicians, scientists and clinicians in North America and Europe called for compulsory sterilisation of the mentally ill. Psychiatric genetic research aimed to prove a Mendelian mode of inheritance as a scientific justification for these measures. Ernst Rüdin’s seminal 1916 epidemiological study on inheritance of dementia praecox featured large, systematically ascertained samples and statistical analyses. Rüdin’s 1922–1925 study on the inheritance of “manic-depressive insanity” was completed in manuscript form, but never published. It failed to prove a pattern of Mendelian inheritance, counter to the tenets of eugenics of which Rüdin was a prominent proponent. It appears he withheld the study from publication, unable to reconcile this contradiction, thus subordinating his carefully derived scientific findings to his ideological preoccupations. Instead, Rüdin continued to promote prevention of assumed hereditary mental illnesses by prohibition of marriage or sterilisation and was influential in the introduction by the National Socialist regime of the 1933 “Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring” (Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses).

This dissertation examines two daily newspapers’ representations of eugenics from the incipient racial biological investigation 1919 until 1958, and the State Institute for Racial Biology is reorganized. The dissertation also aims to examine whether there are any distinct turning points where the newspapers distance themselves from the ideas and the research of eugenics. The analysis material is based on newspaper articles from two national dailies, i.e., Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter. The theoretical framework and method are based on Fairclough’s discourse theory and analysis to observe and elucidate how eugenics is represented over a longer period of time. The conclusion of the dissertation is that the newspapers continuously designate racial biology as something unique and being the salvation from degeneration until Herman Lundborg resigns as head of the institute. After Gunnar Dahlberg took over the managerial position the activities at the Institute changed course and the research undertaken there became engaged in medical genetics and social medicine instead of racial biology. The main argument for the establishment of the institute was that it would provide protection for the Swedish race. The norms and attitudes were more about the science and somewhat about nationalism, while what we now call racism did not seem to be included at all. The discourses about racial biology that have arisen have been maintained in society through the newspapers, as the recipients have been continuously fed with praiseworthy and warning words. This fits with Foucault’s reasoning and theory which he clarifies the fact that discourses are conditioned by how society discusses about something that over time has been an influence on how people are classified or treated by the newspapers that maintains it.

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

Since the election of the first African American president in 2008, race relations have deteriorated in the United States. In May 2017, the emergence of the “alt-right” movement advocating for white nationalism caused further polarization between the races. This transcendental phenomenological research examined how white adult males’ exposure to racist ideologies influenced their perceptions towards African Americans, and how they emancipated from environments that promoted racist tenets. The study was guided by three research questions: How have white males been impacted by their exposure to racial antipathy and discrimination? What events or circumstances have white males experienced that led them to denouncing negative racial stereotypes and/or participation with hate groups? And, what efforts have they made to reconcile with individuals or groups they have harmed in the past? The literature review revealed racial conflict is a social phenomenon evolving from historical narratives posited by fear, social class, and white superiority. By employing qualitative data analysis, interviewing eight participants, and applying the theoretical lenses of critical race theory, social Darwinism, hate theory, and regenerative justice, the primary essence of the phenomenon acknowledged individuals are mentally and emotionally affected by negative historical narratives about racism. Six major themes evolved: 1) Familial Influences, 2) Southern White Experience, 3) Education and Race Relations, 4) Spiritual Convictions, 5) Immersion into the African American Experience, and 6) Physical and Mental Emancipation. The findings in this study contribute to the field of conflict resolution by advocating for advanced exploration into socio-psychology, racial reconciliation, and restorative justice.

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<p>My thesis examines how eugenicist and psychologist Robert M. Yerkes’ experimental intelligence research helped to situate the non-human primate as the ideal research subject for human betterment research in the twentieth century U.S. Yerkes believed that the primate was the ideal research subject to address questions of human betterment and social welfare, specifically best to create methods of evaluating the imagined threat of intellectual disability. While Yerkes has been studied extensively in the history of psychology, primatology, and eugenics, rarely have his separate contributions to these fields been placed in conversation with one another. Placing the primate at the center of Yerkes’ work allows for all three fields to engage with one another in a new perspective. By analyzing Yerkes’ publications about the Multiple-Choice Experiment within the context of the American eugenics’ movement, we can see how the primate came to hold a central position in U.S. scientific research, the advancement of human welfare and betterment, and as a means of defining what it means to be human. This story offers a glimpse into this longer process of how the primate came to occupy this position, but even a glimpse offers historians of the American eugenics’ movement new questions. What was the role of the non-human animal in the formulation of American eugenic theories? How have we historically used the natural world in our attempts to separate ourselves from it? And can we truly reconcile a history with eugenics if we continue to ignore the role of animals within it, they who today exist unquestionably within the status of the sub-human?</p>

[pt] Esta dissertação mapeia relações entre o movimento antropofágico e o movimento eugenista no contexto entreguerras no Brasil. A eugenia, ciência do aprimoramento da raça, predominava nos meios científicos mundiais e nacionais, enquanto a Antropofagia representava, no campo cultural, uma ampliação e amadurecimento ideológico do modernismo brasileiro. Assim como na geração de 1870, que buscou interpretar o Brasil através da aplicação de preceitos científicos na crítica literária, na geração de 1920 as questões culturais e raciais retornaram com mesmo léxico. A intelectualidade letrada e científica do país, impulsionada por um surto de modernização do Estado (maximizado ao fim da primeira guerra), ganhou um novo fôlego para reverter a imagem do Brasil como uma nação atrasada, devido às alegações fatalistas sobre o clima, a miscigenação e a herança colonial. Simultaneamente, pensava-se em resolver a falta de coesão entre os elementos étnicos, intensificada após uma larga imigração europeia. Através da análise do periódico paulista, Revista de Antropofagia, e de seus suplementos literários em outros estados (pouco considerados pela crítica), é possível perceber que ambos os grupos, com perspectivas heterogêneas e até divergentes internamente, encontraram uma confluência ao debater a formação de uma raça brasileira essencialmente mestiça, forte e original, dotada de uma unidade moral e espiritual. Tal aproximação entre a Antropofagia e a eugenia colabora para a compreensão dos motivos pelos quais a valorização da herança negra e ameríndia dentro da brasilidade modernista (absorvida pelo Estado a partir de 1930), longe de ter rompido com os preconceitos raciais, culminou na legitimação de um modelo peculiar de neutralização das alteridades através da devoração. / [en] This dissertation maps the relations between the Antropophagy(Anthropophagic Movement) and the Eugenics Movement in Brazilian interwar context. Eugenics, is the science of racial improvement, predominated in bothglobal and national scientific circles, while Anthropophagy represented, in thecultural field, an expansion and ideological maturation of Brazilian Modernism s.Similar to the generation of the 1870s, which sought to interpret Brazil through the application of scientific principles in literary criticism, in the 1920s, cultural and racial concerns resurfaced with the same lexicon. The country s literary and scientific intelligentsia, driven by a modernizing surge from the State (which was maximized after the First World War), gained new impetus to reverse the image of Brazil as a backward nation due to fatalistic claims about the climate,miscegenation, and colonial heritage. Simultaneously, there was a desire to address the lack of cohesion among ethnic elements, intensified after a significant European immigration. Through the analysis of the São Paulo s literary journal Revista de Antropofagia and its literary supplements in other states (often overlooked bycritics), it is possible to perceive that both groups, with heterogeneous and eveninternally divergent perspectives, found a confluence when discussing the formation of a Brazilian race that is essentially strong, miscegenation-driven, and endowed with moral and spiritual unity. This convergence between Anthropophagy and eugenics contributes to the understanding of why the valorization of Black and Amerindian heritage within Modernism s Brazilianness (incorporated by the Statestarting from 1930) far from breaking with racial prejudices, culminating in the legitimation of a peculiar model of neutralizing otherness through devouring.