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James Thurber, along with others who wrote for The New Yorker magazine, developed the 'little man' comic figure. The little man as a central character was a shift from earlier nineteenth-century traditions in humor. This twentieth-century protagonist was a comic antihero whose function was to create sympathy rather than scorn and bring into question the values and behaviors of society rather than affirm them, as earlier comic figures did. The little man was urban, inept, frustrated, childlike, suspicious, and stubborn. His female counterpart was often a foil: confident and controlling enough to highlight his most pitiable and funniest features. Contradictory gender roles and stereotypes are essential to Thurber's humor. This thesis thus reads Thurber's work as critical of gender roles. Thurber's humor demonstrates that expectations for men and women to be socially masculine and feminine are often incongruous with their capabilities and natures. Often his work is funny because of the way it portrays gender as performance and as expectations imposed upon people instead of as inherent qualities in men and women. These roles create conflicted characters as well as conflict between the characters that Thurber draws in his stories, often a quarreling husband and wife. Also characteristic in Thurber's humor is the element of neurosis. Thurber often played with the vernacular concepts of neurosis, and he capitalized on public obsession with Freudian psychology with his satires and with fiction and essays about various anxieties and daydreaming. Neurosis works well as comic material because it also catalyzes the battle of the sexes. To support my interpretation of Thurber as a critic of societal gender roles, Freud's book The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious is useful at illuminating a deeper 'tendency' in Thurber's humor. Thurber is often thought of as a misogynist, for his personal behavior and for his unflattering literary portrayal of women as unimaginative nags. This thesis also examines the complexities and developments of Thurber's attitudes toward women. Most importantly for Thurber, his little man figure and the battle of the sexes was a way to express the importance and power of the liberated human imagination.

In her 1895 novel, Professor Hieronimus, Amalie Skram describes the struggle of Else Kant, a young mother and artist, against a tyrannical and apparently unfeeling doctor who keeps her at a Copenhagen asylum for more than a month against her will. Else feels terrorized by the constant surveillance to which she is subjected. This voyeuristic tendency in psychiatry is not only a reflection of Amalie Skram's own experience at a Copenhagen asylum, but is also indicative of a new psychiatric epistemology that understood visual observation as the key to ascertaining objective truth. Skram's novel is thus read against the backdrop of Jean-Martin Charcot's intensely visual treatment practices at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, with a specific focus on the photographs of hysterical women Charcot commissioned and published. This voyeuristic/exhibitionistic dynamic between doctor and patient is also cast in semiotic terms, showing how arguments made as early as Lessing's Laokoon provide a useful way of understanding the essential differences between verbal and visual art, and for understanding the tensions between doctor and the patient. W.J.T. Mitchell's notion of "ekphrastic fear" proves a useful concept for demonstrating how anxieties about the breaking down of the strict boundaries between visual and verbal art correspond neatly to similar anxieties that the doctor had about the transgressive potential of a patient who takes up language and describes her condition. These tensions between word and image also highlight the particular historical context in which Skram's novel appeared. Professor Hieronimus was published the same year as Freud and Breuer's Studies on Hysteria, which many consider the founding document of Freudian psychoanalysis. Although writing for completely different audiences, both Freud and Skram argue for the value of the patient's verbal utterances at a time when the patient was seen as little more than a visual specimen whose disorders could only be accurately ascertained by the acute vision of a doctor. In his promotion of the "talking cure," Freud diverged sharply with his mentor, Charcot, and this turning point in psychiatric history from a visual to a verbal epistemological model highlights the timeliness and importance of Skram's novel.

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This dissertation investigates enduring forms of Jewish “presence” in Tunisia, but a presence in the near-absence of Jewish communities. French colonialism, Zionism, and Arab nationalism led to the mid-twentieth century immigration of Tunisia's Jewish population to France and Israel-Palestine. Minor Differences examines the century-long de-nativization process by which the Jews of Tunisia went from being seen as Tunisian or Ottoman subjects, to a minority of “nonnative” outsiders. If the historical Jew indexes a past “Golden Age” in Tunisia, then the contemporary Jew is a subject of curiosity––and hostility through her association with the Israeli state. Through the prism of Jewish absence, I examine social relations among the few Jews who stayed in Tunisia, as well as between Jews and Muslims. I draw on a wide array of historical and literary sources as well as two years of fieldwork in a variety of sites, some intuitive and some unexpected: a boxing gym, a Hebrew class, a photography studio, a cemetery, and a synagogue; all of which inform my research, three of which I explicitly discuss in this dissertation. In these cultural sites, my research revealed a phenomenon I call “minor differences”: a paradigmatic instance of this anthropological pattern is the common distinction made between two nearly identical dishes, the “Muslim” madfouna and the “Jewish” bkaila. The “narcissism of minor differences” is a phrase used by Freud to describe an inclination toward aggression that facilitates cohesion between members of a family, or community. Provoked by Freud’s limited theorization of this peculiar form of narcissism, my research develops and applies it to understand the small ways people construct Otherness in everyday life—even, and perhaps especially, the Otherness of an absent cultural presence; and my fieldwork illustrates how it is through these “minor differences” that Jews and Muslims in Tunisia define themselves historically and contemporaneously. I show how minor differences are used to divide people and treated as proof of their essential cultural difference but also how these same “differences” can be used to foster connection, smooth out bumps in social relationships, and argue for broader solidarities. Ultimately, minor differences form the basis of major distinctions in inherited and ascribed forms of social belonging.