This dissertation explores the effects disability had on the aesthetics of American modernist writers like Langston Hughes, William Faulkner, Amy Lowell, and Ezra Pound at a time when eugenics' insistence on a superior and uniform humanity dominated social thought and how their writings complicate generalized conclusions espousing ablist tendencies in modernist literature, demonstrating that such generalizations can be complicated with careful attention to a broad range of modernist texts. The introduction highlights important ideas and events in the development of disability studies and applies the theory to Emily Dickinson’s “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” to demonstrate how scholars have largely overlooked even well-known authors’ engagement with disability. The first chapter interrogates Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury to demonstrate that, rather than reify disability, Faulkner questions the idea of norms that imply a stable identity by alluding to and investigating ideas relevant to important events and conceptions of the time such as Henry H. Goddard’s The Kallikak Family and the U.S. Supreme court case of Buck v. Bell. Chapter two’s analysis of Langston Hughes's Fine Clothes to the Jew identifies a tendency in the poetry to enact Tobin Sieber’s concept of disability masquerade to assume but play against the intellectually disabled identity forced on Blacks at the time, rather than attempting to distance himself from the label as disability theorists such as Douglas Baynton posit generally occurs when racialized groups are associated with disability. In the third chapter, Robert McRuer’s concept of compulsory able-bodiedness is identified as a source for Amy Lowell’s fall from popularity and she is considered alongside conceptions of the freak to identify a source for her creativity most evident in the "polyphonic prose" of Can Grande's Castle, her invention to free poets of the restrictions of traditional cadenced verse. The final chapter offers a reading of Pound's Drafts & Fragments that, while highlighting this often neglected collection's importance because of the social awareness brought to it through Pound's twelve and a half years in a mental institution, also explores the limitations of readings that assume that his disabled status guided this poetry. Concluding the dissertation is an analysis of Sherman Alexie's Pulitzer prize winning young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, that demonstrates disability’s continued applicability after eugenics’ fall from grace and highlights Alexie’s use of humor to get readers to stare as a part of considering the serious topics he writes into the novel, instigating what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls the "good stare" that welcomes identification between staree and starer. Together, these chapters attempt to further expand the inclusivity of discussions of modernism and complicate long-standing understandings of disability.

This thesis evaluates how effectively the trilogy's laws and law enforcers further the ends of the fictional laws. The study examines the trilogy's law enforcers' responses to Snopes violations and bendings of the laws to evaluate the laws and their enforcers. The enforcers' responses to Snopes wrongs make clear how well the laws are written. These responses also reveal how well the enforcers themselves are able to achieve the objectives of the laws. It is argued in the thesis that although the laws are effectively written, the law enforcers fail to enforce the laws and, consequently, fail to achieve the laws' ends. It is also shown that the enforcers invariably harm innocent persons when they fail to enforce the law.

"The Religious Dimensions of William Faulkner: An Inquiry into the Dichotomy of Puritanism" traces a secular mode of thinking of American moral superiority and the gospel of success to its religious origins. The study shows that while the basis for American moral superiority derives from the typological correspondence between sacred history and American experience, the gospel of success results from the Puritan preoccupation with work as a virtue instead of a necessity because labor improves one's lot in this world while securing salvation in the next. By explaining how Puritanism begins as a rejection of worldliness but ends as an orgy of materialism, my study raises and addresses the paradoxical nature of the Puritan legacy: Why should the Puritan work ethic, when subverted by its logical conclusion---the gospel of success, result in the undoing of Puritan spirituality in its mission of redeeming the Old World? Furthermore, this inquiry examines the role Puritanism plays in creating the mythologies of America as the New World Garden, the white man as the American Adam, the black man as the American Ham, and the white woman as the American Eve. In the Puritan use of biblical typology, blacks and women function as the white men's servants and helpmates and, as such, have only adjunctive value to the white men's moral vision of the New Canaan and their economic pursuit of an earthly paradise. Since the racist and sexist discourse of Adamic self-creation predominates the American Dream, blacks and women become part of, rather than owner of, that dream. Basing my analysis on his three major novels, I demonstrate William Faulkner's penetrating insight into the dilemmas and ramifications of Puritanism in his critique of the American gospel of success in general and the Southern gospels of racism and sexism in particular. My conception of Puritanism in dichotomous tension, paradigmatically proposed as the American Adam turned Franklinesque self-made man, sheds new light on Faulkner's fictional characters as victims of the Puritan moral ambiguities.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(人間・環境学) / 甲第17965号 / 人博第661号 / 新制||人||159(附属図書館) / 25||人博||661(吉田南総合図書館) / 30795 / 京都大学大学院人間・環境学研究科共生人間学専攻 / (主査)教授 水野 尚之, 教授 廣野 由美子, 准教授 小島 基洋 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Human and Environmental Studies / Kyoto University / DFAM

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This thesis examines the relationship between Southern literature and socio-cultural realities of the Southern region of the United States of America. Analyzing works of five distinguished Southern writers, this thesis examines the reflection of specific Southern culture features in literature of the region in the period from the end of the American Civil War to the second half of the 20th century. The thesis oppose the opinion that the primary goal of Southern literature was to promote Southern identity and its cultural superiority above the North. The central hypothesis, that is being verified by this thesis, is that despite the indisputable contribution of highly recognized Southern writers to building of Southern identity, these authors expressed in their works also often sharp critiques of the social conditions in the South.

Critical reactions to the religious experiences contained in William Faulkner's fiction have tended to fall within the context of traditional Christian belief systems. In most instances, the characters' beliefs have been judged by the tenets of belief systems or religions that are not necessarily those on which the characters base their lives. There has been no effort to understand the characters' spirituality as the basis of an independent religious belief system. Mircea Eliade's methods and models in the study of comparative religion, in particular his explanation of the interaction of the sacred and the profane during a hierophany (the manifestation of the sacred), can be applied to the belief systems of Faulkner's characters to reveal the theologies of the characters' religions, the nature of the belief systems on which they base their lives. Identification of those stories associated with hierophanies in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction enables the isolation and analysis of the sacred stories and sacraments of Yoknapatawpha County's civil religion. The storytellings examined appear in Flags in the Dust, "A Justice," and Absalom, Absalom!. The storytellers and the audiences are all a part of the Yoknapatawpha community, and the stories are drawn from a common history. The sacralization and use of particular stories to explain certain events reflects the faith life of the community as a whole, as well as that of the individual participating in the ritual. The explication of the profane experiences the myths are meant to sanctify will reveal that the individuals, and consequently, the community, are in the process of discarding their old, civil religion. As a result, they have lost the ability to adapt their ancestral myths to fit the existential crises they presently face. Unable to infuse the present with the sacred, Yoknapatawpha1s younger generation is overwhelmed by the chaos that surrounds it.