The Sound and the Fury is William Faulkner’s story of the Compson family’s downfall in the American South during the early 20th century. The novel illustrates the impact on the cultural identity of the South of strictly defined social roles and the tension they created in the aftermath of slavery and defeat in the Civil War. In my analysis, I have chosen to focus on gender issues, especially in their Southern manifestation. The Compsons’ daughter, Caddy, figures prominently in the sons’ narratives, but is only portrayed through their perceptions and memories. My aim is to determine Caddy’s significance in the novel by exploring her relationships with her brothers, as seen through their eyes, and how she is characterized by them. In Benjy’s narrative, I examine her actions as a little girl in light of the Eve myth and the icon of the virgin mother. Quentin’s obsession with Caddy's sexuality as a teenager reveals the implications of associating female sexuality with death, the role of language in reproducing and combating established gender power structures, and the impact of traditional gender roles on women and men. Jason’s binary categorization of women as virgins or whores turns the few glimpses of Caddy as a mother into that of a woman treated as a commodity of exchange. In each of their narratives, Caddy is a dynamic character whose words, body, and actions expose prevailing social and gender power struggles. By conjuring her presence through her absence, her brothers reveal the depth and destructiveness of the social imperatives that underlie their attempts to control her. I suggest that Caddy’s role in the novel is to disrupt the brothers’ narratives and challenge the underlying Southern social and gender constructs that imbue them.

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

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The moral and aesthetic complexity of Cormac McCarthy's fiction demands sophisticated theoretical reading paradigms. Intertextuality informed by poststructuralism is a theoretical approach that enables one to read the moral and aesthetic elements of McCarthy's work in productive ways. McCarthy's work is augmented by its connection to the works of other great artists and writers. As a result, McCarthy's work forces us to read his precedents from a different framework. An examination of the conversation between Martin Heidegger, Meyer Schapiro, Jacques Derrida, and Frederic Jameson about Van Gogh's A Pair of Boots creates an intertextual framework for examining the connection between Cormac McCarthy's Outer Dark and William Faulkner's Light in August. This examination demonstrates that Cormac McCarthy provides a sophisticated aesthetic and moral critique of Faulkner. This application of intertextual theory can also be applied to better understand the intertextual connections that exist within McCarthy's own canon of work. The same discussion of Van Gogh's painting can be used to understand the significance of a pair of boots in McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. This analysis demonstrates that McCarthy has moved from a privilege of postmodern aesthetics in Outer Dark to a privilege of more modern cinematic aesthetics in No Country for Old Men. This shift in aesthetics also informs the moral universe in each novel. Understanding this shift in aesthetics also provides a useful framework for understanding the connection between All the Pretty Horses and its film adapation directed by Billy Bob Thornton. The adapted film of McCarthy's novel enables a productive reading of the tensions between modernism and postmodernism in McCarthy's work.

ABSTRACT This study focuses on twenty-one particular texts published in 1925 as contemporaries of The Great Gatsby. The manuscript is divided into four categories—The Impressionists, The Experimentalists, The Realists, and The Independents. Among The Impressionists are F. Scott Fitzgerald himself, Willa Cather (The Professor’s House), Sherwood Anderson (Dark Laughter), William Carlos Williams (In the American Grain), Elinor Wylie (The Venetian Glass Nephew), John Dos Passos (Manhattan Transfer), and William Faulkner (New Orleans Sketches). The Experimentalists are Gertrude Stein (The Making of Americans), E. E. Cummings (& aka “Poems 48-96”), Ezra Pound (A Draft of XVI Cantos), T. S. Eliot (“The Hollow Men”), Laura Riding (“Summary for Alastor”), and John Erskine (The Private Life of Helen of Troy). The Realists are Theodore Dreiser (An American Tragedy), Edith Wharton (The Mother’s Recompense), Upton Sinclair (Mammonart), Ellen Glasgow (Barren Ground), Sinclair Lewis (Arrowsmith), James Boyd (Drums), and Ernest Hemingway (In Our Time). The Independents are Archibald MacLeish (The Pot of Earth) and Robert Penn Warren (“To a Face in a Crowd”). Although these twenty-two texts may in some cases represent literary fragmentations, each in its own way also represents a coherent response to the spirit of the times that is in one way or another cognate to The Great Gatsby. The fact that all these works appeared the same year is special because the authors, if not already famous, would become famous, and their works were or would come to represent classic American literature around the world. The twenty-two authors either knew each other personally or knew each other’s works. Naturally, they were also influenced by writings of international authors and philosophers. The greatest common elements among the poets and fiction writers are their uninhibited interest in sex, an absorbing cynicism about life, and the frequent portrayal of disintegration of the family, a trope for what had happened to the countries and to the “family of nations” that experienced the Great War. In 1925, it would seem, Fitzgerald and many of his writing peers—some even considered his betters—channeled a major spirit of the times, and Fitzgerald did it more successfully than almost anyone.

America has adopted as its own the Eden myth, which has provided the mythology of the American dream. This New Garden of America, consequently, has been a masculine garden because of its dependence on the myth of the Fall. Implied in the American dream is the idea of a garden without Eve, or at least without Eve's sin, traditionally associated with sexuality. Our canonical literature has reflected these attitudes of devaluing feminine power or making it a negative force: The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, and The Sound and the Fury. To recreate the Garden myth, Americans have had to reimagine Eve as the idealized virgin, earth mother and life-giver, or as Adam's loyal helpmeet, the silent figurehead. But Eve resists her new roles: Hester Prynne embellishes her scarlet letter and does not leave Boston; the feminine forces in Moby-Dick defeat the monomaniacal masculinity of Ahab; Miss Watson, the Widow Douglas, and Aunt Sally's threat of civilization chase Huck off to the territory despite the beckoning of the feminine river; Daisy retreats unscathed into her "white palace" after Gatsby's death; and Caddy tours Europe on the arm of a Nazi officer long after Quentin's suicide, Benjy's betrayal, and Jason's condemnation. Each of these male writers--Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner--deals with the American dream differently; however, in each case the dream fails because Eve will not go away, refusing to be the Other, the scapegoat, or the muse to man's dreams. These works all deal in some way with the notion of the masculine American dream of perfection in the Garden at the expense of a fully realized feminine presence. This failure of the American dream accounts for the decidedly tragic tone of these culturally significant American novels.

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