My dissertation argues that a number of novels published in the U.S. during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries work to reveal corporealitys contributions to knowledge and meaningful human action. Many critics have proposed that fictional treatments of bodies during this period provide a means for understanding the diminished capacities for human agency in modernity. However, my dissertation proposes that figurings of dynamic embodiment in some turn-of-the-century American writers works present corporeality as a shared condition of embodied beings, a condition that offers ethical insights into the nature of personhood. Even as bodies were being disciplined in military and civilian life to serve the states purposes, American novels were evoking the bodys complex resources for other forms of thought and action.
The emphasis on physicality in literary works of the authors I examine has no doubt contributed to their notorious association with popular conceptions of late nineteenth-century determinist philosophies. My project suggests, though, that these writers philosophical interest in embodiment marks a serious engagement with a corporeal-centered epistemology. I propose that turn-of-the-century writers literary expressions of corporeality in many respects anticipates non-dualist theories of embodiment later elaborated by phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In these accounts, the body is conceived as an active entity itself that is inextricably bound up with consciousness, rather than an inert object directed by a controlling mind. Feminist and cultural theorists such as Elizabeth Grosz, Judith Butler, and Laura Doyle have recently worked to re-appropriate and supplement phenomenological accounts of the bodys role in human relations and action. In doing so, they have helped to elaborate the potential significance of these conceptions. Drawing on this theoretical work, my dissertation is an effort to rethink treatments of corporeality in some late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. fictions by authors such as Charles Chesnutt, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Frank Norris, and Edith Wharton.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-08012008-212801 |
| Date | 30 October 2008 |
| Creators | Mahady, Christine |
| Contributors | Lisa S. Parker, Kathryn Flannery, Nancy Glazener, Troy Boone |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-08012008-212801/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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