DISSERTATION ABSTRACT
DREAMING IN CRISIS: ANGELS AND THE ALLEGORICAL
IMAGINATION IN POST-WAR AMERICA
Emily Bauman, PhD
University of Pittsburgh, 2003
This dissertation bridges literary and cultural studies in order to offer a critical reading of the fascination with angels that appears in America at the beginning and end of the Cold War. Though the contemporary wave of interest spans genres of mass entertainment, pop psychology, and high modernist literature and film, I find angelic representations to be consistent. Invested in the idea of a separated intelligence, these representations expose larger concerns with personal sovereignty and historical determinism. From fantasy to true story, the encounter with the pure and providential spectator consecrates the subject within a special temporality, a temporality of imagination and reception. Angelic illumination thus answers a crisis of attention that renders the human paralyzed. In all of the texts considered the attendant spirit confers personal chosenness and historical beginning through the act of judgment, an idea I discuss in reference to the theories of agency of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Immanual Kant.
One distinguishing feature of the angelic spectrum is that popular and highbrow treatments differ radically in their attitudes toward angelic revelation. Its a Wonderful Life and other movies of the sentimental fantasy genre, the true stories books, the self-help books, and the TV drama Touched by an Angel represent the angel-guardian as a figure of completion that assimilates an unsteady future to the rational structures of the past. Implicit already in Tony Kushners Broadway hit Angels in America and fully expressed in the angelic poetry since the second world war, angels appear as expressions of partialness, ruin, and decay. I analyze the differences between sentimental and tragic appropriations of angels by investigating them in relation to the logic of allegory. A paradoxically populist-hierarchical way of reading, allegorical thinking defines both the angels of annunciatory blessing and the angels of impotence and destruction. Through a final engagement with the work of Walter Benjamin, I argue that as a way of reading experience through its own alterity, allegory is itself an angelic hermeneutic.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-12172003-113848 |
| Date | 16 January 2004 |
| Creators | Bauman, Emily Therese |
| Contributors | Colin MacCabe, Jonathan Arac, Ronald Judy, Nancy Condee |
| 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-12172003-113848/ |
| 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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