Student Abstracts 2013-2014

The Effects of Electronic Media on Modern Reading Culture: How Reading Literature Has Become a Social Experience

The last two decades have seen the rise of technological developments that have had a transformative effect on reading culture. This thesis discusses how these new digital media have influenced modern reading practices.

First, I will explain why reading should be valued as a beneficial social activity that promotes positive behaviors such as civic engagement and cultural participation, which support the values of empathy and community involvement. These social benefits are separate from the inherent benefits of reading, which include the spreading of topical knowledge, the preservation of history, and entertainment.

Then, I will describe how digital media allows for a positive reconfiguring of reading culture in which the social aspects of reading are emphasized more than ever before. I will describe the history of the book’s shape so far, and how those changes in form affected reading methods. In addition, I will briefly discuss how the publishing industry has influenced the physical shape of the book.

I will then proceed to use J.K. Rowling’s popular Harry Potter series as a case study to examine the effects of the Internet on reading culture. I will also explore the text within the series itself in order to compare “old” reading culture to today’s electronically-influenced reading culture. In the fantasy world of Harry Potter, technology ceases to function around magic, a fact that forces the wizards and witches in the series to rely on traditional reading methods. I will show how these traditional reading methods fail to bring about the social benefits that modern reading practices promote.

Finally, I will summarize how reading culture has evolved and why these changes are valuable. I will provide examples of the positive effects of these changes. Understanding the differences between “old” reading culture and “new” reading culture will help us develop insight into how the activity of reading will be seen by a new generations of readers, and how we can best utilize new ways of reading to our advantage

"A World by Itself": Geography, Otherness, and Hybridity in Shakespeare's Cymbeline

When King James I came to the English throne in 1603, he reinvigorated a century-old debate on the origins of Britain. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century History of the Kings of Britain, which presented a mythical history as stemming from Trojan royalty, was challenged by newly printed English translations of Julius Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, which portrayed the ancient Britons as savages. As a result, the British were forced to negotiate this imposed barbaric origin with their own sense of civil value. The dichotomy that emerged from this negotiation was placed under heavy stress during James’ reign, as he fashioned himself a monarch who was Roman in style and British in substance.

This thesis contends that Shakespeare’s 1611 romance Cymbeline best negotiates these anxieties about national origin. The play draws upon understandings of civility and barbarity as informed by contemporary competing historiographies and explores these issues through constructs of space, perspective, and subjectivity. By means of these approaches, notions of identity that were linked to this dichotomy are deconstructed throughout the play; however, in the final scene, a new order is established that stresses the inherent hybridity of the nation and the necessity for peace and forgiveness in the face of war and violence.

The argument of this paper is divided into four chapters, but can also be considered in three different phases: Foundation, Deconstruction, and Reconstruction. The first phase features a detailed historiography on the rise of Roman-based views of Britain and the decline of Galfridian myth, and how these narratives cement themselves as central to the action of the play.

This is followed by separate investigations into the barbaric and civil worlds of the play. I first examine Wales, particularly in terms of how its geographical marginality defines its barbarity. The stability of this division comes under scrutiny when consideration is given to how Wales is constructed and interpreted spatially in the play. Focus then shifts to the court, and the ways in which the courtly characters define their value externally through comparisons to other characters. A close reading of several scenes reveals the consistent uncertainty of subjectivity in the play, and how this contributes to the revaluation of courtly worth.

Finally, in reckoning with the play’s concluding scene, I analyze the hybrid family that emerges, and how this family gestures towards the development of a new hybrid nation. I also examine how acts of beastly violence threaten to interrupt these concluding reunions, and how acts of forgiveness and generous pardon nullify such violence.

The theories of Edward Said, Michel de Certeau and Benedict Anderson – as well as the critical frameworks developed by Huw Griffiths and Avraham Oz and Jodi Mikalachki – all prove vital to the construction of my argument.

The Out of Control: Sexual Danger and Female Adolescent Desire in Charlotte Temple, Forever..., and the Twilight Series

In my thesis, I read Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1791), Judy Blume’s Forever… (1975), and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series (2005 – 2008) together as works of female adolescent literature in order to examine how each text represents the sexuality of teenage girls.

Charlotte Temple is a seduction novel that chronicles the downfall of a 15-year-old schoolgirl who runs away to America with a British solider. Her seduction results in social exile, pregnancy, and death—dangers from which Rowson endeavors to protect her young female readers by framing her novel as a tool of what we would now call sex education. In order to save girls from seduction and preserve new middle-class values, Rowson recommends that they learn from Charlotte’s tale, surround themselves with good friends, and defer sexual decisions to their mothers. I argue that though she offers these clear solutions, Rowson has trouble ascribing blame for Charlotte’s seduction due to a reluctance to acknowledge Charlotte’s sexual desire and possible role in her own fate.

Forever… tells the story of a teenage girl’s sexual relationship with her boyfriend in the 1970s. I argue that Blume performs the cultural work of defining new norms for female adolescent sexuality in a society that has been influenced by second wave feminism and the sexual revolution. The protagonist, Katherine, conforms perfectly to these norms, allowing her to successfully manage her sexual relationship with her boyfriend without falling victim to the threats of pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections. Blume constructs these norms by layering liberal ideology and sex education agendas to create what I call the institution of Judy Blume: a defined discourse meant to control and manage teenage girls’ sexuality.

In Meyer’s Twilight series, the supernatural elements of the narrative concretize the dangers of sex. Bella, the protagonist, experiences overwhelming desire for her vampire boyfriend Edward, but he refuses to allow her to act on it because doing so would mean putting her at risk for physical injury. The incapacitating nature of Bella’s desire necessitates that Edward control her sexuality, a deferral to patriarchy. Nevertheless, Meyer is the only author to explore female adolescent desire, allowing her readers to experience it for themselves through the text, whereas Rowson and Blume attempt to manage sexuality through sentimentality and education. Meyer also contends with the subject of sexual violence in her novels, which both Rowson and Blume fail to recognize as a threat.

In all of these texts, female adolescent sexuality is dangerous. Though each author identifies different dangers based on her historical, cultural, and ideological context and prescribes unique (but equally simplistic) solutions, at the heart of each novel is an anxiety about unmanageable nature of female adolescent desire and a paradoxical understanding of girls’ sexual agency that simultaneously empowers them and undermines that power.

Haunted Houses, Haunted Texts: Threatening Deviant Women and their Ghost-Children in the Victorian Domestic Sphere

The Victorian period is marked by its long works of fiction; because of its engagement with literary realism and idealization of home and family, the stereotypical novel from this time is often thought to be a conservative text in both form and content. However, the Victorian era also witnessed the profusion of shorter fictions, in particular the genre of the ghost story. How are these two genres related, despite their disparate portrayals of domestic strength and domestic vulnerability?  This thesis investigates this connection by exploring the haunted houses built in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse’s Story,” and Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. By focusing on how each of these texts deploy three shared features—the house, the domestic servant, and the ghost-child—I analyze the complicated narratives of gender, sexuality, and class at work.

In the terrifying scene that sets the tone for Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847) the ghostly emanation of child calling herself Catherine Linton penetrates the dream of Lockwood, the narrator. However, it is not until the role of the narrator shifts to another character, the housekeeper and nursemaid Nelly, that Lockwood (and the reader) can begin to understand why this ghost has appeared in this particular house. I argue that Brontë’s novel depicts an impossible presence: a woman who rejects authority and feminine convention in favor of savage childishness and unrestrained desires.

In Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse’s Story” (1852) I appropriate Nick Freeman’s theory of “wicked inheritance” to explain how the story revises a dated social structure. The tale is narrated by Hester, a nursemaid; I focus on her relationship with her charge to understand the presence the ghost-child that appears, the spirit of a girl who was the product of sexual transgression. This ghostly figure, I propose, is doubled in the character of Hester’s still-living charge, necessary to show how strict class lines have weakened over the generations in an old family home.

In the final section I excerpt a passage from Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (1853), which I will call “The Ghost’s Walk Tale.” Narrated by the loyal housekeeper Mrs. Rouncewell, I suggest that the ghost Rouncewell presents actually reveals the presence of a different ghost, one who is also one ofBleak House’s narrators. Simultaneously a ghost-child and a living young woman, Esther Summerson’s dual roles as Bleak House’s housekeeper and as a child born out of wedlock challenge perceived conventions of domestic stability.

These three texts are not limited to one specific genre; rather, the features of the ghost story merge with the classic Victorian novel, allowing the supernatural to expose issues within contemporary social structures. Despite her disruption of the home, I conclude that the manifestation of the ghost-child is necessary to see how the home is already a haunted idealization. The presence of the ghost-child allows the housekeeper to begin her narration, thereby exposing the problems of sexual desire, civil discord, and maternal rejection already at work in the domestic sphere.

An Incomplete Universe: Attempting to Understand Self-Knowledge in Ulysses 

Beginning with an examination of sexual jealousy in the story “Water Liars,” collected in the American writer Barry Hannah’s Airships, this paper draws a link between sexual jealousy and self-knowledge. Using the American philosopher and literary critic Stanley Cavell’s essay “Othello and the Stake of the Other” to understand sexual jealousy, and more generally skepticism, as a cover for the confrontation of self-knowledge, Hannah’s story provides a study of typical male jealousy, and the introduction of an atypical figure in regards to infidelity: Leopold Bloom, the main character of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Bloom, in the wake of his wife’s affair, comes to affirm his knowledge of himself, through the confrontation of his wife’s autonomy and individuality. Understanding self-knowledge as such, the text of Ulysses shows itself to be caught in the struggle of self-affirmation and self-denial.

Using Cavell’s essay, as well as the model Bloom provides, I figure the conflict of the text of Ulysses (both with regard to itself and to an other, the reader) as an imperfect struggle for self-knowledge. I examine how that struggle shapes the text of Ulysses, directing formal shifts that are inextricable from Bloom’s character and perceptions.

Charting a discussion of the textual qualities of Ulysses as they change from the Lotus Eaters episode through the Lestrygonians, Circe, Ithaca and Penelope episodes, the difficulties of reading Ulysses reveal the text to be constructed in the struggle for its own self-awareness and self-knowledge. That struggle is apparent to a reader, and implicates the work of a reader in struggling through the complicated and sometimes alienating experience of reading offered by Ulysses. Finally, this experience will show itself to be the product of a reader’s participation, of the repeated efforts of multiple readings, and of a gratification that can only be discovered through the triumph of obtaining a privileged access to the text, one that is necessarily personal and implicates the individual.

The Humor of Samuel Beckett: Reinforcing That From Which it Relieves

What makes us laugh in the theatre? What makes us laugh while reading a novel? The question of what we find funny in a piece of fiction may seem so basic that we rarely give it much thought, but a closer look at the “comedy” of certain writers shows that the issue is vastly more complex than it may at first appear. Samuel Beckett is one example of a writer whose works push humor to its utmost limits. His plays and stories often explore such dark topics as the apocalypse, the inescapability of human suffering, and the pointlessness of life, and yet somehow he still manages to make audiences laugh. This thesis explores how Beckett achieves this laughter variously in his plays and novels, how his use of humor is affected by genre difference, and how it impacts his readers and audiences. To do this I compare and contrast the humor in two specific works by Beckett: the play Waiting for Godot and the novel Murphy.

In order to get closer to the heart of Beckett’s comedy, I go back to some of the most essential and influential critical theories of drama, prose and humor, including Freud’s The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd and Verna Foster’s The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy as well as the relevant critical works dealing specifically with Beckett, including Ruby Cohn’s Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut, Wolfgang Iser’s The Art of Failure: The Stifled Laugh in Beckett’s Theatre, and Carla Locatelli’s Comic Strategies in Beckett’s Narratives.

Beckett once commented that his humor works to “reinforce that from which it relieves” and I will use these sources in conjunction with a close reading and comparison of my two primary texts in order to get at the heart of what Beckett’s humor relieves and reinforces, how it does this, and how the relief and reinforcement it provides influence its recipients.

Postmodernism and War: The Postmodernism Debate's Relationship to World War II and Why it Matters Today

The Professor and Jane Eyre: Two Mirrors to Power Struggle

In my thesis, I take a close look at Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor (1855) and Jane Eyre (1847). Though The Professor was published after Jane Eyre, it was Brontë’s first novel. It was rejected by nine different publishers and only successfully published after Brontë’s death. Jane Eyre, on the other hand, was immediately well-received, and continues to be hugely popular and widely praised.

While most critics see The Professor as Brontë’s botched first novel and her unsuccessful emulation of the male voice, I believe that an examination ofThe Professor in conjunction with Jane Eyre is more fruitful than simply reading one of the novels. I assert that the two novels contain the same plot line but different actors. Both novels are centered around the dominance and power, but the protagonists are confronted by these common themes in different ways because of their genders. Through my thesis, I examine how Brontë engages with these themes, and how this changes for the male protagonist compared to the female protagonist. I explicitly focus on the relationships of dominance and subversion that Brontë presents and work to explain what the two novels, together, say about power and authority.

Razing the Sanctuary: Measure for Measure and corrupting the tropes of "virtuous" literary romance

In Measure for Measure, Shakespeare’s play, the poetry plays with tropes that usually elevate Renaissance romantic poetry from a secular (and sexual) experience to a spiritually and intellectually exalted one, particularly within the text given to Isabella and Angelo, both of whom are presented in the play as paragons of virtue. That being said, the actual so-called presumptive “romance”between them is deeply corrupt and verging on criminal: their interactions resolve not in mutual romance or elevation but instead culminate in sexual blackmail and legal transgression. The poetry, however, describes a kind of love that is nonetheless “virtuous”by Renaissance terms—that is, Isabella and Angelo react to each other intellectually and even spiritually as well as sensually. That their relationship becomes the crux of Angelo’s moral degradation and Isabella’s spiritual viciousness is a result of the play’s setting: Shakespeare’s “Vienna”acts as a kind of moral sinkhole in which the usual poetic exaltations of romantic spirituality fundamentally cannot work. Specifically, this “Vienna”legislates against sexuality in such a way that all forms of sexuality are considered morally and legally degrading, and Isabella and Angelo act as embodiments of how toxic this state-sanctioned morality is: they experience a genuine connection that fulfills all the poetic conventions used to establish “virtuous”rather than corrupt love, and it corrupts them. This relationship therefore illustrates both the intrinsic sensuality that underpins those “virtuous”tropes as well as the failings of the state

In short, Isabella and Angelo, acting as embodiments of a corrupted state morality, meet, fall in poetically genuine love, but experience the ensuing emotions as degrading rather than elevating. I argue this through exploring three different poetic conventions: how they were used to elevate the idea of romance in Renaissance poetic traditions, how Shakespeare’s text about Isabella and Angelo utilizes them, and why exactly they fail in each case.

I. “To hear her speak again / and feast upon her eyes”: Angelo and neo-Platonic romance

Angelo’s soliloquies establish his belief that what he feels for Isabella is sinful, yet they also chronicle an emotional reaction to Isabella that is both not in and of itself sinful and actually fulfills tropes of Renaissance romantic poetry that prove a lover is virtuous rather than corrupt: specifically, he discusses her eyes and her speech, and is intellectually before physically attracted. Through this reversal of poetic morality—this pulling an intellectual reaction down into the physical, rather than up to the spiritual—I establish both that his reaction is more love than lust, and that his misread of that is not only personal but predicated on the state code of law that he has been tasked to uphold, which legislates against sexuality in such a way that he has been conditioned to believe his poetically virtuous feelings are amoral.

II. “And strip myself to death as to a bed”: Isabella and religious sensuality

Isabella’s rhetoric comes directly from the poetic tradition of sensual, affective religious poetry, often written by women, that allowed women freedom of sensual expression otherwise denied them. Yet her sensuality is not transfigured into spiritual elevation or expressive freedom when she speaks; her speech construes her as deeply afraid of her own sensual responses and in fact she becomes more volatile and fearful of sex the more she talks about it. Through this reversal of poetic sanction—this internalized belief that her sensuality is eroding her religiously grounded morality rather than her religious response encompassing her sensuality—I establish both that she does respond to Angelo emotionally and sensually, and that her misread of that is again not only personal but predicated on the same conventions of the state.

III. “I can speak against the thing I say”: eloquent lovers made incoherent

As established in Chapter I, focusing on the “tongue”(i.e. speech) is one of the most concrete ways in Renaissance poetic dialectic to establish love as virtuous; as established in both prior chapters, Isabella and Angelo are both eloquent beyond what is considered normal in the text. When they meet, therefore, their verbal skills rise in the collision—and then immediately decay the minute they each individually decide that what they are feeling is amoral. Here, I discuss how their verbal decay is a specific and essentially deliberate reaction to that internal (and inaccurate) moral judgment: the virtue of their speech is moot when state-sanctioned ideology functionally chokes them both.

Those tropes failing matters not simply to the play, for exploring the characters’internal lives and the toxicity of its setting, but their failures turn their function on its head: instead of elevating presumed “base”romantic responses to prove something spiritual or intellectual in the lovers, here the lovers re-sensualize spiritual tropes and reinforce the latent sensuality they have signified all along.

Resisting Consumable Fictions: A Play-Centric Approach to Reading Postcolonial Formal Collapse in the Ludic Century

Metaphor or Allegory: The Construction of a Theme in Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance

Hawthorne is supposed by most people to be an allegorist or a symbolist.  I purpose to prove that Hawthorne is foremost an aesthetic as opposed to an allegorical writer, relying rather on metaphors than symbols.  And the absence of allegory either leads to or corresponds with the absence of deliberate moral-political design in Hawthorne’s novels.  I explain in the introduction what I mean by aesthetic and allegorical, metaphorical and symbolic, before going on to analyze the primary subject of my thesis, The Blithedale Romance.

The line between metaphor and allegory is blurry.  So in an attempt to clarify my own sense of the two devices I adopt Coleridge’s definition of allegory and use it to guide my analysis of The Blithedale Romance.  I then adduce the prefaces to two of Hawthorne’s novels, including the one presently under review, to give an idea of Hawthorne’s aesthetic philosophy, which impresses me as inimical to the sort of mindset that produces allegory.  Before I begin the main analysis I give an example of a typical allegorical critique of the same novel.

The bulk of my thesis deals with The Blithedale Romance, which features (to my mind) the most important and striking theme of Hawthorne’s novels: the rise and fall of pretentious Man, the inevitable mortification of his swelling pride.  I argue that this conceit is wrought through metaphors, and that each recurrence of the conceit in the text is intelligible enough by itself to stand as an isolated observation of a character or a situation—intelligible enough in its own context without the assistance of other instances.  Allegory requires an overall view of the story and a knowledge of its many symbolic manifestations in order to be understood, if it is even there at all.

In my conclusion I try to relate Hawthorne’s style to his morality. Allegory presupposes a certain moral or philosophical prejudice on the writer’s part; and as Hawthorne is not allegorizing on things like libertarian socialism (in The Blithedale Romance) and early mercantile capitalism (in The House of the Seven Gables), so he is not voicing any grand judgments on them—not even on a cryptic, allegorical level.  The narrator is accordingly very suspicious of theorizing; he prefers mere observation, and is afraid to draw grand psychological conclusions from his observations of the nuanced characters that surround him.

The Writing Home: Vocational Labor and Literary Production in Contemporary American Homesteading

This thesis examines literary production in contemporary American homesteading. Homesteaders choose for ideological or ethical reasons to lead lives that are centered around the home, producing for themselves the food, household goods, and other items that most people typically buy. Many are also prolific writers who define the politics, meaning, and community context of their lifestyles through literary production. The bulk of my analysis focuses on the significance of labor and the construction of selfhood in this body of work.

The first section of this thesis focuses on homesteaders’ innovative perspective on the relationship between people and objects. Homesteaders reject mainstream American cultures of consumerism and materialism, imploring readers to pay closer attention to the things they use rather than buying and disposing of mass-made objects indiscriminately. I find in each of my five primary texts, memoirs published by homesteaders between 2008 and 2013, that objects are not rejected or treated as necessary evils (as in asceticism or minimalism) but highly valued and symbolically charged. I theorize homesteaders’ “conscious materiality” using close readings of textual and paratextual elements of homesteading memoirs, along with New Materialist Jane Bennett’s concept of “vibrant matter.”

In section two, I begin my analysis of homesteaders’ work by engaging with the questions of scale and labor raised in environmentalist writer Paul Kingsnorth’s essay “Dark Ecology.” Homesteaders fulfill Kingsnorth’s recommendation to return to an intimate, “human-scale” relationship with nature and objects. They voluntarily produce goods that most people purchase from others, and reap personal and spiritual benefits from this production-oriented lifestyle. I call their particular kind of work “vocational labor,” a term that indicates the inextricability of work and identity in homesteading. Literary production is an important part of this vocational labor, especially as a way for homesteaders to explain and codify their self-definition through work. Author-homesteaders use a variety of rhetorical and literary devices to accomplish this, including contemporary versions of the counterforce identified by Leo Marx in pastoral literature.

Finally, I analyze how homesteading literature constructs a collective selfhood for the homesteading community. As a group of people linked by ideology rather than physical proximity, I characterize the network of American homesteaders as an imagined community. In printed literature author-homesteaders establish historicity through references to established traditions and cultural movements, and websites allow homesteaders to socialize, share knowledge, and even conduct commerce regardless of their physical distance from one another.

In my conclusion I describe contemporary American homesteaders as “The New Pioneers.” They see the home as the final American frontier, a space in which they can reclaim objects, work, and identities from dominant cultural forces like globalization. As in early American frontier writing this genre affords individuals almost limitless opportunity to reinvent themselves, but a twenty-first century frontier is more accessible to historically disempowered groups than its predecessor. Through vocational labor and literary production, homesteaders discover themselves and construct a community in service of a more sustainable way of living.

The Effects of Electronic Media on Modern Reading Culture: How Reading Literature Has Become a Social Experience

The last two decades have seen the rise of technological developments that have had a transformative effect on reading culture. This thesis discusses how these new digital media have influenced modern reading practices.

First, I will explain why reading should be valued as a beneficial social activity that promotes positive behaviors such as civic engagement and cultural participation, which support the values of empathy and community involvement. These social benefits are separate from the inherent benefits of reading, which include the spreading of topical knowledge, the preservation of history, and entertainment.

Then, I will describe how digital media allows for a positive reconfiguring of reading culture in which the social aspects of reading are emphasized more than ever before. I will describe the history of the book’s shape so far, and how those changes in form affected reading methods. In addition, I will briefly discuss how the publishing industry has influenced the physical shape of the book.

I will then proceed to use J.K. Rowling’s popular Harry Potter series as a case study to examine the effects of the Internet on reading culture. I will also explore the text within the series itself in order to compare “old” reading culture to today’s electronically-influenced reading culture. In the fantasy world of Harry Potter, technology ceases to function around magic, a fact that forces the wizards and witches in the series to rely on traditional reading methods. I will show how these traditional reading methods fail to bring about the social benefits that modern reading practices promote.

Finally, I will summarize how reading culture has evolved and why these changes are valuable. I will provide examples of the positive effects of these changes. Understanding the differences between “old” reading culture and “new” reading culture will help us develop insight into how the activity of reading will be seen by a new generations of readers, and how we can best utilize new ways of reading to our advantage

The Invisible Wounds and Defeaning Silences: Examining War Trauma in Virginia Wolf's Mrs. Dolloway

This thesis closely examines the character of Septimus Warren Smith in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Septimus, a tormented World War One veteran, serves as the main focus of my analysis, as I suggest that he acts as the interpretive crux of the novel, upon which notions of temporality, trauma, recovery and memory are hinged. My analysis destabilizes the common classification of Mrs. Dalloway as a post-war novel, questioning the idea that “…the War was over…” (Woolf 5). I observe the various ways in which Woolf’s characters are drawn back into the past and how the memories, losses, and damages of the Great War persist like wounds left unhealed. By way of recognizing numerous cyclical patterns in the text, my reading explores the different narratives of trauma and whether there exists the possibility of recovery.

This thesis consists of four chapters. The first centers on the limits and potential failure of language and communication, between characters in the novel, and also with regards to Woolf as a writer. I comment on Septimus’s inability to narrate his past experiences to others, as well as the inherent problem of representation that Woolf faces when depicting trauma. In Chapter Two, I begin a discussion of war trauma in the novel, emphasizing Septimus as an embodiment of individual trauma. In Chapter Three, I move outward, from a discussion of private trauma, to public (or collective) trauma. This chapter will expand on the idea of a constructed, national narrative that seeks to normalize and “heal” by way of repression. I argue that this constructed fallacious narrative is ultimately destructive and in reality, impedes recovery and perpetuates trauma. I ultimately suggest that in Mrs. Dalloway, both of these distinct narratives co-exist, at times thwarting one another, and often fusing together. In the final chapter, as well as in my concluding section, which act as a collective counterpart to my opening chapter, I shift the focus from Septimus to Woolf. I examine Woolf’s highly stylized prose, the link between beauty and madness, and the ways in which the novel—despite its linguistic and communication barriers—reclaims the potential for recovery.

The Dominican American Difference: Heterogeneous Re-creations of Dominicanidad in Literature

My thesis analyzes the types of Dominican subjectivities being proposed and produced in contemporary literature for U.S consumption, specifically in the writing of Rhina P. Espaillat, Julia Alvarez, Junot Díaz, and Josefina Báez. I argue that the term “diaspora” not only continues to be pertinent for characterizing Dominican subjectivities and literatures, but also that these texts exemplify Stuart Hall’s conception of diaspora in difference. Whereas a multiculturalist approach might group these texts together on the basis of the authors’ Dominican heritage, reading their work together actually suggests the heterogeneity of Dominican American experience through their diverging concerns and aesthetics. These authors’ insistence on revealing difference resists facile conceptions of pan-Latin@ ethnicity and dominicanidad, a term I use to mean identification with Dominican culture. In fact, these authors argue for the necessity of emphasizing difference as they constitute complex speakers and characters across boundaries of language, gender, race, and class. In doing so, they engage in political work against the homogenizing that has long been a tool of oppression.

These texts thematize the role of representation and re-creation in negotiating identity. Moving chronologically, each author adds to the multiplicity of Dominican American identity, creating hybrid characters that are not stifled by the supposed conflicting aspects of their subjectivities but instead are empowered by them. Espaillat focuses on language, Alvarez on gender, and Díaz and Báez emphasize race and class. While Espaillat and Alvarez thematize an awareness of difference, Díaz and Báez perform it.

Ultimately, the focus on difference in these texts implies that discrepancies between individuals cannot be relegated for the sake of creating a ‘unified’ ethnic group. Yet, differences do not have to mean division. Since heterogeneity exists within all groups, acknowledging differences presents us with a way to make alliances beyond ethnic or national loyalties. Similarly, analyzing these texts with criteria other than cultural identity allows us to reconceptualize what can be considered American Literature and could allow us to free texts like these, which utilize other registers besides standard English in order to emphasize difference, to be read in more comprehensive ways that do not only focus on ethnicity. These texts provide a model for cultural identity that is active and a model of diaspora that involves a re-telling instead of a return. Dominicanidad is constantly constituted and redefined through representation and reading.

Feeling (Dis)Integrated: Antisociality and Queer Longing in the Archives of David Wojnarowicz and Gary Fisher