1,720,985 research outputs found
Literature, Progress, and Monsters: What is Electronic Literature?
No full textAuthor: Godwin, Mary, L.. Ph.D. Institution: Purdue University Degree Received: May 2017 Title: “Literature,” Progress, and Monsters: What Is Electronic Literature? Major Professor: Dr. Arkady Plotnitsky Jacques Derrida famously asserts, “The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality” (Of Grammatology 5). When writing of the ‘future’ here, Derrida points to a way of thinking “beyond the closure of knowledge,” which is to say an absolute danger inasmuch as it betrays all that is by welcoming an unknown and as yet unthought is not. N. Katherine Hayles proclaims electronic literature the future of literature on the strength of its capacity to keep pace with a ‘new’ digital normality, to anchor a new structural center for 21st century literature and safeguard against an otherwise imposing and dangerous future for study in the humanities—a very different ‘danger’ than one to which Derrida alludes. The overarching purpose of this project is to engage the question, “What is electronic literature?” and while readily conceding the force of advancing technologies bring to bear broadly on the production, distribution, and consumption of literature, the thrust of the argument resists conflating “literature” with its medium or delivery technology. Chapter one reorients the question of electronic literature by focusing first on the more anterior question, “What is literature?”—remembering Derrida’s caution in pursuing any ontological delimitation and drawing on the work of Peggy Kamuf among others to assist in parsing a response. Chapter two considers what is essentially new in electronic literature and argues against Hayles’s accounting of media specificity as it underwrites new configurations of literarity. Chapter three attends the question of literarity in the form of ‘monsters’ and reads James Joyce’s Ulysses alongside The Unknown (Scott Rhetberg et al. 1999), asking if and in what ways linguistic practices marking Ulysses a definitive act of “literature” can be found at play in electronic literature as well
Becoming Science Fiction: The Purport of an Evolving Genre
No full textThis dissertation three-dimensionally reconstructs Hjelmslev’s glossematic matrix (composed of the following quadrants: content-form, content-substance, expression-form, and expression-substance) in conjunction with Deleuze and Guattari’s theoretical concepts in order to reveal the purport of science fiction (SF). I create this theoretical apparatus in the introduction. The following four chapters then examine the content-form, expression-form, content-substance, and expression-substance of SF through a Deleuzoguattarian lens. First, I question how we recognize SF if it has both no essential details and an evolving identity. The chapter shows how recognition outweighs contingent features, thereby revealing socio-cognitive frames that buttress such recognition, and ultimately proposes a cognitive model for recognizing SF. Second, I advance an argument for a new generic paradigm for SF, whereby a narrative without chapters as a generic abstract machine can be deployed to differentiate all narratives, without defining them, while still allowing genres to define themselves, which refines the theoretical framework currently buttressing SF theory. Third, I examine Clarke’s The City and the Stars (1956) to advance our understanding of anoedipal bodies in the text and the fascist machines that give rise to them, which calls into question the continental death of the author who must make choices in an oedipalized world while creating one. Fourth, I explore the deployment, seizure, reclamation, and loss of power as functions of destruction across several SF texts while advancing and interrogating the implications through theory, the ultimate result of which shows that SF is becoming destructive. Finally, the conclusion synthesizes the content and expression forms and substances from the previous four chapters to reveal the purport of SF: a socio-cognitive capacity to recognize prototypes through generic gravity for a future of unavoidably oedipal technological enclosures where society has moved beyond a state of control to a crisis of destruction. The dissertation disrupts the dominant contemporary conception of SF as having an identity, or being, by committing it to the ontology of becoming. Such a re-conception frees SF from retrospective determinations. Essentially, this project enters the critical conversation on SF by proposing, first, to sidestep the need for generic determinations and, second, to accept it as an evolutionary process entangling cognition, parameters, creation, and trends
The rhetoric of resistance and the resistance to theory: Controversial academic scholarship in the American public sphere
No full text“The Rhetoric of Resistance and the Resistance to Theory: Controversial Academic Scholarship in the American Public Sphere,” builds a reception theory that accounts for the ways in which scholarship that advances the perspectives of marginalized groups is configured and corrupted within our general culture. Through an analysis of the 1993 Lani Guinier nomination controversy, the 1986 Edward Said-Michael Walzer debate over the interpretations of Walzer\u27s Exodus and Revolution, and the relatively recent attempts to malign Norman G. Finkelstein\u27s A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth and The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering; I assess the socio-political forces that condition the American public sphere\u27s understanding of academic work that touches upon sensitive issues concerning the past and present oppression of ethnic minorities. Through the Paul de Man controversy, I assess the political conditions that may have contributed to de Man\u27s journalistic collaboration, as well as the ways in which figures who contribute critical strategies for minority critiques are often attacked within the American public sphere. Minority critiques often act as violent allergens. Coming to understand the important of these interventions and the “allergenic” reactions these interventions have induced may very well be the first step toward constructing a “rhetoric of dissent” for the twenty-first century. Such a rhetoric of dissent requires a re-visioning of the intellectual mission itself; a task that figures such as Guinier, Said, and Finkelstein have effectively performed. If we are to resist the dawning of a new age of intellectual orthodoxy, it will be important to look to the examples of critical intellectuals who have refused a gregarious and tolerant outlook for the way things are and to understand the strategies of dissent they provide
Other possible identities: Three essays on minor American literatures
No full textInstitutional fields of marginal literary study arose largely from related ethnic, gender, and sexual liberation movements in the 1960s and 1970s. Necessarily entrenched in liberatory identity politics at the time of their inception, those fields have remained committed to relatively stable formulations of disciplinary identity in their public self-portrayals, despite the ongoing internal conflicts over the nature of marginal identity formation. This dissertation engages with structures of disciplinary propriety, that have established the grounds for a replication of the insider-outsider, legitimacy-illegitimacy, canonical-noncanonical standards against which these fields initially formed themselves some decades ago. I trace through three marginal authors and their respective fields—Frank Chin and Asian American literature, Ishmael Reed and African American literature, Sarah Schulman and Gay-Lesbian literature—possibilities for a minor reading not only of the ambivalent academic treatments awarded the three individually, but more broadly, of the institutional formations of marginal literary studies themselves. Despite the significant differences between the three authors, I employ the formal and thematic resonances in the work of Frank Chin, Ishmael Reed, and Sarah Schulman to propose a means of rethinking the ways in which marginal fields of literary study have, following Deleuze and Guattari, resigned themselves to becoming “major” for the sake of institutional legitimacy. When Chin, Reed, and Schulman complicate any disciplinary efforts to stabilize the reception of their works through the coextensive use of essentialist discourses in their critical pieces and unstable—postmodernist or surrealist—discourses in their fiction, they rupture, by extension, dominant disciplinary efforts toward the stabilizing of the broader fields in which their work has been, at best, treated ambivalently. By bringing three such seemingly incompatible authors into conversation, I argue further that marginal American literatures may themselves enter into an active engagement with one another, rupturing the institutional containment to which they have been increasingly relegated since their inception
American mixed-race literature: Cultural history, precursors, identities, and forms of expression
No full textThis dissertation focuses on recent instances of mixed race literature in American culture such as Danzy Senna\u27s novel Caucasia, Rebecca Walker\u27s Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self , and Kip Fulbeck\u27s Paper Bullets: A Fictional Autobiography . This dissertation suggests that these mixed race literary texts, as well as the multiracial experiences, sensibilities, themes, and expressions communicated therein, differ from traditional conceptions and descriptions of race and mixed race in American society, history, and literature that are based on the logic of the binary racial system. Mixed race literature attempts to phrase and communicate suppressed, distorted, and/or neglected multiracial experiences, sensibilities, and possibilities. Mixed race literature is also coextensive with the emergence of the multiracial social formation and movement in the post-civil rights era. “Precursors” to mixed race literature fall short in their attempt to phrase and to communicate complexities and experiences of mixed race lived existence. I read lean Toomer\u27s Cane as one of the most significant precursors to mixed race literature in American literature. Mixed race literature also differs from “mixed race in American literature” insofar as the later, in the presentation of mixed race characters and themes, both relies on and validates the categorical, hierarchical, and dichotomous logic of the binary racial system. Notable examples in the canon of American and American Ethnic literature are William Faulkner and Tony Morrison who, from a mixed race perspective, extend and promote in their texts the suppression and distortion of multiracial complexities, possibilities, and lived realities in the service of the binary racial system
Women\u27s Wealth, Work, and Citizenship in the True Crime Genre, 1979-1991
No full text“Women’s Wealth, Work, and Citizenship in the True Crime Genre, 1979-1991” is an interdisciplinary cultural studies project that examines true crime, media, and juridical discourses about women criminals from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. Women’s criminality is often dehistoricized and framed as a private, domestic, or pathological matter. By foregrounding the historical situatedness of true crime narratives, female criminalities emerge as complex political responses to socio-economic life. I focus on the ways that Reagan-era neoliberalism, Soviet détente, and Latin American border policies shape political life, including crime, as well as attitudes about crime. Taking women who transgress the law to be limit cases for what constitute gender, citizenship, and national belonging, I use representations of non-violent women to consider how female criminalities shape and are shaped by contemporary political and economic forces and neoliberal and capitalist ideologies. I engage borderlands studies, feminist criminology, security studies, and feminist and black feminist legal and political theory to show how particular material conditions help to produce the raced, classed, and gendered legal and political subject during the 1980s
From animal trials to the animal advocacy movement: A Foucauldian reflection on the animal question
No full textThe philosophical literature on the animal question has grown significantly in the last few decades. Today many philosophers both in analytic and continental traditions criticize the ontological privilege traditionally granted to human beings and the ethical and political ramifications of it by challenging the boundaries set between human beings and animals. Most of the works in the field, however, are speculative inquiries that lack a historical perspective on the subject or at best they extrapolate a history of anthropocentrism from an analysis of the human-animal divide in the thoughts of individual philosophers from different periods. The aim of this study is to go beyond a speculative engagement of this type and to historicize, by adopting the approach developed in the work of a great contemporary French philosopher Michel Foucault, the animal question by exploring how the human-animal divide is enacted and sometimes modified through social rituals and politico-legal institutions as well as in the scientific enterprise. In order to highlight the significance of a historical perspective and to establish the usefulness of this Foucauldian approach to the animal question, the study turns to the tradition of animal trials in the medieval and early modern Europe, a phenomenon widely overlooked both in the cultural histories of law and in the current debates on the legal status of animals. Drawing on Foucault\u27s distinctive conception of knowledge and power, this study seeks to substantiate the following two claims: a) the contemporary animal advocacy movement with its philosophical and scientific foundations conforms to the anthropologism of the modern era, and b) power invests as much in the animal body as it does in the human body. Formulated in this way, the animal question takes on a historical and embodied form
Making ideology material: Theory and practice in punk
No full textThe purpose of the present study is to theorize how punk, as a cultural field, renders its ideological assumptions material. First, I schematize “punk history” and map the formative impulses of punk in terms of desire. Drawing from Sigmund Freud, from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari\u27s concept of non-individuated desire, and from Fredric Jameson\u27s concept of a “political unconscious,” I imagine late capitalism as allowing for the expression and realization of certain desires and the concomitant repression of others, which then return, as Freud claims that repressed desires must. Most importantly for punk, capitalism both creates and exacerbates a friction between culture and economics, from which flows the most formative desires of punk. I name the core desires of each of the six major punk scenes and map each scene as a nexus of intersecting desires that can be derived from the material artifacts—the social formations and commodities—that the scene produces and in which it finds expression. Second, I situate punk in terms of a logic of capital and culture derived from the work of Perry Anderson, Fredric Jameson, Guy Debord, and Ernst Bloch. With the work of these theorists in mind, I investigate punk as a cultural movement that emerges from the break that they posit between modernism and postmodernism, in order to assess whether, in refusing to abandon certain modern practices, punk manages to recuperate and redeem them within a postmodern context. Third, drawing on Marx\u27s description of the commodity in Capital, I examine punk\u27s problems with capitalism and commodification in relation to the opposition within the commodity form between use-value and exchange-value. I question punks\u27 antipathy for commodification and speculate on whether or not the commodity form is truly the target of their animosity. I conclude by inserting the punk object into the larger structure of the economy of the music industry. This study reveals that the most powerful element of the punk project is its underlying refusal to give up on imagining something other than the world as it is and punks\u27 material efforts toward constructing a “new world.
Philosophy and the confessional novel: A critical confession analysis
No full textThe purpose of Philosophy and the Confessional Novel: A Critical Confession Analysis is to redirect literary criticism back to works of literature as the center of its critical attention. A Confessional Novel within the context of this study is a novel wherein the developing story or developing character is representative and reflective of the ongoing development of the reader. The authors (Dickens, Dostoevsky, Mann and Camus) of the novels (A Tale of Two Cities, Crime and Punishment, Doctor Faustus and The Plague) included in this study are, I claim, acutely interested and, in all cases, insistent that the reader notice the re-creative process which, in turn, compels a response. Critical Confession Analysis as a mode of critical response begins when the reader notices his or her thoughts are in the text through the confessions given by the text. Here, the reciprocal act of the confessional novel towards the reader who has re-centered literature is its ability to re-centralize and pay critical attention to the reader. Briefly, the one becomes conversant with the other. The leading question for this investigation is not what is literature? Rather, and significantly self-critical, the fundamental question is what is reading? or more specifically what am I doing as a critical reader? The hypothesis is that the subject positions established by the reader\u27s recognition of human relatedness between his or her thinking and the written story will produce a response that critically assesses the developments of the reader\u27s intimacy with and an ongoing understanding of the novel. Methodologically, this will mean rereading our own marginalia and being critical of our initial reactions to or judgments of or predetermined strategies for the text which transgress the confessional novel\u27s intention to be known. Re-reading as such, being critical of the text inclusive of our notes and marks, will, I argue, be an interpretive attempt at not only one\u27s analysis of what the novel knows of itself, but is also a way to analyze what it is that literature will teach the reader to know about oneself. Because this dissertation is making a claim for moral reading as opposed to moralizing approaches to it, the criteria established through this project are carefully chosen from among philosophers who explicitly privilege and define, in one way or another, reading. These philosophers are Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Camus, Derrida and Stanley Cavell. However, I do not claim any dominant philosophical school of thought or attempt to reconcile the rifts between them. Rather, and because the notion of giving language as giving knowledge is a prevalent theme of this project, I have accepted various concepts for Critical Confession Analysis which are consistent not only within each philosopher\u27s thinking, but are also consistent with this project\u27s concept of responsible critical response. The criteria set forth in this approach to the confessional novel are self-critical; as self-critical, confessional; as confessional, open to re-creation. It is not clear from this study that all novels are confessional. The novels chosen for this project, however, are quite explicit about the separation of the spectacle of institutional hyperbole and human meaning; about the difference between moralizing constructions of power and moral introspection. The chapters of this project are meant to show, through these novels and the concepts given by philosophy, the development of the theory of reading advanced through Critical Confession Analysis. Chapter II analyzes how literature authorizes the critic to respond to literature through Dickens\u27s A Tale of Two Cities. Chapter III investigates, as an extension of Chapter II and a transition into a reading of Dostoevsky\u27s Crime and Punishment, the overarching, pre-confessional question of all literature Will you hear me? Chapter IV continues by suggesting that hearing the text creates for the reader a recognition of the self or a relatedness to the text which I have termed I-ness. Chapter V, this dissertation\u27s most complex, shows through Mann\u27s Doctor Faustus that the trouble of responding as an act of love for another will include becoming as Nietzsche writes what one is. Chapter VI is a comparative study of The Plague and a concept given by The Myth of Sisyphus: The Ethics, in one of its aspects, is but a long and reasoned personal confession. Abstract thought at last returns to its prop of flesh. As the concluding chapter, Chapter VI incorporates each of the steps of the development of Critical Confession Analysis. I explain, through this reading of The Plague, and emphasize the necessity of beginning new ways to accept and approach literature and philosophy as illustrated gifts of language which compel us to respond reciprocally and critically to the their advocacy of the human being
Shelley (en)corporated: The romantic sublime and middle -class subjectivity in the Victorian domestic novel
No full textThe principle aim of this dissertation is to examine the ways that the aesthetic of the sublime is integral to shifts in the organization of power from the late eighteenth through the nineteenth century. Following the trajectory of the romantic aesthetic of the sublime from the treatises of Burke and Kant, through Wordsworth and the Shelleys, into the works of William Thackeray, Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, this project demonstrates that the sublime mode was part of a transition from a paradigm of overwhelming power exemplified by the body of the king to the pervasive power of surveillance utilized by the rising middle-classes. While the domestic woman connected with the rise of the middle-class is normally seen as beautiful, it is the claim of this study that the moral authority of the middle-class woman is actually sublime. The binary of the beautiful and the sublime seeks to contain the sublimity of womanhood by insisting on sublimity\u27s masculine character. Thus, rather than exemplifying masculine strength, the sublime is a divided aesthetic that marks the transition to a new system of power gendered as feminine and yet masks that transition because it fears the power it accords to the feminine. This aesthetic is both an inheritance the Victorians receive from their romantic predecessors, and, more importantly, a broad historical phenomenon that questions the artificial boundaries between romantic and Victorian
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