This dissertation takes up questions of access at the level of language itself, as well as in the context of cultural institutions in emerging global communities. Using the texts of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Shani Mootoo, I argue experimental narrative techniques develop new understandings of mental disability by pushing against the limits of language, particularly in relation to mentally disabled women. The novels and plays examined function as creative objects that refigure the reader’s relationship to mental disability through embodied reading practices. In resisting previous tendencies to read literary representations of mental disability as metaphor, I offer an alternative framework for understanding mental disability as an ongoing interactive process between bodies. Drawing on work from disability studies, critical gender studies, and trauma theory, I call for approaches to mental disability in literature that understand reading as an interactive process between reader and text, proposing a methodology for understanding how embodied reading practices inspire new understandings of mental disability and trauma in emerging global communities. In appreciating mental disability as an ongoing interactive process between bodies, readers can better attend to the nuanced ways in which complex embodiment calls for innovative modes of storytelling that challenge histories of representation.

In this dissertation, I look at how the strains of post-colonial nationhood manifest in the haunted homes and mad families of new Irish literature. This nation is shaped by long years of struggle under a colonial force, and this imbalance of power marks the individuals in these post-independence works. Each symbolic strain indicates a traumatic mark on the national identity itself. However, the manifestation of national trauma is rooted in the various gothic depictions of the home and family. I begin by looking at the supernatural, but my focus is truly on the social structures and traumatic moments that shape the families in each work.

I assert that the traumas of this developing nation manifest in the gothic themes of the modernist inspired literature written in the decades after independence. The personal responses to these traumas appear in the literary depictions of haunting and madness. Here the ghosts signify both shared traumatic events and the personal trauma-related pains that are too socially taboo to express. In contrast, the symbolic presence of madness is a transgressive expression of the individual’s responses to a trauma. Authors use this literary madness to call out the social strains of the long process of reinventing a national identity after colonial occupation.

The time period for the works ranges from publication dates in the 1940s to around 2016. Yet, the individual pieces are set as far back as the start of Irish independence. In effect, this is the Irish looking back on the moments that haunt them as a culture. The traumatic reshaping of a post-colonial national identity comes down to a matter of the family. Each individual in these works deals with the consequences of displacing the individual response to strain for too long, and the family and home are where this haunting realization appears.

In “Blood of a Nation” I argue that U.S. authors’ writing about human blood (both metaphorical and literal blood) changed during the second half of the nineteenth century. The chosen texts range from poetry to medical manuals to illustrate how authors increasingly superimposed medical blood tropes on Romantic metaphors. Medical language helped them bridge the conceptual gap between bodily fluid and social metaphor. By saddling aristocracy with medicine, writers created new fictions about blood, especially occult blood, which anchors metaphors of race and gender in the bodily fluid. I argue that they supplemented political blood metaphors in support of the new nation state with medicalized blood metaphors and thus made possible scientific racism, blood quanta, and their legal codification.

Chapter one examines political blood metaphors, namely Nathaniel Hawthorne’s erasure of the nation state’s history of sovereign bloodshed in The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and Ludwig von Reizenstein’s emphasis on the resulting uncanny nation filled with bloodshed in Die Geheimnisse von New Orleans (1853). Chapter two follows the rise of medical vocabulary from a school textbook to Civil War poetry and finally to a nationalist magazine. Emily Dickinson’s Civil War poem “The name – of it – is ‘Autumn’” (1862) rejects both contemporary Romantic blood metaphors and her anatomy textbook’s taxonomy because neither adequately addresses the blood on the battlefield, a critique edited out in the poem’s posthumous publication. Chapter three shows that Walt Whitman focused his collection Drum-Taps (1865) on the absorption of blood and hospital practice to reconcile the blood of the Civil War with his national vision. Chapter four argues medical texts about blood in practice really present political arguments. While William Wells Brown avoided blood in practice and theory, Edward H. Dixon made blood an occult sign for race and gender. Chapter five explores blood in scientific racism. Samuel A. Cartwright foreclosed individual agency and the freedom to change in the assertion that “black blood” is eternal and immutable. In his The Rising Son (1873), William Wells Brown ripostes that blood is a shared and mutable part of humanity. Chapter six considers the blood quanta of chattel slavery as laid out by Thomas Jefferson in 1815 as the root of the Jim Crow racism in Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1893), and Pauline E. Hopkins’ Of One Blood (1903). Against the resistance of black mothers, familial blood became an unknowable truth of the legal and social erasure of black families.

By analyzing scenes of instruction and the instructive literary techniques of Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers, Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, and Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, I introduce a new connection between ethnic modernism and immigrant education in the Progressive era. I assert this connection by establishing what I call modernist pedagogy—the instructional component these novels share at the level of narrative, style, and reading practice. Thematically and formally, these three novels educate scholars and lay readers about immigrant experiences, and my analysis of education in these novels crosses public (Metropolitan museum, university, city streets, immigrant night school) and private (Hebrew school or heder, governesses in the family home) spheres. I demonstrate how Jewish immigrant modernist Bildungsromanen—constructed through formal experiments with English, Yiddish, and Hebrew as well as thematic experiments with immigrant education—enrich our understanding of assimilative discursive formations that shaped education and reform in the Progressive era.

In addition to examining the pedagogical themes and practices these novels engage, I consider how these works and the meta-discourse of their creators exemplify generational modernism—the synthesis of formal experimentation and the older literary theme of family history. All three modernists purported to take immigrant experiences—their own fictionalized stories as Jewish émigrés or the stories of their ancestors—and represent those experiences with new forms. My interlocking analytical frameworks of generational modernism and modernist pedagogy connect literature known for its experimental aesthetics to representations of immigrant experiences that engage readers in unfamiliar reading experiences that inspire readers to question the certainty of what makes them American—and how they learned to be that way. Thus, Modernist Pedagogy provides a framework to examine imaginative experimentation as a proxy for societal restraints on immigrant education; explores the construction of American identities; and invites interdisciplinary scholarship that bridges literary studies, Judaic studies, immigration studies, pedagogical practice, educational theory, and American cultural history.

Talking Back: Disabled Women’s Autobiography examines the life and writing of four disabled women in the United States from the antebellum period through the end of the Progressive Era. I examine how these women use autobiography to represent the intersections of disability with other identities such as race, gender, sexuality, class, and social positions such as enslavement and enfreakment. My methodology involves close readings of various genres of life writing including autobiographies, memoirs, dairies, letters, and filmic representations that are juxtaposed with popular representations of disabled people within historical contexts such as slavery, early medicine, and freak shows. From my investigation I have found that these women use autobiography to call into question the values of individualism that influence popular representations of disabled people as helpless, dependent, and pitiable. I argue these women challenge cultural conventions of independence and autonomy, including those that undergird the genre of autobiography. In doing so, these women offer important alternatives of disabled women as powerful and disruptive of traditional conventions.

Chapter one examines issues of race and disability in Our Nig by Harriet Wilson, a black indentured servant in the antebellum north. I argue that Wilson challenges dominate proslavery and antislavery representations of disabled blacks and repositions dependency as a means to negotiate economic and social agency. Chapter two investigates The Little Locksmith by Katherine Butler Hathaway, an upper class white woman that is bedridden with spinal tuberculosis. I argue Katherine complicates conceptions of dependent disabled women through interdependent relationships and offers an alternate model of reciprocity that challenges ideals of individualism and self-determinism. Chapter three looks at the context of the early twentieth century freak show through The Loves and Lives of the Hilton Sisters, about conjoined twins, Daisy and Violet Hilton. The narrative points to the linguistic and generic attempts that are meant to norm and contain bodies within conventions of individualism. As conjoined twins, their embodiment challenges ideals of singular self-reliant individuals just as their narrative disrupts the linguistic and generic conventions meant to contain and explain their anomalous embodiment.

Amidst the emergence of modern European nation states and the racialized logic of global modernity, Jewish people began to be considered “sick,” first by official discourses of knowledge—such as government, medicine, and psychoanalysis—then by themselves. In turn-of-the-century psychoanalysis and racial science, hallmarks of global modernity, for example, hysteria was a disease associated with the immutable and inferior natures of women and Jewish men. Approaching Jewish literatures comparatively and transnationally, spanning medical and cultural archives from the modernist period to today, my project examines a cultural genealogy that tropes the modern Jew’s body as “sick”—a locus of sexual and racial difference. I bring scholarship on the modern Jewish body—by Sander Gilman, Todd Presner, Daniel Boyarin, and others—together with critical theories of modernity and their postcolonial revisions. By tracing trauma and disability as expressions of how racially gendered capitalism is embodied and survived, my project contributes to recent efforts to bridge trauma with disability studies, as well as bring both fields into conversation with categories of race, gender, and sexuality.

The archive of Jewish hysteria offers an example of a literary mode that I am calling the “cultural scar.” This is a mode in which overlapping metaphors of illness, disability, and trauma express a multiplicity of global modernity’s violence, implicitly articulating relatedness between different and uneven histories of loss. Imbricated in turn-of-the-century ideologies like nationalism, race, heterosexuality, and eugenics, inventions of modern Jewish culture and politics often rejected the effeminate, “queer”, racialized, diasporic, and sickly Jewish body. This body—the Jewish hysteric—haunts and unsettles canonical works of Jewish literature from the modernist period to today. Through close readings—from the grotesque figure of the mentshele (or little person) in transnational Jewish modernism, to guilt in post-Holocaust poetry, to contemporary “hysterical” women in American Jewish and Israeli literature—I show that hysteria is a mode of Jewish cultural production and critical memory that offers unsettled forms of identity and politics through a poetics of mourning. Embodying the mode of the cultural scar, these figures express transnational histories of violence and loss that work against celebratory national and diasporic forms.

This dissertation explores the impact of psychopharmacological discourses on Post-WWII American literature. I argue for a “pharmacentric” reading practice that foregrounds the role of pharmaceuticals in both the production and consumption of American literature across the period, tracing the rise of a new ontological construction in the cultural imagination I call the “neurochemical self.” This view of the self as an expression of chemical interactions in the brain emerges from the period’s scientific, medical, and advertising industries to become the dominant understanding of American selfhood by century’s end, and remains under-examined in existing literary scholarship. In making the case for the rise and importance of the neurochemical self, I identify and examine the development of literary language and techniques indebted to popular and scientific discourses around pharmaceuticals, a phenomenon I call “pharmaceutical literacy.”

In organizing this analysis of the neurochemical self and pharmaceutical literacy, I turn to three distinct eras in post-WWII American literature, identifying three signal pharmaceuticals within and the literary works they engaged with. I argue for the importance of amphetamines, specifically Benzedrine, to the work of the Beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg in the first decade after the war. Next, I look at America’s “Age of Anxiety,” identifying tranquilizers as the dominant psychopharmaceuticals from the late 1950s through the 1980s, reading the confessional poetry of Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton through the resulting pharmacentric perspective. Lastly, I argue for the importance of neurochemical selfhood and pharmaceutical literacy to the discourses provoked by the advent and run-away success of SSRI antidepressants, specifically within the work of 1990s depression memoirs by Elizabeth Wurtzel and Meri Nana-Ama Danquah. Finally, I argue for an extension of literary studies that accounts for these psychopharmaceutical developments and offers valuable perspective on the tensions between scientific and humanistic understandings of identity.

Transindigenous Modernism indigenizes the study of literary modernism. It applies the term indigenismo, generally defined as a discourse of assimilating Indigenous peoples in the Americas, to begin with the premise that settler nation-state consolidation and modernization were dependent on assimilating Indigenous peoples culturally and politically. Transindigenous Modernism questions the extent to which Indigenous peoples normalized indigenismo. Using a North-South methodology that brings together English-language and Spanish-language primary sources, theory, and literary criticism, Transindigenous Modernism interprets artistic and literary productions such as literary criticism, oral traditions, novels, and histories published by American Indian and Indigenous Mexican artists between 1929 and 1945. Through this approach, this dissertation seeks to recover and interpret Indigenous-to-Indigenous connections made through literature, connections which are often obscured or under-examined due to the dominance of nation-state paradigms to pursue literary studies. Transindigenous Modernism argues that these transindigenous connections attest to Indigenous peoples’ creative adaptations and contestations to settler nation-state consolidation (indigenismo) and their insistence on modern Indigenous, and tribal-specific, identities and futurities. Traveling intellectuals and writers such as Todd Downing (Choctaw), Andrés Henestrosa (Zapotec), and John Joseph Mathews (Osage), helped shape a North-South circuit of knowledge and cultural production that scholars are beginning to explore and appreciate. In order to capture the historical moment, chapter one examines the discourses of indigenismo and mestizaje in the Mexican, modern artist José Clemente Orozco’s writing and mural, The Epic of American Civilization, at Dartmouth College. Chapter two re-examines the themes explicated in chapter one through the lens of an American Indian narrator traveling south in Todd Downing’s The Mexican Earth. Chapters three and four examine Indigenous-to-Indigenous connections across time and space in the tribal-centric writings of Andrés Henestrosa and John Joseph Mathews. The epilogue explores further questions about mestizo/a-Indigenous connections.