"Mirrors of Culture" is an invited response to two essays “How Stories Make Us Feel” by Hannah Wojciehowski and Vittorio Gallese and "Literary Biomimesis" by Marco Iacoboni and Deborah Jenson. This response addresses the question of mirroring and relations between neuroscience and the humanities through Jacques Lacan's essay on "The Mirror Stage."

Ambivalence in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century U.S. Literature and Culture reframes ambivalence from being a problem requiring solution to a source and force of politically and ethically significant transformative potential. Since its coinage in early-twentieth-century psychoanalysis, accounts of ambivalence, particularly those concerning stigmatized (e.g. queer, trans, racialized, disabled) subjects, typically conceive of it as a component of or catalyst for broader arguments around shame and repression and seek to resolve the problem of ambivalence resolutely through either assimilation or radical opposition. The literary works I explore chart more complex routes through ambivalence, disaggregating it from shame, understanding it as a constitutive, unavoidable, and irresolvable condition of subjectivity, and leaving the ambivalences the works explore – around gender, sexuality, race, and class – provocatively unresolved. In considering how these texts derive with (rather than from) their ambivalences the affective resources through which new resistances and worlds can begin to be built, my dissertation establishes ambivalence as an integral concept for approaching and conducting the work of ethical and political action in the troubled present.

In 1942, my great uncle, Haruo Komori, was removed from the West Coast along with more than 21,000 other Japanese Canadians. Throughout his incarceration, Haruo corresponded with agents at the Office of the Custodian of Enemy Property about the forced sale of his belongings. Of particular concern was the future of a fishing boat, the F. C. Vancouver. In a 1944 letter, Haruo explained that he was “worried over this boat,” which he had been holding in trust for a man named Frank Charlie, who, “being an Indian, could not have it registered in his name.” By the following year, however, the boat had been auctioned off along with all of Haruo’s property, never to be returned to its rightful owner.

While the fact of Haruo and Frank Charlie’s relationship arrives to us through the voluminous government records produced during mass incarceration, it tells a broader story than the typical narrative of Japanese Canadian dispossession and confinement to concentration camps. Haruo’s letters give a glimpse of how he and Frank were enmeshed in the provisional and fugitive interracial communities forged in Western Canadian resource extraction industries. My dissertation, Ghostly Labors: Japanese Canadians in Western Canada’s Settler Ecology, takes up the experiences of Japanese Canadians like Haruo to examine the tensions and solidarities between the settler, migrant, and Indigenous workers caught up in the settler colonial transformation of the local environment from 1858 to the present. Through fieldwork and analysis of archival documents, oral history, novels, visual art, and my family’s history, I theorize Western Canada’s “settler ecology” as an integrated system of racialized labor exploitation for resource extraction and I highlight Japanese Canadian embodied knowledges and practices that offer immanent critiques of the racialized exploitation of both workers and the environment.

The first chapter, “Slimers, Skippers, ‘Slaves’ Indigenous, Japanese, and Chinese Workers of the Fraser River,” elucidates the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fishing and canning industry’s recruitment of an interracial labor force. I argue that the salmon industry’s growth depended on the consolidation of locally specific racializations of seasonal Asian and Indigenous workers, who were represented as both a threat to settler society and as uniquely suited to salmon work. These emergent racializations and settler colonial conceptions of the environment drove in turn the destruction of the local ecology and the restriction of Indigenous fishing rights.

The second chapter, “Spectral Yellow, Fine White: Homegrown Sugar Beets and the Racial Stratification of Labor,” analyzes the successive recruitment of incarcerated Japanese Canadian, Indigenous, and Mexican migrant “stoop laborers” to cultivate a domestic sugar supply. I argue that the industry’s collaboration with the Canadian state to produce new classes of temporary workers who are stripped of or denied citizenship has, rather than solving the “labor problem,” exacerbated ecological issues and reinforced systems of racialized employment that undergird white Canadian settler sovereignty.

In the third chapter, “Foraging for Ghosts: Steveston’s Migrant Ecologies,” the dissertation follows contemporary Japanese Canadian foraging trips for yomogi back to the historical site of the salmon industry, home to the largest pre-war community of Japanese Canadians. I analyze Japanese Canadian knowledge of Steveston’s migrant ecologies less to retrieve prior Japanese Canadian inhabitance per se, but to interpret the foraging trips as a response to the municipal government’s initiatives to eradicate “invasive species,” present-day anti-Asian racism, and the Musqueam people’s ongoing struggle for land and fishing rights.

The dissertation is grounded in Japanese Canadian knowledge—produced through the experience of laboring in British Columbia and Alberta’s rivers, oceans, and fields—and transmitted today in the intimate archives of foraging trips, novels, art installations, oral histories, and old letters. Taking inspiration in Haruo and Frank’s improvised solidarity, I contend that the knowledge forged in fishing and agriculture, and the environmental devastation these industries have left in their wake, offers an immanent critique of Western Canada’s “settler ecology” and harbors strategies for building solidaristic relationships within it.

This text examines implicit metaphysical assumptions that influence the discourse of artificial intelligence by shaping key underlying concepts such as intelligence, agency, rationality, thought, mechanism, process and number. I consider the impact of these assumptions on the frameworks and methods of the field, as well as their relevance to debates concerning the ethics of research in AI. In this context, I evaluate the consequences of Jacques Derrida’s critique of metaphysics, examining its implications for conceptual models of artificial intelligence that continue to depend on the foundational ideas his critique puts into question.The first part, “Mind Against Mechanism,” deals generally with the idea of intelligence and the figure of the thinking machine. I argue that Beneficial AI, a prominent research program within machine ethics, relies on a misguided theory of intelligence that combines misconceptions about evolutionary biology with inappropriate analogies to nuclear energy, and mobilizes longstanding anxieties about the viability of traditional beliefs regarding individual autonomy and agency. My analysis corroborates Timnit Gebru’s call for a holistic approach to Ethical AI that incorporates a more diverse group of scientists into the design process. I add to this that scientists are not enough—serious engagement is needed with a wider range of scholarly work beyond the sciences. The second part of this manuscript, “Number Beyond the Algorithm,” considers the provenance of premises that inform the way we conceive of the limits of computation. I show that the adoption of the set as the founding element of the real number system follows from a concept of number that elevates presence over process (i.e., cardinality over sequence). This preference for presence aligns with the culturally- specific beliefs of a small group of European mathematicians, particularly with regard to the nature of number and infinity. Yet, the resulting definitions continue to inform contemporary characterizations of the relationship between mathematics and computa- tion by contributing to the conviction that the objects of mathematics (and the world they correspond to) vastly exceed what machines can compute.

For late-Victorian authors and sexologists, Roman literary culture was essential to the development of the British decadent movement. My dissertation explores how authors including Walter Pater and Michael Field return to Roman epicureanism and decadence as a way of justifying their literary style and personae as gender and sexually nonconforming authors. Scholarship in the history of sexuality and nineteenth-century classical studies has tended to focus on the relationship between Victorian homosexuality and Greek pederasty using an older model of gay and lesbian studies. From this perspective, Victorian homophiles constitute homosexuality on the basis of Greek pederasty, reversing the discourse of the state to justify a newly constituted homosexual identity. My dissertation, by contrast, examines Victorian and Roman gender-sex deviancy from a queer theoretical lens. This research brings queer theory’s resistance to identitarian politics into Victorian neoclassical literature. Starting with the premise that an excess of sexual and gender categories flourished in imperial Roman society because the Romans neither sanctioned nor criminalized same-sex desire, I discuss how late-Victorian authors revived queer Roman literary history to prefigure their dissent from predominant gender-sex paradigms. “Queer Decadent Classicism” thus explores how nineteenth-century authors forged a genealogy from Roman literary figures and imagined a queer aesthetic history. My first chapter, “‘Aesthetically, Very Seductive’: Pater’s Homoerotic Epicureanism in Marius,” explores how Marius the Epicurean (1885), an historical novel, published the same year England re-criminalized homosexuality and set in second-century CE, the period affiliated with the rise of decadence and decline of Rome, represents a specifically Roman queer literary culture. I argue that Pater showcases several different models of homosocial intimacy available to Roman men. Within the novel, Marius’s “natural epicureanism” becomes not only a philosophy and lifestyle but also the literary style that Pater’s modern-day narrator self-consciously affiliates with nineteenth-century decadence. Tracing the roots of modern decadence to Epicurean philosophy helps Pater justify the connection between queer desire and aesthetic philosophy. After making a case for how Pater theorizes queer decadence in terms of a modern-day epicureanism, I turn my attention to Pater’s inserted translations, which he frames with homoerotic scenes between men. I show how the epicurean principle of egalitarianism allows Pater to reconstitute representations of homoerotic scholarship that level the conventional power dynamics of the ancient Greek world. Whereas the eromenos, the pupil philosopher and youthful lover, had for the most part acted as interlocutor in Greek dialogues, Pater imagines a more collaborative Roman literary community of co-authorship. Each homoerotic scene of classical reception Pater features in his novel—which includes literary criticism, translation, and adaptation of the classics— showcases collaborative authorship between men. Moreover, I demonstrate how Pater constrains heteronormativity within the inserted translation, while allowing homoerotic lives to flourish in the Roman world of the second century, formally echoing the decadent Roman world’s less restrictive hold on queer sexualities. The second chapter, “Metamorphic Aesthetics in Michael Field’s Ovidian Poems,” introduces unpublished poetry by the co-authors and lovers Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who wrote classically themed poetry under the masculine pseudonym Michael Field. This chapter discusses how they turned to Ovid’s erotic epic to experiment with “mutatas formas”—textually as well as physically changed forms--to prefigure unfixed and fluid gender and sexual subjectivities. The first part introduces Field’s dramatic trialogue on the Philomela myth. In their version, two sisters change into a mating pair of songbirds, thus rewriting Ovid’s story about the power of sisterhood into a late-Victorian story about a queer feminist relationship. The second half of the chapter introduces Field’s Aphrodite poems, inspired by Sappho, written on the topic of the “gods in exile” popularized by Pater in Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) and subsequently used to analogize experiences of persecution, exile, and censorship under the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885. I discuss Field’s Aphrodite series, comprised of their unpublished translation of Sappho’s “Hymn to Aphrodite” and To an Exile,. arguing that this project merges Sappho’s Lesbian symbolism with Ovid’s metamorphic characters and poetics to articulate more clearly the model of queer feminist kinship they first explored in the Philomela trialogue. In my third and final chapter, I introduce Michael Field’s Roman Trilogy, a series of metatheatrical closet dramas situated in decadent Rome and featuring queer pantomime dancers, entitled The Race of Leaves (1901), The World at Auction (1898), and Julia Domna (1903). I argue that the genre of tragedy enables authors to disentangle queer decadence from its imperial history. Examining Field’s Roman Trilogy, I explore how Field re-elevates pantomime dancers, generally taken as symptoms of Roman decadence, to their origin as the creators of Greek tragedy according to Aristotle. On the one hand, this reevaluation helps Field make a case for the emergence of aesthetic decadence from the Greeks. On the other hand, Field also offers the pantomime’s queerness—gender fluidity and pansexuality—as a model of non-conformativity emerging alongside Greek pederasty. Interrogating the Victorian decadent movement’s queer representations of Roman decadence through the genres of the novel, lyric, and drama, my dissertation contributes to a lacuna in both Victorian and history of sexuality studies. I make a case for understanding decadence as a literary style and a philosophical lifestyle that developed apart from and in opposition to imperial decadence. By understanding decadence’s resistance to institutionalized forms of sexuality, I suggest that decadent authors anticipated queer theory’s insistence on ambiguity and fluidity, and in an anti-identitarian sexual politics we find mirrored in the experimental forms they created.

This dissertation argues that contemporary feminist historiography and perspectives have erroneously conflated the theories of workerist autonomist-feminist tendencies with that of “Autonomist-Marxism”, thus assuming the former as partisans of the shift from Operaismo to Autonomia. The legacy of the Italian workerist-feminist tendency Lotta Femminista, and the work of Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Leopoldina Fortunati, and Silvia Federici, have been confused with what has been called “Autonomist-feminism”. This name signals a shift within the Operaismo Workerist-Marxian theory, moving away from a Marxian labor theory of value–and the associated strategy of the political wage demand–towards the praxis of Post-Workerism and its Autonomia iterations circa 1973-1977, which is now known as “Autonomist-Marxism”.

The following dissertation works to dispel this confusion, while distinguishing the theory of sexual difference within both forms of autonomist-feminism in order to show that Lotta Femminista was opposed to Autonomist-Marxian theories due to its affirmation of the Marxian labor theory of value.

Using Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s methodology, I argue that Lotta Femminista is a workerist-feminist tendency of autonomist-feminism, elaborating upon the value-theoretical basis of classical Italian Workerism and appropriating many of its genre-forms in critical-feminist performative practice. Additionally, through original interpretations of the archive of Lotta Femminista, I show that an autonomist-feminist “developmental-interventionist” praxis is consistent on both theoretical and practical bases, while also proposing an original theory of the social reproduction of labor power as a labor force.

The ambition of this dissertation is to articulate a theory of affect that works well with the innovative poetics of four important contemporary feminist poets. The introduction, "Reading for Affect in Contemporary Feminist Poetry," gives an overview of literary affect studies and proposes a way of reading for affect in poetry. The second chapter, "Black Laughter in the Poetry of Harryette Mullen," approaches laughter as a form of affect and explores the ambiguity of that affect through a reading of Mullen's major collections of poetry, all of which employ puns and other double-meanings to comic effect, even while commenting upon serious issues of race and gender. Chapter three, "Language and Affect in the Poetry of Leslie Scalapino," reads for affect in selected works of this Language poet, arguing that despite semantic indeterminacy, affect flourishes. In the fourth chapter, "Lisa Robertson's Feminist Poetic Landscapes," I argue that in several of her major works, Robertson challenges the figure/ground division to create a poetic subjectivity that is a feminist model of interrelatedness. And finally, in the last chapter, "SAD in the Anthropocene: Brenda Hillman's Ecopoetics of Affect," I further explore the ways an affective poetics can develop an ecological subjectivity that is more sensitive to human interrelations with the land. The chapters are organized to emphasize what I see as a trend toward ecopoetics in these works. The ethics of attention to and respect for difference, highly developed in this feminist writing, lends itself very well to a consideration of affective and ecological interrelations. Together, these chapters apply an affective interpretive method to extended studies of the work of four contemporary feminist poets.

Abstract

Echo-critical Poetic Narcissisms:

Being Transformed in Petrarca, Ronsard, and Shakespeare

Melissa Yinger

“Narcissism” is a term that was popularized by Freud in the twentieth century, but whose roots date back to the first century C.E., to a story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In Ovid’s story, Narcissus is a beautiful youth who falls in love with his image in a pool and wastes away, leaving only the Narcissus flower. Only slightly less famous is the story of Echo, with which Narcissus’s story is intertwined. Echo is a wood nymph who, in punishment for her garrulousness, is denied her ability to speak for herself and is permitted only to return the speech of others. Then, later in life she has the supreme misfortune of one day coming across Narcissus by the mirror-pool and falling in love. When he spurns her, she too wastes away, becoming a disembodied voice that reverberates in forests and caves.

This project focuses on the Narcissus and Echo myth because, for some of the most canonical Renaissance poets - Francesco Petrarca, Pierre de Ronsard, and William Shakespeare - Narcissus is as important a figure as Orpheus or Apollo. Petrarca develops a particular aesthetic pattern out of the Narcissus myth, which later poets imitate and expand. The first goal is to define the narcissistic aesthetic that Renaissance poets found so appealing. This aesthetic valorized sameness and fetishized mirror images, the formal poetic equivalents of which are rhyme, repetition, and chiasmus. The second goal is to understand the presence of Echo in some of literature’s most narcissistic moments. Because Narcissus’s rejection of Echo causes her to melt into the landscape and live disembodied in forests and caves, she becomes the voice of the natural world in Renaissance poetry.

As an ontologically liminal figure, Echo is able to become a mediator between the human and non-human worlds, and allows poets to think through the stakes of an aesthetic that favors self-love and sameness over caring for non-human others. In Renaissance poetry, she gives voice to a nascent version of the central concerns of ecocriticism. To elucidate this important moment in the genealogy of the growing and evolving field of ecocriticism, Echo-critical Poetic Narcissisms seeks to define the parameters of what I call Echo-criticism, an ethical imperative in the period that questions but does not ultimately displace the era’s narcissism.

For the poets included in this study, the Narcissus and Echo myth is a source of inspiration as well as anxiety. Significantly, their ambivalence about the myth is mirrored in and perhaps shapes our ambivalence about humanism, which we associate with great art, on the one hand, and on the other, recognize as what Richard Schechner calls, “very arrogant, anthro[po]centric, expansionist, and high-energy ideology.” Renaissance poets’ engagement with the Narcissus and Echo myth brings this tension into focus and gives us a perspective from which to reevaluate our own aesthetic and ethical values.

The ambivalence about Renaissance humanism that these poets bring into focus is becoming magnified, as ecocriticism and posthumanism continue to influence the shape of the humanities. Like tectonic plates that bear stress, shift, and settle, we are again, as were the great humanists, in the midst of a shift. Will anthropocentrism continue to be the reigning worldview in the era of posthumanism? Can we separate positive versions of narcissism from the more ethically and environmentally dangerous forms? This project suggests that if we allow ourselves to learn from humanists’ engagement with this myth, their lessons could have an impact on the future of the humanities. A more nuanced understanding of humanism’s negotiations of aesthetics and ethics in these poetic contexts will make us more self-aware scholars of the humanities, and may inform our decisions regarding our responsibilities to and for others.

In this dissertation, I contend that women experimental writers engage the literary epic mode to explore and invigorate questions about female authorship, history and narrative, and the city and its communities. Analyzing connections and challenges to the Western epic tradition in contemporary texts, I examine how the works find epic a generative mode through which to investigate, contest and reimagine how one tells the community's story and what that story is. Emphasizing how the texts work at the intersections of continuity and change, I bring these particular works together for their shared concerns and varied responses to the genre's formal and thematic conventions, and to the literary critical discourses about epic. Central to my inquiry is how the authors' texts interrogate epic's cultural and political meaning in a manner that contributes to interpretive readings of the genre that have accrued over time by presenting provocative new questions and assertions.

I analyze Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette for its inquiry into gender, genre and female-authorship. Notley's poetic innovations use quotation marks to cite and contest a masculinist literary tradition, question formal limitations and possibilities, and ask how a female writer may present her own story of community, war and revolution. In addition, I examine Vanessa Place's Dies, Bhanu Kapil's Schizophrene and Cathy Park Hong's Dance Dance Revolution for their depiction of histories that challenges epic's traditional domain as History as told by its victors. Rather than fortify a past for the community, their experimental texts open up the possibility of other pasts, ultimately contesting the concept of any single authoritative story passed on to present and future readers. Finally, I argue that Renee Gladman's Event Factory shifts epic from a story about the distant past to the historical present in order to make claims about understanding contemporary crises. Gladman's text highlights epic's history as a tale of city building with depictions of the city, its citizens and their agency in the face of increasing social and political precarity.

This thesis examines the addict as an ontological, medical, and aesthetic category in the context of psychoanalysis, biopolitics, and cinema. Organized in two parts consisting of distinct but thematically conversing papers, I offer a reading of the addict as an ethical subject of desire. The first paper, entitled "Mastering Death, Rejecting the Future: The Peculiar Sovereignty of the Addict," investigates what it is about addiction that engenders strong and conflicting views and media representations. In this paper, I contend that anxieties regarding the addict's attempts at mastering death by closely encountering it explain biopolitical modalities of addiction rhetoric and policy. By exposing the similarities between the addict and Foucault’s homo economicus, I argue that the addict's disruptive social and political impact stems from a refusal to valorize longevity/futurity and the self-administration of jouissance. The second paper, entitled "Leaving Las Vegas and the Ethics of Addiction," takes this line of inquiry to a specific cultural text, the 1995 film Leaving Las Vegas. By parsing the intricacies of the film's unique addiction narrative, I reveal the ethics of desire, what Jacques Lacan calls "the ethical act" at the heart of the protagonist's, Ben Sanderson's, story. I frame the discussion with psychoanalytic film theory, which studies film as a collective dream where a culture's repressed fantasies emerge. Leaving Las Vegas tells a story of an addict whose singular desire is allowed to exist as it is and illustrates the often-unrecognized ethical structure of addicted desire.