In a 1965 manifesto called "Proprioception" Charles Olson, the poet often known as the father of the American avant-garde, suggests that poets wanting to implement their open verse poetics explore a physiological faculty associated with the way we experience motion, texture, and shifts. This dissertation attempts to do so.

Distinguishing between artworks associated with a perceptual model of the senses and those associated with a proprioceptive one, I show that a proprioceptive approach can be helpfully explored through a look at the work of Marcel Duchamp, who is best known for his anti-representational approach to art, one which includes the spectator as a part of the canvas. Using the example of spectator experience of a pointillist painting by Georges Seurat in which differently colored dots reach each of our eyes at different times, I show that juxtaposition-based art allows viewers to navigate the painting using proprioceptive coordinative mechanisms to apprehend texture, seeing colors that are neither on the canvas nor in our eyes.

The coordinative process, I show through a reading of the work of Jean Genet, involves not just textures associated with physical stimuli but also with memories and expectations. Here, I introduce the idea of modality showing how we can navigate multiple literary senses, developing a figural awareness of patterns across scenes using proprioception to apprehend narratives that do not depend on totalizing wholes. Like the court cases that I take as a model for Genet's recursive narrative, I show we can in fact navigate contradictions using an adaptive approach to narrative based on homeostasis that allows our ideas to be co-created by the scenes we seek to understand.

In my third chapter I come back to the question of "projection" in Olson's projective verse. A consideration of the development of new senses, figural patterns, and all of these artworks together points us to a poetics that is open in the sense that it is deliberately full of juxtapositions, and gaps and contradictions; rather than producing skepticism, however, these juxtapositions draw the audiences in and produce a flexible coherence dependent on balance and open relations.

I conclude by explaining why proprioceptive poetics offers a step beyond post-modernism, showing the particular type of coherence to be gained through its tension-based approach to poetics.

In this dissertation I explore the crumbling foundations of the Modern Project in order to assert that not only has “modernity” itself collapsed, but that many of its attendant institutions have as well: the State, the Individual, the Nation, and even Literature. Literature has always been bound up and complicit in these now defunct formations through an alliance forged around the concept of “unity.” The Modern Project and Literature in its wake each posit unity as a constitutive principal of the Individual, the Work of Art, sociality and order in general. The thought of unity dangerously implies that disunited things must be violently subsumed into unification, and I endeavor to trace the fault lines of modernity in order to reckon with the remainders, the “what” or “who,” that have been discarded and erased in the exchange of disunity for unity. I pit against Literature (understood as a homogenizing or institutional force) what Maurice Blanchot terms “écriture” (writing). Écriture is a mode of witnessing that, rather than making the unseen visible, intimates an irrecoverable silencing and erasure. I then assemble a counter-tradition to the Modern Project through a reading of texts by Maurice Blanchot, Assia Djebar, Tom McCarthy, Franz Rosenzweig, William Gibson and Bilge Karasu.

Although currently still engaged in the longest war in U.S. history, the military is comprised of only 1% of the U.S. population. In the absence of conscription, most Americans are isolated from the experience of combat and limited in their affective connections to war. Despite these limited geographic, psychological, cultural, aesthetic, and affective connections, the costs of war are coming home. Since 2001, more than 7,000 U.S. troops have died; 50,000 were visibly wounded; and more than 500,000 suffer from invisible injuries such as PTSD. These human losses only begin to index the effects of the wars on returning servicemembers, their families, and the larger civilian population, as rising rates of military suicide, domestic violence, sexual assault, alcohol and substance abuse, and homicide point to a larger crisis in which the homefront and battlefront are increasingly merged.

In this dissertation, I analyze how contemporary war novels, cinema, and post-cinematic media try to bridge the "military-civilian divide" through the affective conditions of war. My central claim is that the traces of war can be found not only in the content but also in the form of texts such as Toni Morrison's Home (2012), Ha Jin's Nanjing Requiem (2011), and Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker. I argue that these hybrid forms, which transgress boundaries of fact and fiction, generate war's multiple affects within the fictional textual world and in the real audiences who read or watch them. These texts help to bridge combat experience and civilian ignorance by appealing to affective states both in the characters and the audience. To better understand the effects of modern war's changing spaces, times, tactics, strategy, and weapons, I analyze texts that represent both the battlefront and the homefront. By bringing together different scales of representation and affective resonance, we can see the war stories that are often neglected and better understand how to engage with and heal a new generation of war wounded.

After the ‘Post-Sixties’: A Cultural History of Utopia in the United States is an historical inquiry into the cultures of utopian thought and practice. Consisting of three multi-chapter sections, this cultural history unfolds as an account of utopian, anti-utopian, and dystopian imagination through different periodizations. Each section attempts to extend Fredric Jameson’s 1984 essay “Periodizing the 60s” to a history of the present period, developing a historical framework for understanding the politics of utopia. The last section of this dissertation deals with utopia and dystopia as cultural tendencies in the historical imagination of the 2007-2008 financial crisis and the global explosion of social movements and uprisings that extended from the Movement of Squares in the North Africa, the Middle East, and parts of the Mediterranean, to the Occupy Wall Street encampments in the United States. The first section builds toward this account of the contemporary period, through a series of analyses of literature, film, subcultures, music, architectures, and historical phenomena that engage with communalist, feminist, punk, anti-colonial, and anti-capitalist articulations of ‘utopia.’ The second section examines the recuperation of countercultural utopianism in post-1960s history of tech corporations and creative industries in the United States. In constructing a periodization of the end of the post-sixties, this cultural history considers various shifts and mutations in the political imaginary of neoliberalism, and takes up utopia as an epistemological problematic of contemporary global capitalism. The project concludes tentatively and with futurity, insisting on the correspondence between utopian imagination, historical experience, and revolutionary possibility.

This dissertation analyzes the Christian Quiverfull movement, focusing on its underlying ideology, how that ideology is created and disseminated, and its similarity with certain aspects of broader U.S. culture. In doing so, it examines the written and visual texts produced and distributed by the movement. Though the dissertation covers a wide range of materials, including sermons, books, blog posts, films, and educational materials, its most significant focus is on the reality TV shows on which Quiverfull adherents appear, as those provide the most conspicuous example of Quiverfull belief and practice. To respond effectively to the Quiverfull use of this and other platforms, the dissertation combines techniques based in both literature and ethnography. This allows it to establish the broad boundaries of Quiverfull community as demonstrated by its textual production, to engage directly with the self-representation that the Quiverfull community practices, to situate that community within its larger cultural context, and to document and evaluate the textual practices that the Quiverfull movement uses to engage public audiences and attract them to its ideology. By using such methods, the dissertation documents not only the parameters of the worldview to which the Quiverfull movement adheres but also the methods by which they devise those parameters. It argues that the Quiverfull movement employs a model of reading that involves first establishing fundamental principles and then instructing its adherents to learn its worldview by teaching them to approach Scripture and other key texts as though engaging in a scavenger hunt. Using this model, readers discover the clues that lead to the construction of essential truths, verifying them and coming to embrace them through a process of identifying and understanding all items given on the scavenger hunt list, with the process ultimately leading to full membership in the community. Finally, the dissertation discusses how echoes of the Quiverfull method of approaching texts can be seen in broader U.S. culture, suggesting that the Quiverfull movement is not nearly as aberrant to dominant culture as it is often treated in public discourse.

Abstract

Sobia Saleem

“Never Trust the Teller,” he said. “Trust the Tale”:

Narrative Technique from the Arabian Nights to Postmodern

Adaptations by Rabih Alameddine and Pier Pasolini

This thesis stems from an examination of Rabih Alameddine's The Hakawati's embedded narrative structure. The roots of this structure reside in the Arabian Night's renowned frame structure, which can be traced to the Islamic aesthetic, primarily its textile culture and organization of the Quran. To further investigate framing, embedding, and interlacing as narrative techniques, the thesis draws upon discussions by M. M. Bakhtin, Erving Goffman, Mieke Bal, and Gerald Prince, applying their ideas and definitions to Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo, and Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red. The postmodern text The Hakawati is then reexamined in reference to these backgrounds, and finally, Pier Pasolini's Arabian Nights is analyzed as a cinematic adaptation of the frame narrative.

The central aim of this dissertation is to effectively trace the intersection of race and urban epistemology by examining representations of the American metropolis in literary and cinematic noir. In addition to analyzing classic hard-boiled texts and noir films, I introduce a new range of texts that suggestively argue for the racialization of the city as a significant source of noir anxiety; these texts, I contend, speak directly to the complexities in the evolution of noir and its many subgenres and appropriations. One of the primary interests of my dissertation, then, is to explicate the ways in which race narrativizes the city, and in turn, how the city narrativizes race.

In my investigation, I look to social histories of cities as well as theories of urban phenomena, which provides me with a useful historical entry point in reading the noir city as producing powerful fictions of urban epistemology. In my analysis, I include readings of Dashiell Hammett's Personville, Raymond Chandler and Walter Mosley's opposing epistemologies of postwar Los Angeles, and noir's repeated use of Chinatown as an exotic mise-en-scène. I end my analysis with a provocative suggestion that Iceberg Slim and Sam Greenlee's narratives are mutations of noir, where the black ghetto is the contemporary incarnation of the "mean streets" that produces a different set of noir heroes - the pimp, spy, and hipster. Stifled by carceral conditions and white surveillance practices, these new noir protagonists may "own" the streets, but they also reveal that positing the black male body as a site of the hyper-urbane produces its own set of profoundly mythic constructions.

The status of the fairy tale in present systems of value is decidedly shifting and incoherent, both within and beyond the realm of literary scholarship. My inquiry regarding the genre's perceived status and purposes--and the implications of those perceptions within academia and general society--is primarily informed by a comparative evaluation of Jack Zipes' and Marina Warner's perspectives, principles, and priorities for fairy tale analysis. I focus specifically on their differing conceptions of the genre's definition, origin, longevity, social functions, media presence, and the most representative tales. My research supports the notion that fairy tales demand more scholarly attention for many reasons. Widely misconceived as unsophisticated, inconsequential literature, fairy tales in fact present significant problems for literary theory and history; they have been used to socialize and control populations for centuries; they are survival tools, providing knowledge, hope, and escape; and they point to dimensions outside of themselves--social, political, historical, cultural--demonstrating connective, cross-disciplinary, and testimonial properties generally overlooked in conventional evaluations. Finally, fairy tales are not only artful platforms for speaking about often unspeakable realities; they are also potent tools for visualizing and cultivating change.

My dissertation argues that the prohibition of incest is as much a prohibition of speech as it is a prohibition of behavior and that the suffering incest inflicts on survivors involves a crisis of representation that literary arts and literary criticism may help us understand. I consider figurations of incestuous abuse in the early 1970s United States, a historical moment when the Women’s Liberation Movement had broken the silence on various forms of violence against women, enabling a public discussion of incestuous abuse more far-reaching than ever before. Through close-readings of Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye (1970), Roman Polanski’s film Chinatown (1974), Anne Sexton’s poetry, her play Mercy Street (1969), and records of Sexton’s therapy sessions with psychiatrist Martin Orne, I conclude that the incest survivors in these works are doubly victimized by incest and the prohibition of incest – by a sexual assault and by a system of social relations that renders them blameworthy for undermining normative modes of kinship. I apply insights from anthropology, feminist studies, phenomenology, psychoanalytic theory, post-structuralist literary theory, and clinical research on family violence to argue that kinship – culturally prescribed relations within families and between families – loses its integrity in the face of incestuous violence and that this loss of integrity helps account for incest’s injurious unspeakability.

This interdisciplinary dissertation examines the built and written topographies of three cities central to the contested histories and national narratives of Germany, the Czech Republic, and Poland. Using a variety of texts—novels and poetry as well as urban planning documents and submissions to architectural competitions—I show how the narratives of these cities reflect different modes of navigating national trauma and identity creation. I explore how these spaces, often divided culturally and physically, are used to construct national historical narratives and project ideal futures. The dissertation maps narrative tropes such as metaphor/metamorphosis, synecdoche, and kitsch onto physical and literary urban topography to suggest how these tropes’ unique representations of time act as sutures for each city’s particular social and historical traumas.