Postmodern Realism and That Class Which Is Not One explores the social and epistemological significance of realist description in white lower-middle-class fiction of the American seventies and eighties. As that period’s most canonized fiction reached the height of postmodernism, a cohort of fiction writers depicting white lower-middle-class characters – including Raymond Carver, Marilynne Robinson, and Lucia Berlin – turned its back on metafictional play, finding kinship instead with the political realist novelists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who brought working-class characters into visibility for a literary readership. I argue that the realist practice of these fiction writers can best be understood in terms of their desire for class-based solidarity, at the moment of the American labor movement’s collapse and the political climate’s neoliberal turn. In our own era of right-wing populism, their attempt to imagine such solidarity has become more salient than ever.

Through my close readings of these writers’ representational strategies, I work out the defining dialectic of postmodern realism. On the one hand, the aim to portray the white lower middle class as a material reality and social identity, beyond the reach of postmodern relativism, leads these writers to reinvest in narrative notations of unmediated referentiality. Particularly in its narrative description, that is, white lower-middle-class fiction supposes a social reality that can be objectively known. But on the other hand, knowledge that the social world is ideologically constituted leads these writers to upset the realist norms established within their literary works, each through a different formal invention. This disruption is not performed in an act of postmodern play but in an effort to better represent the characters’ latent class-consciousness, both as an ideological construction and as an unrealized potential for solidarity among white lower-middle-class subjects of the postmodern period. The negotiation of this dialectic forges the connection among the writers who are the focus of my dissertation. In addition to fiction by Carver, Berlin, and Robinson, I examine the contribution New Journalism makes to the realist project through Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (1979) and the view of white class identity, seen from the African-American lower-middle-class position, offered by Alice Walker’s fiction. By bringing these varied writers into conversation, my study re-conceptualizes the period’s literary history, foregrounding realism as a predominant and politically significant form.

In the cases my project explores, realist description, defined by the ethnographic detail, conjures a race-class specific social reality. But in each case, a different formal response to one aspect of white lower-middle-class culture simultaneously disavows the realist description’s claim to positive social knowledge. Carver’s minimalist short stories, for example, have the effect of stripping away as many ethnographically suggestive brand names or consumer artifacts as possible, without jettisoning referentiality entirely. “Cathedral” (1983) exemplifies this operation in that it not only prunes consumer artifacts, but also deploys an anti-realist mode – allegory – to represent the utopian possibility of experience removed from commodification. In this way, his fiction undermines its own positivist impetus, erasing the social specificity of its realist description. This erasure universalizes whiteness and middle-class-ness, reproducing their cultural hegemony, as Bharati Mukherjee has said of minimalism; however, removing social specificity allows the characters to momentarily break out of the ideologies endemic to their race-class position. This break is only a utopian possibility, but it imagines lower-middle-class whites as capable of social critique and class-based solidarity that could transcend racial categories. In other words, it is precisely the reactionary gesture of treating lower-middle-class white experience as a given in no need of social contextualization that begins to envision a critical consciousness for allegedly apolitical subjects.

Literature of Diminishment redefines regionalism as a philosophical approach that prefers a partial view of oneself and of others, whether human or nonhuman, rather than the comprehensive view pursued by nineteenth-century science. I show how American regionalist writings from the 1820s to 1910s adapt scientific techniques of observation to the aesthetics of the regionalist sketch. Their "sketchy" view of Nature highlights the deficiencies of knowing and nonetheless opens out to a view of biological processes and succession in which life cedes to life through its casualties. Regionalist literature is, then, less a literature of particular cultural or geographical regions as it is a literature whose principles of diminishment might insist on the roughness and limits of a regional setting. The archive of works I draw upon extends from environmental literature—the nature writings of John James Audubon, Henry David Thoreau, and Celia Thaxter—to less conventionally regionalist texts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries such as works by Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Gertrude Stein.

In regionalist formulations, diminishment is a mode of seeing that relies on imprecise and partial specifications rather than strict definitions. Understanding art and science as approaches that both connote ways of seeing and being in the world, I show how writers like Thoreau, Dickinson, Melville, Thaxter, and Sarah Orne Jewett experiment with partial ways of seeing through concomitantly aesthetic and scientific uses of views, optics, and visual technology. Setting the frame with Thoreau's vista from the eroding shores of Cape Cod, I consider how these writers' engagement with natural history's empirical methods attends to their own perceptual diminishment, and also, critically, to the diminishment of their object of study—Nature, or, more generally, life. The final chapters examine the practice and politics of seeing human races as "species," that is, as part of nature, through what I consider "snapshots" of black workers. Du Bois's and Stein's literary-photographic studies view and review the racialist natural history that pictures African-Americans, as Du Bois writes, "somewhere between men and cattle." Regionalism, I argue, instead affords the succession of life through diminishment, rather than a reduction of life to units of data.

Abstract

Tragedy after Darwin

by

Manya Lempert

Doctor of Philosophy in English

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Dorothy Hale, Chair

Tragedy after Darwin is the first study to recognize novelistic tragedy as a sub-genre of British and European modernism. I argue that in response to secularizing science, authors across Europe revive the worldview of the ancient tragedians. Hardy, Woolf, Pessoa, Camus, and Beckett picture a Darwinian natural world that has taken the gods’ place as tragic antagonist. If Greek tragic drama communicated the amorality of the cosmos via its divinities and its plots, the novel does so via its characters’ confrontations with an atheistic nature alien to redemptive narrative. While the critical consensus is that Darwinism, secularization, and modernist fiction itself spell the “death of tragedy,” I understand these writers’ oft-cited rejection of teleological form and their aesthetics of the momentary to be responses to Darwinism and expressions of their tragic philosophy: characters’ short-lived moments of being stand in insoluble conflict with the expansive time of natural and cosmological history.

The fiction in this study adopts an anti-Aristotelian view of tragedy, in which character is not fate; character is instead the victim, the casualty, of fate. And just as the Greek tragedians depict externally wrought necessity that is also divorced from mercy, from justice, from theodicy, Darwin’s natural selection adapts species to their environments, preserving and destroying organisms, with no conscious volition and no further end in mind – only because of chance differences among them. The variations upon which natural selection acts are matters of chance: they cannot be fully predicted and occur regardless of their adaptive benefit to the creatures involved. In both tragic drama and evolutionary biology, one cannot work backward from fortune to foresight. As a result, tragedy and evolutionary theory have faced analogous interpretive distortion. Chance, the signature of the Greek gods, has also appeared to underwrite the evolution of life – and yet a preponderance of theorists have sought to banish the aleatory from narratives of individual and species-wide destiny. When Hardy, Woolf, Pessoa, Camus, and Beckett therefore reprise Attic tragedy’s worldview – constituting a literary backlash against comforting, anthropocentric narratives of human origins and human fates – they recast the Greek gods of tragedy as Darwin’s godless nature.

My project opens by contrasting philosophy’s and anthropology’s readings of Greek tragedy and the natural world with this fiction’s own. I show that Darwin himself grappled with the notion of a cosmic lottery of fate in the biosphere, in which no moral, loving, or teleological power determined each organism’s lot or the future of species. My first chapter argues that Hardy’s tragic novels proceed to indict manmade narratives that cast mortal luck and the cruelties of men as the victim’s wrongdoing. The impassioned narrator of Tess of the d’Urbervilles and the titular character of Jude the Obscure resist the Aristotelian notion that protagonists initiate their own catastrophes, are the causal agents of their demises; these defiant figures eschew, too, Christianized tragedy that understands heroes and heroines to be morally responsible for their misfortunes in a providential universe. Although Woolf is often seen as a comedic author, I contend in my second chapter that she develops Hardy’s atheistic sense of the tragic – in her words, Hardy’s aesthetic that allows us to “feel that we are backing human nature in an unequal contest” against “Nature as a force.” Woolf perfects a novelistic structure that accentuates rebellious subjectivity at odds with an affectless environment. Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse and Bernard in The Waves envy the longevity of wind and waves and seek to secure for their treasured moments the permanence of the “granite” (Woolf’s elected noun) of logical universals – all the while knowing that their moments in time cannot possess such solidity. Representing the natural world, its forces and processes, elemental materials and organic growths, as a site of extrahuman persistence and unpredictable chance, Woolf rejects vitalist and theistic professions of the underlying security of human life within this larger totality. Woolf rejects as well ritualistic and mythical construals of tragedy as the genre that redeems our mortal fragility. Woolf’s tragic form carries with it an ethics of human limitation and interdependence, and her characters do not equate their Sisyphean pursuit of happiness with the denial or subjugation of nonhuman otherness.

Reaching across the Channel in my third and fourth chapters, I turn more explicitly to a form of contrast – between tragedy’s moments of affirmation and the siren song of negation – that emerges within the novels of Hardy and Woolf and is essential to the oeuvres of Pessoa, Camus, and Beckett. Pessoa’s Baron of Teive composes his suicide note to silence the grief that attends tragedy. His foil is Pessoa’s Darwinian nature poet, Alberto Caeiro, who expressly condemns Nietzsche’s “wisdom of Silenus,” that never to have been born is best. Caeiro actively resists the impulse to merge with the insentient environment that time’s passing on occasion inspires in him. Camus’ magisterial negative examples of The Stranger and The Fall display characters who do cultivate states of ethical indifference akin to nature’s own. These, in turn, stand in opposition to Camus’ corpus of fiction based on Woolfian moments of being, and on the literary and ethical merits of resisting, not emulating or eluding, our tragic antagonists: the absurdity of the cosmos and the men who adopt its inhumanity. Individual and ideological denials of personhood and shared defenses of it prove the antimonies of the modernist response to a tragic universe. In my final chapter, therefore, what I argue to be Beckett’s narrator’s life-negating pursuit of nonhuman quiescence in The Unnamable finds its antidote in Company’s resuscitating endeavor to people its solitude. I thus offer a fresh account of modernism’s suicides, nihilists, and murderers; my work is unique in suggesting that such characters aim to suppress tragic knowledge with their strategies to deny life. A nihilistic posture toward existence – valuing nothing – serves to transform the very pains of tragic finitude, powerlessness, and inexplicable fortune into the calm of indifference. Yet characters rarely attain this degree of dispassion, fail to live a peril-free life, are disturbed by their still resurgent anguishes and attachments. Unconcern itself may also trouble them, feel distressingly vacuous or ethically remiss. I close my project with a theory of literary criticism: studying characters from whose behaviors we recoil, immersing ourselves in modernism’s negative examples, we disclose our own ethical commitments.

This dissertation charts the emergence of the upper middle class as a distinct group in Anglo-American nineteenth-century culture and, simultaneously, offers a theory of the English-language novel of this era. Following the work of scholars like Ian Watt and Nancy Armstrong, I argue that the Anglo-American novel devoted itself in the nineteenth century to constructing an ideology around and for a particular social echelon—the upper middle class. Beginning in the 1860s, the upper middle class gained popular recognition as a new social group in Britain. Newspapers, magazines, and fiction writers identified the upper middle class as a group of affluent, professionally inclined, metropolitan-leaning, novel-loving men and women. Depending on the political inclinations of the beholder, the upper middle class either emblematized the best traits of the British people or crystallized everything wrong with the nation and its empire. My project insists that the nineteenth-century novel obsessively focuses on the upper middle class and, in doing so, invented the sociocultural meaning for this group. I assert that recognizing the special relationship between the novel and the upper middle class is crucial to understanding the history and theory of the genre itself. I further contend that this novel-born ideology is essential to understanding Anglo-American popular conceptions of class and, I argue, still shapes our discussions of capital and its forms, our definitions of affluence, and the meaning we give to economic inequality. In my introduction and conclusion, I touch on how this class ideology that originated in the nineteenth-century continues to be reiterated in Anglo-American culture of the present—particularly the idea that conversational style validates and justifies affluence.

I show how the nineteenth-century novel characterized the upper middle class as possessing an almost magical ability to generate capital. Nineteenth-century novelists not only cemented a cultural ideal of the upper middle class as affluent, professionally-inclined, metropolitan-leaning, and novel-loving, but they also portrayed this social group as able to conjure money seemingly out of nowhere. Pierre Bourdieu’s 1985 essay “The Forms of Capital” famously identifies three types of wealth—economic, cultural, and social—and this theory forms a central reference point for my project. A century before Bourdieu wrote this essay, I contend, nineteenth-century novelists characterized the members of the upper middle class as sophisticated manipulators of multiform capital, who could skillfully convert between these different forms with preternatural ease. Novelists like Austen, Dickens, Eliot, and James—among others—show their upper-middle-class characters generating capital not through traditional financial means like the stock market, trade, or professional employment, but through their talk. In these novels—some of the most canonical in the English language—conversation functions as an economic technology capable of creating just the right kind of wealth at just the right moment. In each chapter, I analyze how a given novelist (Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James) innovated their era’s definition of “good” conversation by employing previously verboten speech genres—detraction, meanness, masculine and feminine conversational styles, and making another feel de trop—as narrative technique, such as omniscient narration, characterization, generalization, and free indirect discourse.

The first chapter focuses on the work of Jane Austen, specifically her novel, Emma. I examine how Austen’s social origins in the “pseudo-gentry,” the group of genteel rural people who lived like the gentry but did not actually own hereditary estates, provided her with the fodder to invent a proto-upper middle class through her novels. I study how her novels—particularly her famous happy endings—configure and privilege this new echelon. Then, looking at Austen’s engagement with the conduct book literature, I trace this ideology of conversation directed at young girls and women at the time, showing how an ability to have “good” conversations functioned as an indicator of gentility. Paying attention to what this ideology discourages, I examine how the speech genre of detraction—much maligned in these books—gave Austen a model for her omniscient narration.

My second chapter looks at Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. I argue that Dickens’s novelistic project on a whole is preoccupied with the lower-middle-class individual moving into the upper middle class. I begin with the etiquette manual, a genre that first appeared in the 1830s. Intensely preoccupied with capital and its trappings, the genre nevertheless frames capital—who has it, how much and why—as a taboo subject of conversation, terming preoccupation with money “meanness.” I show how the etiquette manual provided a crash course in multiform capital for its nineteenth-century readers and instructed this readership in how to read speech and behavior as indications of social, economic and cultural capital. Like the reader of the etiquette manual, Scrooge receives an education from the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come in multiform capital; he learns the importance of cultural and social capital to true affluence. A Christmas Carol establishes a new multiform affluence in the place of Scrooge’s obsession with economic capital. Furthermore, in his narration, Dickens turns this mode of capital-reading into a method of characterization and, like Austen, creates a new conversational technique from a former prohibition: Dickens repositions this euphemized meanness as another conversational strategy by which the upper middle class imagines and performs its aspirational identity.

The third chapter advances this argument by examining George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I examine Eliot’s own trajectory from a lower-middle-class daughter of a rural estate manager to the artistic and learned ranks of upper-middle-class London. Reading across her novels, I show how, like Austen and Dickens before her, she constructs the upper middle class as an economic and social ideal, particularly in Middlemarch, in which her four central protagonists all embark on upper-middle-class lives in London at the novel’s close. Then, I put Middlemarch in context of John Ruskin’s Victorian conduct book, Sesame and Lilies, in which Ruskin outlines his ideal man and woman of modern, bourgeois society. I trace how, through this text, Ruskin outlines two gendered styles of conversation: women sympathize and, using their superior knowledge and educations, men instruct and generalize. I argue that, in Middlemarch, Eliot both affirms and subverts these gendered styles of conversation by employing both in her narration; she practices what I call “sympathetic generalization,” in which she very quickly switches from feminine-coded sympathy to male-coded generalization.

The fourth and last chapter focuses on Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and how James uses this novel to test upper-middle-class ideology as a method for reorienting trans-Atlantic and, more broadly, colonial hierarchies. Reading Isabel Archer as the archetypal upper-middle-class seeker, who marries Gilbert Osmond in an attempt to attain that particularly desirable mixture of affluence and moral superiority, I show how the novel ultimately ends up ambivalent about whether this ideology creates a truly trans-Atlantic upper middle class. James’s free indirect discourse replicates the status of the American outsider in British polite society; the narrator makes the reader feel “de trop,” the etiquette manual’s term for feeling extra, unwanted, like a “third wheel” in a social situation. This technique makes the reader experience being an outsider, an interloper, on the intimacy between narrator and character, replicating James’s own status as an American in England as a dynamic between reader and narrator. In using this negative social experience, a normative instance of not excelling in conversation, as a model for his free indirect discourse, James also shows the power inherent in being de trop, as well as the fine line between making another feel de trop and feeling de trop oneself. Through Portrait’s narrative and his iteration of free indirect discourse, James works to collapse the national distinctions between American and English society, trying to position the upper middle class and its novelistic ideology into a truly Anglo-American hybrid.

In my conclusion, I turn to a few turn-of-the-century writers to examine the fate of the upper middle class and the novel—John Galsworthy, Oscar Wilde, Edith Wharton, and Rudyard Kipling. I argue that, by this time, the upper middle class had codified into a broadly recognizable social category, allowing Galsworthy to open his popular novel, The Man of Property, by describing the Forsytes as “an upper-middle-class family in full plumage.” Orwell and Galsworthy’s argued that the upper middle class disappeared after World War I, but I look at how, recently, in the twenty-first century, this social group has reemerged into preeminence, catching the eye of sociologists and, of course, novelists.

Geronimo’s Ghosts rethinks the convergences of racialization and settler colonialism in the United States by considering together Ethnic and Native American novels published in the wake of the Civil Rights and Power Movements. Critical Indigenous Studies has understood Native American tribes, who generally seek greater political autonomy through sovereignty, and African Americans, Asian Americans, and other minority groups, who generally seek greater political inclusion through civil rights, to have incongruous and even opposing objectives within liberation and resistance movements. Still, many non-native Ethnic American novelists populate their novels with Indigenous characters whose presence configures their examination of the respective obstacles to political inclusion faced by African Americans, Asian Americans, or other groups. By examining these non-native Ethnic American novels through the perspective of Native American literary theory, this dissertation seeks to reimagine the coalitionary potential of Indigenous sovereignty and racial civil rights for advancing resistance movements through discursive measures. The conceptual foundation of my understanding of American Indian literary theory is the “Three Geronimos” motif in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, which suggests that Geronimo, whose 1886 surrender is often believed to mark the end of the “Indian Wars,” was never actually captured in order to assert that Indigenous resistance has carried on into the twentieth century. Through the concept of the medicine story, a story with the capacity to heal, I argue that Silko invites us to appreciate in Indigenous presence a potentiality for resistance and resurgence which is cultural or ideological rather than martial. Three subsequent chapters draw an Ethnic American novel into conversation with a Native American novel to illuminate how concepts of tribal sovereignty prove useful to non-native Ethnic writers because of the unique conjunctions of expropriated Indigenous land and exploitable enslaved, immigrant, or foreign labor under American settler colonialism, which give rise to diametrically opposing federal policies toward Indigenous peoples and racial minorities. This dissertation demonstrates not only how Native American literary theory allows for a greater comprehension of non-native post-Civil Rights novels but, even further, how concepts of tribal sovereignty that emerge from American Indian literary theory can be used to advance the project of civil rights, rather than, as previous scholarship has maintained, necessarily undermining it.

My dissertation, History's Unmentionables: Reference and Interiority in the Contemporary American Historical Novel, analyzes what I argue are traces of historical referents, specifically the minds of historical figures, in the works of Norman Mailer, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon. The project critiques postmodern theories of narrative that, citing their equivalence as texts, attempt to undo the distinction between histories and fictions. While such claims are predicated on the assumed irrecoverability of historical referents, I argue that we can only account for a network of stylistic peculiarities in these authors' works as disruptions created by such referents.

My first chapter, "`Strange Even to Himself': History, Characterization, and the Absence of Interiority in Libra," accounts for a self-alienation unique to the historical figures in DeLillo's novel. I argue that DeLillo skirts the epistemological limit posed by the minds of historical figures by folding that limit into his characterizations; that is, unlike the novel's purely fictional creations, his versions of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby lack access to their own interiorities. Failing to identify with a text that does not correspond to their referential selves, they register their own fictionality as a result. My second chapter, "The Devil's in the Details: The Mundane Symbols of The Executioner's Song," combines theories of description with recent work in thing theory to show how the recalcitrant materiality of the story's details undercuts any symbolic reading of the text. Mailer's presentation of his material certainly begs for such readings at moments; even Hugh Kenner has, somewhat ghoulishly, linked the coroner's initial inability to recognize Gilmore's heart (the actual organ) to "the truth that...the heart of man is very often desperately wicked." The resistance of Gilmore's corpse to this distasteful metaphorization marks, I claim, an ethical limit to fictionalization. My third chapter, "The Abstracted Ladder: Mason & Dixon's Model of History," examines the purpose underlying the multiple returns to literal meanings and material objects staged over the course of the novel. As the text reveals the arbitrariness of the organizing principles governing historical narrative, it frees up areas of the past such narratives have obscured and suggests their recuperation depends on a multiplicity of imperfect frames.

I study works of fiction and poetry that explore the process by which feelings come to seem relevant or productive to those who experience them and to others. My research seeks to contribute both to literary studies and to recent debates about the political and philosophical usefulness of lived or represented feelings. Contemporary scholars often treat works of literature as sites that help us discover why it is politically or ethically urgent, or epistemically revealing, to pay attention to other persons' and our own emotional experiences. The writers I examine do not stress forceful imperatives to attend to how someone feels. Rather, they call attention to the difficulty of knowing how intensely, when, and why we should do so. Each chapter of my dissertation focuses on one quality of feelings that, one might think, should make these feelings reliable sources of knowledge or potential change. These qualities include feelings' whimsicality (which I examine through Wallace Stevens and Sylvia Plath), their urgency (which I examine by reading Ralph Ellison), their portability (which I examine by reading Virginia Woolf and F. Scott Fitzgerald), their persistence (which I examine by reading John Ashbery), and the quality I will focus on today, their immersiveness (which I examine by reading Marcel Proust and James Baldwin).

The writers I study show why such qualities might seem politically or philosophically promising. But they also highlight why it is in fact hard to decide whether feelings that carry such qualities are significant in any larger sense. On a historical level, I argue that the definitions of feeling my chosen writers rely on are inspired by modernist philosophy, political theory, and psychology. These writers' reflections on the unclear importance of feelings can therefore help illuminate the stakes of parallel reflections taking place in these other disciplines. These writers can also thus help us appreciate literature's particular contribution to this strand of modernist intellectual history. More theoretically, I claim that my chosen novelists and poets explore a dimension of emotional experience that has been neglected by contemporary affect theory because of its prevalent emphasis on proving feelings' productivity. My research therefore aims to map out some ways in which these writers' treatment of feeling could help us think more self-critically and more expansively about our current studies of fictional or lived emotional states.

In my introduction I present the larger social and intellectual contexts and reasons for modernist literature's particular preoccupation with uncertainly important feelings. For modernist philosophy and politics, emotions are both obstacles and gateways. They are the tools and objects of new philosophical and political ideas that range from psychoanalysis to early communism. But from the first, many thinkers also doubt whether it is possible reliably to parse apart politically or philosophically significant feelings from irrelevant ones. I outline this unease as it is voiced by Karl Marx, William James, Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, and Hannah Arendt. I also set these thinkers' treatments of feeling in dialogue with recent historical research on how the experience of total war destabilized Western society's standards of emotional proportion. The introduction finally frames my project within the field of affect studies as staked out by critics such as Charles Altieri, Rei Terada, Lauren Berlant, and Sianne Ngai.

My first chapter focuses on whimsical feelings. Wallace Stevens and Sylvia Plath center their lyrics on the emotional vacillations of the introspective self. Both poets showcase the way that feelings' whimsical persistence in searching for their most appropriate or appealing objects could be seen to resemble or to support a philosophical or political investigation of the proper importance of any given subjective impression or reaction. But they also suggest that the very diversity of the spans and intensities of focus feelings are capable of keeps making these feelings seem unreliable and inconsistent; proofs not of any particular importance of their speakers' inner lives, but of these speakers' confusion about its import. Stevens explores the process of trying to decide what more or less important self-knowledge could come from each momentary focus his speakers' feelings give to their experience. Plath studies her speakers' ongoing attempts to figure out whether and why the feelings they uncover could deserve to be voiced or even lingered in. Their speakers alternately lose and regain hope of finding in this whimsicality a stable sense of who they are or what they merit. Both poets keep multiplying the possible contexts, scales, pitches, and spans of time or space in which each feeling could be experienced. On the one hand, their poetry affirms emotional states as paths toward discovering or sounding new modes in which we relate to our world. On the other hand, the way their represented feelings' different scales and paces disrupt or fold into each other dramatizes how hard it is to decide exactly why each momentary worry or elation should have any significance even to the person experiencing them.

In the second chapter I examine how late modernists represent the difficulty of making sense of feelings' portability. I focus on Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway as well as F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night. Woolf and Fitzgerald are preoccupied by the apparent difficulty of stably distinguishing between emotional experiences that stem from or react to intense personal events and ones that stem from law-like, socially instilled habits. They showcase the difficulty of expressing feelings in a way that would allow them to be stably and reliably recognized as expressions of trauma or of libido; of the sensitivity with which their characters take in the fine grain of the objects and impressions they are presented with, or the indiscriminateness with which they equate all these objects as sources of more or less lasting pleasure. Both Woolf and Fitzgerald embed emotional exchanges within descriptions of walks, parties, and teas. They frame these social events as spaces in which the long-term material labor that goes into maintaining their characters' lifestyles is set in tension with these persons' momentary efforts to lift the moods of those around them. Their characters try to use their possessions and bodies to create or demand fleeting offerings of joy or comfort. Rather than be satisfied or disappointed by what they give or receive, they keep discovering new aspects of an uncertainty about whether each such attempted exchange has been successful and about how significantly these emotional gifts affect their larger lives. Woolf introspects primarily into the process by which her characters try with varied success to apply their resurging feelings to a new context or person. Fitzgerald remains on the outside of his characters' minds, and focuses on the way their feelings are recurrently expressed within the social and material world.

The third chapter studies the immersiveness of feelings. Marcel Proust and James Baldwin explore what it would mean to try to do something with feelings that relate to enveloping sensory spaces. They ask how one nurtures such immersive feelings as potentially significant outcomes of our engagement with the world or models for how we can engage with this world further. They explore how one could try to perpetuate these feelings or satisfyingly to act on them. They also highlight the sheer effort it requires emotionally to take in or react to one's entire horizon of perception. But Proust and Baldwin also wonder how we can ever tell that any such immersive emotional experience is valuable, precise, or lasting. For both writers this preoccupation with the uncertain and unsteady relevance of immersive feelings is mediated through their simultaneous preoccupation with rooms. Both for Proust and for Baldwin rooms provide the best, perhaps even too self-flatteringly material models for how enveloping and seemingly reliable a space a feeling is able to draw us to or to discover around itself. Yet rooms also provide models for the ease with which immersive feelings are entered and exited. They showcase the constant need such feelings have for material settings to fuel and confirm themselves, the unreliability of the efforts they inspire us to apply toward the world, the paucity of such feelings' engagement with parts of the world we do not immediately sense.

The last chapter examines emotional abundance through the poetry of John Ashbery. Emotional states, as Ashbery represents them, are abundant in two interrelated senses. They are abundant, first, in the sheer number of their ongoing expressions; in the way that these expressions seem always to be vaster and greater in number than the speaker can attend to all at once. Second, they are abundant in that--rather than present the speaker merely with concepts or merely with sensations--they offer what appears to be a sensory landscape that is already suffused with its own abstract consequences and applications. Rather than represent feeling as an immediate connection or reaction to his personal history or his environment, Ashbery represents his speakers' emotional states as attempts to imagine and inhabit a landscape independent of these contexts; a landscape that the speaker seems at once to create and to fall into as his feelings' necessary corollary, one that seems to not represent but occlude and rival--or at the very least to frequently lose from sight--the context to which it would at first appear to be responding. The details Ashbery's represented environments contain seem constantly and richly to open up onto potentially universal insights; his speakers keeps encountering abstractions in what appear to be robust material forms ready to be inhabited, touched, or tested. But Ashbery also keeps showing that, in themselves, feelings are unable to turn their abundance of expression into articulable particular or universal insights. His speakers easily discard or simply forget about their disconnected momentary expressions as soon as they lose their ephemeral appeal.

My conclusion is entitled "Eyebread," taking up a phrase Walter Benjamin coined during a euphoric false revelation about pastries that he had while on hashish. I take Benjamin's reflections on altered states as a model for my research because of how well they show that, paradoxically, emotions' potential for seriousness and insight is closely related to their potential for preciosity and frivolity. I also take it as a point of departure as I propose how one could apply these questions back to the political and philosophical realms to which these literary works so unreliably and inconsistently aspire. Studying more closely the inconsistent importance and productivity of feelings can help us rearticulate both how we define the subject positions from which we conduct philosophical or political inquiry, and how we delimit the seriousness and importance of philosophy and politics in themselves. Affect theory is uniquely able to help us work toward addressing these questions, provided that--rather than try to deny the unclear importance of feelings, as it has done up till now--it embraces this lack of clarity as the defining feature of emotional experiences.

In The Wikipedic Novel, I taxonomize a new novelistic subgenre that is distinguished by the self- conscious way it bears within its form information from the Open-Source Internet. I argue that these novels, laden with semi-reliable narrators, embed “clickable” material that creates in readers a compulsion to draw away from these texts to the Internet to verify ideas. This compulsion, which I call “clickability,” is incited by specific narrative features, some of which include seemingly polymathic first-person narrators who use the Internet, the visual rhetoric of proper nouns and the embellishment of summary, and accounts of art and historical events mediated through televisionand the Internet. In using these elements, the novelists under study—Tom McCarthy, Teju Cole, and Ishmael Reed—rework the genres of the Novel of Ideas and the Encyclopedic Novel. Across interviews, these three authors unashamedly admit to using Wikipedia in drafting their novels, and this study investigates how the resonances of this cribbing (encouraged by the Open-Source Internet’s inventors) affect plot, character, and ethics in these works. My theorization of the Wikipedic Novel thus aims to contribute to the understanding of how the novel as a “cannibal art” thrives through its innovative incorporation of heterogeneous social discourses. And more generally, my dissertation explores the ways novels call attention to their status as printed books, autonomous objects and artistic totalities whose unified expression is, in these novels, symbolized by their material wholeness—an attribute that is deployed as the sign of “the literary.”

My introductory chapter describes the history of Open-Source logic, drawn primarily from Wikipedia’s architects’ belief that the collective knowledge of an Internet plurality should be openly available and reusable without repercussion. I account for how this ideology opens a terrain for novelistic craft to shift to accommodate the Open-Source’s knowledge, even despite its own freight of potential unreliability. In chapter 2, I read Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (2015) to expand the term called “visual rhetoric”: the way book pages and textual marking from quotations to proper nouns create presuppositions of knowledge. These help readers affiliate with the protagonist, a British anthropologist named “U.,” who has a confidence-crisis as the Internet opens the terrain for the greater plurality, “you,” to cannibalize his skills. Chapter 3 analyzes Teju Cole’s Open City (2011) and mobilizes the terms of clickability through a novel whose thematics are explicitly not technological. The narrative representation of ideas in this chapter dramatizes Walter Benjamin’s critique of “information” as a turn away from the social bonds and ethical responsibilities of lived community. Cole’s novel deliberately diverts readers from the unreliable narrator’s action in the story world to the extratextual corroboration of his ideas as he himself “later looks up” facts in the novel or admits to having “once read” esoteric, masterful ideas that break from the novel’s general style and imply a subtle digital banality guiding information’s inclusion in the novel. This extradiegetic invitation helps to characterize the protagonist primarily through his obsessive connoisseurship, which on the level of plot performs his attempt to escape responsibility for the harm he has done to others. Chapter 4 discusses the figure of the “digital griot” in Ishmael Reed’s JUICE! (2011). The novel is narrated by a political cartoonist retrospectively describing his obsession with the O.J. Simpson “trial of thecentury.” I argue that the novelistic representation of a live media event opens a range of clickable, viewable ephemera to supplement the narrator’s accounting. This turn on historical fiction reanimates the role of the narrator due to the irrecoverable lacunae of minor moments in the Open- Source—radio callers, local periodicals, and particular descriptions of court scenes otherwise unavailable in digital archives. The blur between fact, fiction, and verifiability affiliates the narrator and, by extension, author, with the figure of the “digital griot,” or wizened storyteller of live events made “dead” and irrecoverable for a newer generation.

Hardboiled Aesthetics: High Art and Modes of Excess in the American Detective Novel argues that 1940s American detective fiction fetishizes the work of art more perversely and self-consciously than high modernist texts. Since the early twentieth century, the modernist novel has defined its aesthetic project as a retreat from or resistance to mass culture, creating what Andreas Huyssen has called the “Great Divide.” Yet one of the central ambiguities of high modernism is its strange fascination with the low. The modernist novel displays an obsession with “the masses” even as it attempts to use this “vulgarity” to elevate its own aesthetic status. If modernism abandons the field of high art production to study “low life,” then it is surprising to find that the representation of high aestheticism surfaces with greatest frequency in one of the most “vulgar” forms of mass fiction: the American hardboiled novel. Beginning with the debates surrounding the Aesthetic Movement, between figures like Oscar Wilde and Henry James, Hardboiled Aesthetics examines how certain hardboiled writers, such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Vera Caspary, attempt to distance themselves from commercial modes of production by drawing on fin de siècle European aestheticism in order to legitimize the artistic merit of the detective novel. I define the “hardboiled aesthetic” of the American detective novel as a constant fluctuation between moments of excess and attempts to contain that excessiveness.

Hardboiled Aesthetics traces how cultural constructions of high aestheticism are mobilized and reconstituted in the American detective novel to produce an aesthetics that is refined yet hardboiled and masculine, elevated yet still faithful to the demands of its mass readers. I study how the signature type of the Aesthetic Movement, the highbrow aesthete, is transported from the decadent milieu of 1890s Europe to the consumerist society of 1940s America. I begin first by comparing the excessive aestheticism of S. S. Van Dine’s “Philo Vance” novels to the sparse minimalism in Dashiell Hammett’s hardboiled fiction. I argue that Van Dine consciously models his American detective as a European aesthete in order to showcase his own aesthetic knowledge. However, his excessive didacticism goes against his aesthetic goals, producing a narrative that becomes increasingly contrived and formulaic. Considered the innovator of the hardboiled style, Dashiell Hammett approaches the writing of detective fiction from what could be called an anti-aesthetic position. Through his construction of the detective as both anti-aesthete and anti-consumer, Hammett provides a new criterion for evaluating artistic value that replaces the “feminine” excesses of Van Dine’s decadent aestheticism with an emphasis on “manly” minimalism. In contrast to Hammett’s turn to minimalism as a reaction against commodification, Raymond Chandler attempts to project the novel as a source of aesthetic value through his portrayal of detective Philip Marlowe as a hybrid “hardboiled aesthete” figure who is both tough yet refined. My second chapter argues that Marlowe’s ornate descriptions of art objects and rooms stem from Chandler’s fascination with Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton, which is itself a criticism of the “aesthetic craze” of collecting that Oscar Wilde initiated in America at the turn of the century. Although Chandler’s room descriptions often impede the plot, I argue that these excessive narrative digressions in fact allow Chandler to experiment with and expand the generic limits of the detective novel.

My third chapter examines how the hardboiled style, so powerfully cultivated in the commodified detective novel, comes to inform the modernist novel’s high style. For Ernest Hemingway, the pursuit of formal restraint represents a desire to re-masculinize novelistic aesthetics, a project which James M. Cain also adopts in his hardboiled writing. However, Cain’s representation of aestheticism and masculinity produces an opposite aesthetic style – that of velocity and excess – to express the tensions that Hemingway attempts to manage through minimalism. Addressing the fact that the detective novel is a predominantly masculine genre, my final chapter turns to Vera Caspary’s efforts in her novel Laura to reimagine the masculinist aesthetics of writers like Cain from a distinctly female perspective. Building on Walter Benjamin’s theories on public and private spaces, I argue that Laura’s individuality cannot be decoded from her personal possessions, thus allowing her to counteract the proprietary (male) desire to own and display her as an object of consumption. Laura affirms her female selfhood in terms of a negative capability, an excess that cannot be fully rendered by stylistic forms of representation.

"American Love Stories" argues for the continuity between two traditions often taken to be antagonistic: the sentimental novel of the mid-nineteenth century and the high modernism of Henry James. This continuity emerges in the love stories tracked here, from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Gates Ajar, through Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance and Herman Melville's Pierre, to Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons and James's The Golden Bowl. In these love stories--the other side of the gothic tradition described by Leslie Fiedler--desire is performed rather than repressed, and the self is less a private container than a public exhibit. This literary-historical claim works in tandem with the dissertation's argument for revising narrative ethics. The recent ethical turn in literary criticism understands literature as practically engaging the emotions, especially varieties of love, that shape our social lives. It figures reading as a love story in its own right: an encounter with a text that might grant us intimacy with an authorial persona or else spurn our desire to grasp its alterity. Narrative ethics thereby enables literary criticism to speak to moral and political questions about how reading fiction might shape our lived experience of self and other. And narrative ethics offers an antidote to methodologies that would reduce a text to a cultural symptom, giving literary critics, instead, theoretical tools to evaluate the sense of otherness and intimacy that reading can evoke.

But in imagining the text-as-other, narrative ethics relies on a deep model of subjectivity that isolates the text from its cultural moment. Historicist methods offer an instructive supplement by reading selves and texts alike as flatter entities embedded in discursive networks. Maintaining narrative ethics' notion of the text as the other, this dissertation employs historicist techniques to read novels as thoroughly engaged with their cultural milieu. The dissertation tracks the novels' preoccupations, which direct attention toward surrounding discourses like religious devotional guides, art criticism, and interior decoration. One payoff of this hybrid methodology is to put into conversation texts that have often been divorced from each other in the criticism and thus to bring to light overlooked aspects of each. Read as a starting point for Jamesian psychological realism, sentimental love looks less like an ideological smokescreen, as it can in historicist criticism, and more like a viable description of self-other relations. When James is read as an inheritor of the sentimental mode, his self-conscious difficulty, highlighted in narrative ethics, gets complicated by his relish for the scenic and the melodramatic. Further, by recapturing the historical antecedents of the American love story, this dissertation provides an intellectual history of narrative ethics' commitment to an ideal of reading that is deep and emotional. The dissertation finds sources for this ideal in mid-nineteenth century Protestant guides urging believers to read the Bible deeply, as a love letter from God. Finally, this hybrid methodology tracks in the love stories themselves the persistence of a version of selfhood in the American tradition that is no less lovable for being more surface than depth. This model of subjectivity, and the methodology it sponsors, enables narrative ethics to account for a fuller range of self-other encounters. The text emerges as an other which is at once culturally determined and emotionally compelling.