“Fossil-Fueled Fictions: Coal, Oil, and the Making of American Literary Modernity (1900-1960)” is the first sustained study to examine representations of fossil fuels in modernist-era U.S. fiction. Though modernity was built on a foundation of fossil fuels, most literary critics have assumed that modernist novelists were unaware of the dire environmental, economic, and social ramifications of nonrenewable energy use. “Fossil-Fueled Fictions” challenges this longstanding critical assumption by uncovering how early-twentieth-century U.S. fiction writers grappled with their period’s social attachment to and material dependence on fossil fuels. Combining archival research with close analysis of novels by Zora Neale Hurston, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edna Ferber, Ralph Ellison, and others, my project demonstrates that half a century before “climate change” entered the lexicon, modernist writers were struggling to understand the catastrophic socio-ecological impacts of fossil fuel consumption—and in many cases, presciently contributing to emerging discourses around environmental and energy justice. Put simply, I argue, fossil fuels deeply permeated the atmosphere of American literature in the first half of the twentieth century.

This dissertation is dedicated to the idea that the cultural phenomenon of wellness—understood as an ethos of self-directed healthcare—provides a generative framework for thinking through the formal and critical dimensions of a diverse selection of novels published in the years between 2013-2019. How, it asks, do the novels examined in each chapter serve as a social and formal site for analyzing the zeitgeist of wellness? In what ways do these fictional accounts of wellness influence the novel on the level of genre? How does the history, culture, and politics of wellness work discursively to shape these fictional worlds? To what effect? And how might the critical concerns of these novels be enriched or best understood from the perspective of wellness? These formal questions open up an equally compelling set of broader sociopolitical critiques of wellness including the manifold ways it obfuscates the structural violence of the U.S. healthcare system, the decline of the welfare state, and the disappearance of social services. Moreover, the formal presence of wellness in the novels prompts readers to consider how it operates as a moral and ethical framework for judging and stigmatizing those who “fail” to embody signs of wellness or to take control of their health, allowing larger systemic failures to be redirected back onto the individual. At stake in wellness’ incorporation and ubiquity is the continued shift away from alternative systems of care whereby a reified model of self-directed healthcare maintains rather than subverts the hegemony of western biomedicine. Within these texts, one finds an urgency to articulate new modes of wellbeing rooted in collectivity and interdependence. In answering these questions, my dissertation hopes to make the case for the usefulness of wellness to critical discussions of recent literary production.

Miserable Capitalism develops a new theory of the twentieth-century experimental novel by exploring how works of modernist Anglophone fiction connected fictional representations of emotional suffering to the historical fact of politico-economic misery. In the work of Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, and Kathy Acker, I identify a form of writing that registers a distinctly political account of immiseration—the relative decline in living standards wrought by capital accumulation—through its attention to intersubjectivity. Within these works, I explore the shifting political function and social content of formal strategies—such as free indirect discourse, apostrophe, polyphony, and intertextuality—alongside and in relation to depictions of socioemotional isolation and the physiological consequences of impoverishment. In these texts, the realization of the desire for intimate social connection and meaningful attachment is foreclosed, but never fully destroyed, by capitalist alienation. Ultimately, I argue that in a century of economic crisis, the psychological and physiological misery recorded by the modernist novel acts in dialectical relation with political depression, both registering and informing an apparent impasse. Connecting the affects of melancholy to political destitution, these literary works conceptualize suffering as the anguish provoked by thwarted attempts to change or transform the given world.My dissertation and book project examines an unconscious lost object: not just the possibility of being-together, but what that being-together might bring. It is both a mode of emancipated being, and the means of achieving that unabstracted life through solidarity. While revolution forms part of their coordinates, fearing impossibility and trapped in stasis, together Woolf, Beckett, and Acker mourn a total social transformation that might never happen. In Chapter One, I show how Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931) uses multiple narrative voices to mourn the dissolution of shared life, examining how her text formalizes the horrors of British colonialism and the emancipatory limitations of the women’s suffrage movement. Retaining the structural causality of Woolf’s despair, in Chapter Two I turn to Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable (1953/1958), in which the paradigmatic expression of capitalism’s instrumentalized rationality in the mass-extinction events of Auschwitz and Hiroshima results in the disintegration of the individual. Through an aesthetics of subtraction, Beckett creates a novel after the liquidation of the subject, when language does not signify, material resources have dried up, and time is stuck. Extending Beckett’s total disintegration of the subject, in Chapter Three I read Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School (1978/1984) as indexing the period of full-blown capitalist crisis. Acker’s novel is not only about economic precarity and its violence on the level of content; it also uses characteristically postmodern formal strategies such as pastiche and fragmentation to explore the psychosocial and bodily breakdowns caused by economic suffering. Intervening in the history and theory of the novel as well as gender and sexuality studies, and social epidemiology, Miserable Capitalism illustrates how the modern novel continued to seek the forms needed to counter the structurally imposed, heterogeneous suffering that dominated twentieth-century life. Through their formal and rhetorical experimentation, the three novelists thus elongate the novel’s history of confronting intellectual and social crisis simultaneously, depicting a growing desperation in the modern Anglophone novel to contend with the remorse of severed social connection and basic communication, and the felt impossibility of societal transformation.

While the discourses of the physical and social sciences gave literary naturalists a useful framework for understanding the world (how environments determined human action), those same discourses ended up calling into question the freedom—and thus the value—of artists who were themselves understood to be determined by natural and social forces. How, over time, literary naturalists frame and navigate both this issue and the larger issue of the relationship between the aesthetic and determinism furnishes the subject matter for this dissertation.

What do we mean, this dissertation asks, when we talk about "contemporary literature"? Far from being a fixed category of literary history, the contemporary is always on the move. Just as the "now" when I am writing this abstract is different from the "now" when you are reading it, the contemporary does not so much delimit history as drift across it. So what does it mean to call ourselves contemporary? In "Contemporary Drift," I argue that "contemporary" is more than a name for novelty--it is also an untimely connection to the past. We can best grasp this paradox of contemporary life, I suggest, by reading it through the historical dynamics of genre. More drag than drift, genres stay the same even as they change over time; they are recognizable precisely to the extent to that they're repeatable. The iterations of genre interrupt the fragile immediacy of the contemporary. Reconsidering the fates of the historical novel, the realist novel, the detective novel, and the noir film, I claim that genre shows us what it means--and what it takes--to see ourselves in history.

The way we consolidate a sense of the now is intimately connected to larger issues of literary history: how we construct canons, how we distinguish historical periods, how we lay claim to the continued relevance of the past. My project thus aims to reorient our literary present by looking not at new forms but at renewed forms. Each chapter of my dissertation engages the recent "afterlife" of an older genre in order to show how it conjures a complex image of the contemporary. These reanimated genres insist on the present's singularity yet inevitably invoke its continuity with the past. I consider the strange figure of the speaking dead that links classic film noir to the nostalgic repetitions of neo-noir; the entangled politics of waiting, reading, and race that structure the detective fiction of Colson Whitehead, Michael Chabon, and Vikram Chandra; the tension between the distant gaze of periodization and the everyday details of realism staged in the work of Bret Easton Ellis and J.M. Coetzee; and the modes of anachronism that shape historical novels by John Fowles and Tom McCarthy. These ostensibly outdated genres show how the present can encompass days, decades, even centuries. In doing so, they suggest that being contemporary means always being just a little out of date.

Take Care: Making and Re-Making Dis/ability in Contemporary Science Fiction examines the genre of science fiction through the lens of disability studies to answer the question: “What does it mean to care and be cared for?” By deconstructing the term care, I show how science fiction as a genre articulates the complexities of care and how the language of care obfuscates and validates systemic injustices and violences. I examine a wide range of science fiction works across North America, South Korea, and Japan, including novels, short stories, and manga from the 1980s onward by authors such as James Tiptree Jr., Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, Han Kang, and Hiromu Arakawa. Through the systems of care depicted in these texts—ranging from cultural, governmental, and alien to technological—I dispute the validity of care, care language, and caretaking when used to disable rather than enable subjects. Science fiction presents futures that makes visible bodies erased by the intersections of disability, race, gender, and sexuality. I show how science fiction utilizes and explores the possibilities and potential of advanced technologies while simultaneously challenging and criticizing ableist systems. I show how the effects of ableist systems that force disabled bodies to pass as worthy of care disproportionately affect bodies further minoritized by race, gender, sexuality, and invisible or visible disability. Through this project, I communicate the simple idea that disabled people have a right to be cared for on their own terms rather than for the convenience of others; criticize systems of care that exploit, further disable, or destabilize disabled bodies; and establish conversations of disability and care as desired by disabled bodies.