ABSTRACT

Writing Beauty:

John Ruskin’s Vision of Neural Imagination in the Works of

Nathaniel Hawthorne and George Eliot

By

Sheena Berwick

This dissertation responds to a growing awareness of beauty and visual sensibility in mid-to-late 19th-century British and American novels. These works demonstrate the authors’ appreciation of beauty as a condition of body, mind, soul, and culture. It also illustrates their ability to create through the text an evocative technique of visual writing that creates an imaginative and sensual connection to beauty in the reader’s neuro-visual experience of their art. In considering this development, the dissertation explores the human imagination of writer and reader: ideas, coded into neural transmissions between writer and reader through the medium of text which creates and recreates fictional worlds through mental images, and consequently produces emotional realities in the reader. I attribute this creative partnership in writing and reading to the perception, writing, and reading theories of John Ruskin, and especially to his discussions of beauty, sensuality and imagination expressed throughout the early volumes of his master works, Modern Painters.

Ruskin thought of the experience of beauty in nature and art as an embodied product of the brain/mind, traveling freely through the mind and body changing one’s perceptions of the world and our relations to it. The human response to art in this view is transmitted through the individual back into society, affecting others and transforming society. If we think of beauty this way, we are thinking of it as a neuroaesthetic communications network circulating pleasure and delight and social enhancement—emotional, psychological, physical and moral —moving as a personal gift to the soul of the community. Another way to understand this happy interchange would be as a neuro-hormone pleasure highway. Ruskin, after all, proposed his own version of this when he imagined the processes of the undefinable feeling called beauty—what science has since discovered as hormonal and chemical products of the brain—distributing elixirs of pleasure from the mind through the body’s mapped highways of veins and arteries. Ruskin’s description of these sensations in reaction to beauty were based on his attention to his physio-biological processes in the 1840s. One hundred and fifty years later modern science put Ruskin’s theory to a neurological test. Semir Zeki—a founder of the field of neuroaesthetics and the first scientist to study the effect of beauty and romantic love on the brain— discovered through fMRI technology that the experience of beauty is part of a continuum [at the orbito-frontal cortex] representing a value attributed to it by the brain. The experience of the pleasure of beauty, his team discovered, increases with neural activity associated with the individual brain’s response. Zeki’s work confirms Ruskin’s deductions of the mysterious passage of beauty from the brain’s response to perception channeled through the body. This opens up Ruskin’s writings and those of the novelists influenced by him to the revelation of their early contributions in the field of neuroaesthetics.

Sonic Alterities: On Literature and the Sounds of Intersubjectivity explores the spatial, affective and intersubjective significance of sound to develop a theory of self-and-other that moves beyond the gaze. It orients around three nodes: sound studies, literature, and intertwining discourses of intersubjectivity and alterity. Attending to sound in eco-acoustic, beyond-the-human contexts as well as sonic cultural practices the ocularnormative would occlude, Sonic Alterities deconstructs sound as philosophical problem and demonstrates how modernist experimentation and Black epistemologies center sound in intersubjectivity and phenomenal consciousness. The first chapter moves from antiquity (Plato’s Phaedrus) to the present and shows how cicada singing envelops and pierces a dialectic of death and desire. The second chapter, on bells in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, draws on consciousness studies to distill the role of bells and sound waves in metaphors of attunement. The third chapter reframes acousmatic sound (i.e., sound whose source is unseen) and reads Ralph Ellison’s “sound subject” as an inversion of Pierre Schaeffer’s “sound object,” and it likewise argues that call-and-response is as influential to intersubjective theory as continental philosophy. Chapter Four unpacks how William Faulkner’s circumscription of Joe Christmas in “a little island of silence” underscores his alienation as a possibly biracial character in the Jim Crow South. The fifth reads James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” to argue that jazz provides the cultural frame that makes conceptualizing epigenetics in scientific discourses possible.

“Hey, Mr. Cunningham,” Scout Finch calls to the single familiar face in a crowd of white men as she stands at the door of a jail that wrongly incarcerates a Black man for a crime that she does not understand. This famous scene from Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird (1960) where an eight-year-old stops a lynch mob is both object and emblem of my dissertation project. “A Child’s Call: Braiding Narratives in the Face of Racial Violence” draws on critical race theory and cognitive approaches to literature to show how contemporary American writers focus on child characters as instruments for narrating violence and violation, and how these children’s voices call adult characters and actual readers toward a heightened sense of social responsibility. While Scout’s pleasantries move the adult characters toward an everyday responsibility of caregiving, other such child protagonists face insurmountable barriers: in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), all adults fail to hear the cry of ten-year-old Pecola Breedlove, and many, such as the white storekeeper fail to “see” her. Despite their differing political analyses and aesthetic projects, both Lee and Morrison trust a child with the task of reimagining the world and realigning our ethical responsibilities.

The figure of the child leads me through two genres that constitute community through narration: the United States’ variation on the bildungsroman, the coming of age novel, and an emerging genre I term the “braided narrative”— novels in which multiple narrators tell distinct, often incommensurate, stories that form a complicated constellation in the same storyworld. When Morrison pairs Claudia and Pecola with The Bluest Eye’s other narrators, she begins to forge this new genre that diverges from the style of Mockingbird’s single narrative voice. Like Morrison, Louise Erdrich, Ana Castillo, Nicole Krauss, and many others take up this strategy of casting child narrators among a chorus of raconteurs who narrate different, conflicting stories. “A Child’s Call” proposes a developmental relationship between the coming of age novel and the braided narrative for the reading of American literature. My project proposes a feminist and anti-racist progression of ethical positions staged in these two genres; the relationship between the reader and the protagonist develops from one of identification, to one of maternal care, and finally, to one of empathy that both acknowledges and requires difference.

At Home in Pieces examines the traumas of displaced populations, of populations in fragments, through the lens of poetics. Through a comparative framework, I show how formal methods in diasporic literatures embody and make visible the conditions and consequences of displacement and loss. In particular, I bring into dialogue two seemingly disparate communities, Caribbean and Jewish in the U.K. and U.S. Scholars of diaspora have discussed resonances in Caribbean and Jewish histories of oppression and migration, and literary scholars have written on thematic convergences, but little has been said with regard to the significance of shared poetic and linguistic experimentation. My dissertation is organized around an aesthetic logic rather than solely geographic affiliations. Critical connections across literatures emerge when rarely linked writers are released from ossified representative roles based on family background, place, and time—when these writers are instead brought together to highlight creative kinships, as well as shared trauma. The project moves through four pairs of modern and contemporary writers, aligned by parallels in the form and function of fragmentation within their work—Charles Reznikoff and Fred D’Aguiar, Nicole Krauss and Zadie Smith, Grace Nichols and Laura (Riding) Jackson, and Derek Walcott and Joseph Brodsky.

The project considers diaspora through theories of translation—as a performance of a continual imperfect return to cultural heritage that demonstrates a desire for continuity but is still keenly attuned to gaps and elisions. I construe the fragment in diasporic literature as an embodied gift between generations that can be repurposed and modified for new contexts, akin to sampling in contemporary music culture. Like music, the fragmented form creates the potential for a felt encounter with meaning, rather than dictating a specific response, through effects of rhythm and arrangement. Connecting scholarship in translation and music, I present a theory of “fragment sampling,” an adaptive aesthetic mode through which the texts I analyze engender a space of “in-betweenness”: past and present are contemporaneous, multiple narrative threads weave through simultaneously, and languages intersect and impact each other. I trace similarities in poetic and linguistic experimentation to show how each text confronts intergenerational trauma, imagines a reconstitution of home and self-identity, and illuminates patterns of relation that reject the stringency of national boundaries.

This dissertation intends to reimagine and reinvigorate theoretical criticism on symbolism in the narrative arts from an evolutionary-cognitive perspective. It gestures toward establishing a more robust, scientifically informed, consilient view of how symbolic devices operate in aesthetic-narrative texts and inside the minds of artists and audiences: i.e. toward formulating a biopoetics of symbol. It presents, specifically, a biocultural treatment of the nature, function, and value of indirect referential complexes precipitated by the techniques and modes of second-order symbolism within aesthetic-narrative art.

Aesthetic text–makers configure the cues and patterns of their texts to tap specific and sometimes multiple stages of the mind-brain’s PECMA flow, serially or in parallel. This peculiar cognitive orientation—wherein mental routines must cope with simultaneous multimodal “brain tappings”—has enabled a special mode of meaning-making to take shape: second-order symbolism within a replete aesthetic environment. Certain cultural energies, traditions, and technologies have enabled Western artists and their interpretive communities to refine second-order meaning-making, giving rise to a generic mode of symbolic realism—a mode that might be useful for demarcating between so-called literary/artistic texts and non-literary/non-artistic texts. Selections from American short fiction and film are offered as paradigmatic instances of symbolic realism: Hemingway, Poe, and Kubrick are spotlighted. Non-American texts establish a cross-cultural, cross-temporal, species-typical profile of second-order symbologics. Traditional boundaries between poetry, fiction, and visual art are crossed to reckon second-order symbolism as a multimedia, multimodal platform of artistic technique.

Foundational questions explored include:

• Why and to what ends do some artists deploy devices of second-order symbolism?

• How does a biopoetics of symbol embed with theories of reading and hermeneutics?

• What are the cognitive advantages and disadvantages of engaging in an open-ended, or elusive and obliquely decodable, signification process?

• How do the cognitive mechanisms of the evolved mind-brain enable, constrain, or otherwise contribute to second-order symbolic processes of meaning-making?

• How are these symbol-producing/symbol-reading ev-cog mechanisms implicated in the larger replete aesthetics of meaning-exchange ecologies that emerge in the artistic transaction between textmaker, text, and text-interpreter?

This dissertation sets out on an interdisciplinary, biocultural sortie for thinking through these questions.

ABSTRACT

Railroad Poetics: Infrastructure, Stories, Worldmaking

By

Geoffrey Kyle Bucy

In Media Ecologies, Matthew Fuller argues that “all objects have a poetics: they make and take part in the world, and at the same time, synthesize, block, or make possible other worlds” (1). This causes problems for Humansitic inquiry, which has historically read the human capacity for poetics as evidence of exceptionalism. In this dissertation, I theorize and practice modes of literary and film interpretation based on the fundamental goal of what has come to be called The Nonhuman Turn: “decentering the human in favor of a turn toward and concern for the nonhuman” (Grusin vii). As I argue, cultivating interpretive attunement to the nonhuman affects, affordances and agencies that swirl through our most human of narratives challenges our implicit ontological schism between representation and reality. Rather, I attempt to increase the number of actors that shape our stories, and draw attention to the innumerable threads of translation, mediation, and interpretation that inextricably entangle our thoughts, perceptions, and stories with the nonhuman world.

More than any other technology, the railroad transformed the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries. From standardized time zones and westward expansion to modernized warfare, early cinema, and the rise of finance capitalism, our world was undeniable “made” by trains. The railroad also holds a place of privilege in the history of literature, film, and culture. It was the symbol of progress and speed in the 19th century. Historically, trains are inextricably intertwined with the early history of cinema, from their starring roles in “actualities” and “phantom rides” to their use as an early film dollies. What better case study for developing this unorthodox approach to interpretation? In order to theorize “railroad poetics,” I bracket reductive truisms about the symbolization of modernity. Instead, I “follow the railroad actors” (to adapt the Latourian turn), in order to acknowledge the complex ways that embodied railroad components, such as compartments, cat-walks, tunnels, shovels, deep cuts, and graded causeways, become inextricably entangled with those quintessentially human poetic devices of metaphor, genre, structure, and narrative action.

The Nonhuman Turn adds refreshing tools to our interpretive tool-kit. In each chapter, I choreograph a dialogic interplay between trains, bodies, and stories that, I argue, lies at the heart of our “railroad stories.” In explicating this co-constitutive tripartite relationship, I hope to challenge not just our attention to nonhuman agencies as they swirl through our human stories, but also to he ways dynamic interaction with infrastructure shapes the pace and patterns of our own lives. If this is the case, our current modes of critique are woefully inadequate in a world we no longer recognize as they sole possession of humans. We need to be able to theorize the relationship between humans and nonhumans without falling into one-sided theories of social constructivism or technological determinism. This project is one experimental approach to doing just that. In changing the ways we interpret the literary and filmic railroad, I hope to challenge the prevalent tendency to treat textual objects as nothing but “representations” of their “real-life” counterparts or of an author’s intentions.

Since the roughly simultaneous emergence of queer theory and historicist literary criticism in the early 1990s, scholars have confronted the problem of studying queer culture and identity prior to the so-called “invention of the homosexual,” typically dated to the 1870s–90s. My dissertation offers an interdisciplinary approach to this question by focusing on the literary device of ekphrasis: verbal description of works of art. I argue that, prior to the advent of a discourse of homosexuality in the twentieth century, queer identity materialized in ekphrastic scenes from American literature. By asserting that the aesthetic and the erotic were profoundly entangled during the nineteenth century, I claim literary works as essential to the history of sexuality. I examine numerous writers who refract queer intimacies through scenes of painting—surprisingly, with more enthusiasm than shame or trepidation. In close readings of encounters between white spectators and paintings, I show that writers tend to stage queer relations in terms of racialized desire. Ekphrastic scenes thus consolidate whiteness and heterosexuality by frequently aligning racial and ethnic alterity with queer sexuality. At a time when critics and audiences were understandably anxious about the fledgling status of American art, the writers I discuss ventured far beyond the nation in search of more capacious forms of gender and sexuality: both to actual places such as Europe (in the case of Washington Irving and Henry James), as well as to fantastic dreamscapes (as in the fiction of Theodore Winthrop and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps). As my analysis reveals, these four writers regarded painting as a realm distinct from the contemporary United States. I demonstrate that American authors could explore, but ultimately disavow, queer attachments by writing about art in Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819–20), Bracebridge Hall (1822), and Tales of a Traveller (1824); in Winthrop’s Cecil Dreeme (1861); in Phelps’ The Story of Avis (1877); and in James’ The Tragic Muse (1890). “Kangaroos Among the Beauty” situates these literary works in terms of art history and aesthetic philosophy that influenced how writers and audiences evoked the embodied pleasures of appreciating beauty. Thus understood, ekphrasis offered writers the chance to describe, rather than interrogate, burgeoning sexual categories. “Kangaroos Among the Beauty” proposes that heterosexuality became white, in part, via literary scenes of painting in which non-normative desires flourished through the frame of art.