UC Riverside

This dissertation explores mid-century literary texts drafted and set during the Civil Rights Movement, but which were edited and published posthumously, years and sometimes decades after their authors’ deaths. Written by such authors as Ralph Ellison, Sylvia Plath, Carson McCullers and William Demby, these texts make visible the fundamental instability of authorial intention as they are signed by an other, the editor or executor, then made available to readers. The imbricated temporal layers of their often protracted composition times and publication histories are elaborated by their innovative narrative strategies for engaging the paradoxes of desegregation. Rethinking poststructuralist debates regarding the death of the author as an originator figure through the context of posthumous publication reorients us toward the collaborative labor of the editor and reader in processes of writing, reading, and interpretation. Posthumous texts afford the opportunity for engaging in what I term “ecstatic readings,” whereby the past, loosened from an originary context, enters the present by way of the future. The “enigmatic excess,” as Foucault names it, of the text’s survival beyond its author’s lifespan, promotes a dismantling of masculinist notions of presence, progress, and closure. I draw upon Foucault’s theorization of the author function, which critiques our tendencies to shape our ideas about an author’s life and creative process from his or her textual remains and ideas about an era, race, gender, sexuality, and class—all of which tend to homogenize the authorial persona in order to yield a coherent portrait of the author. The author function, I contend, is at its most beguiling in the posthumous context, as it purports to stabilize the excess of unbound texts that are left unsigned by their authors. To complicate this biographical critical impulse, I call upon Barthes’ notion of the author’s “friendly return” as a plural figure, ever prone to dispersion, which I explore as an ecstatic dimension, rather than an anchor, of meaning. Ecstatic reading is a feminist critical practice that resists strict correspondences between an author’s life and work, and champions the posthumous text’s excess and relevance for engaging the complexities of postwar American life in the present.