English

"Theorizing and Performing Socio-political Representation: Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, and Pauline Hopkins" focuses on the performance of gender and sexuality in works by three African American women writers who were also public figures. In this study, I examine what I have named the "politics of representation" in these texts, whereby their authors articulate the benefits and drawbacks of capitalizing on the dual socio-political positions of subject and object in American culture. I argue that Wilson, Jacobs, and Hopkins critique and theorize the public demonstration or performance of gendered and sexually categorized African American bodies to achieve political ends. In particular, they challenge the conflation by whites and by black male leaders of masculinity and political recognition. Contrary to what many scholars have argued, these writers envision a political authority for black women not circumscribed by normative concepts of femininity, masculinity, and sexuality popularized by the dominant culture.

Temple University – Theses

English

This dissertation seeks to expand our conception of what constitutes Native American letters by examining how the periodical became a prominent form in Native American literary production in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With its focus on the boarding school, Writing against Erasure provides insight into the context in which students first learned how to make complex and sophisticated choices in print. Within the contested disciplinary space of the boarding school, the periodical press functioned as a site for competing discourses on assimilation. Whereas school authorities used the white-run school newspapers to publicize their programs of cultural erasure, students used the student-run school newspapers to defend and preserve Native American identity and culture in the face of the assimilationist imperatives of the boarding schools and the dominant culture. Writing against Erasure highlights the formative impact of students' experiences with the boarding school press on the periodical practices and rhetorical strategies of two well-known Native American literary figures, Zitkala-Sa and Charles Eastman. By treating the periodical writings of these two prominent boarding school graduates alongside the periodical writings produced by boarding school students while they were still at school, Writing against Erasure provides a literary genealogy that reveals important continuities between these writers' strategic and political uses of the periodical press. Writing against Erasure argues that Native American boarding school students and graduates used the periodical press not to promote the interests of school authorities as some scholars have argued, but rather to preserve their cultural traditions, to speak out on behalf of indigenous interests, and to form a pan-Indian community at the turn of the twentieth century.

Temple University – Theses

English

This dissertation explores how aesthetic claims in scientific arguments help construct scientific ethos through demonstrations of the rhetor's judgment. By examining the works of Josiah Willard Gibbs and Henry Rowland, two prominent nineteenth-century American scientists, through the lens of their formal rhetorical training as students in American universities, this dissertation investigates how aesthetic judgment is enacted in scientific writing and explores the rhetorical history of the terms "simplicity," "brevity," "imagination," and "taste" and their use in scientific arguments. The aesthetic judgment that both scientists demonstrate in their written work reinforced an understanding of scientific ethos. By placing nineteenth-century scientific writing in contact with the rhetorical theories of the time, this dissertation explores the history of aesthetic judgment in rhetoric and its influence on conceptualizations of the faculty of taste. The dissertation illuminates the connections between rhetorical training and the ability to perform appropriate judgment when creating a reliable scientific ethos in writing. Constructing a scientific ethos in writing became increasingly important and complicated during the time of great institutional change in scientific research, which occurred during the second half of the nineteenth century in America. Scientists constructed scientific ethos through demonstrations of aesthetic judgment in order to respond to the exigencies of both institutional pressures and disciplinary expectations.

Temple University – Theses

English

This dissertation examines the representation of foreign language in nineteenth-century American travel writing, analyzing how authors conceptualize the act of translation as they address the multilingualism encountered abroad. The three major figures in this study – James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain – all use moments of cross-cultural contact and transference to theorize the permeability of the language barrier, seeking a mean between the oversimplification of the translator's task and a capitulation to the utter incomprehensibility of the Other. These moments of translation contribute to a complex interplay of not only linguistic but also cultural and economic exchange. Charting the changes in American travel to both the "civilized" world of Europe and the "savage" lands of the Southern and Eastern hemispheres, this project will examine the attitudes of cosmopolitanism and colonialism that distinguished Western from non-Western travel at the beginning of the century and then demonstrate how the once distinct representations of European and non-European languages converge by the century's end, with the result that all kinds of linguistic difference are viewed as either too easily translatable or utterly incomprehensible. Integrating the histories of cosmopolitanism and imperialism, my study of the representation of foreign language in travel writing demonstrates that both the compulsion to translate and a capitulation to incomprehensibility prove equally antagonistic to cultural difference. By mapping the changing conventions of translation through the representative narratives of three canonical figures, "Transnational Translation" traces a shift in American attitudes toward the foreign as the cosmopolitanism of Cooper and Melville transforms into Twain's attitude of both cultural and linguistic nationalism.

Temple University – Theses

English

The Presence and Use of the Native American and African American Oral Trickster Traditions in Zitkala-Sa's Old Indian Legends and American Indian Stories and Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman My dissertation examines early Native American and African American oral trickster tales and shows how the pioneering authors Zitkala-Sa (Lakota) and Charles W. Chesnutt (African American) drew on them to provide the basis for a written literature that critiqued the political and social oppression their peoples were experiencing. The dissertation comprises 5 chapters. Chapter 1 defines the meaning and role of the oral trickster figure in Native American and African American folklore. It also explains how my participation in the Native American and African American communities as a long-time storyteller and as a trained academic combine to allow me to discern the hidden messages contained in Native American and African American oral and written trickster literature. Chapter 2 pinpoints what is distinctive about the Native American oral tradition, provides examples of trickster tales, explains their meaning, purpose, and cultural grounding, and discusses the challenges of translating the oral tradition into print. The chapter also includes an analysis of Jane Schoolcraft's short story "Mishosha" (1827). Chapter 3 focuses on Zitkala-Sa's Old Indian Legends (1901) and American Indian Stories (1921). In the legends and stories, Zitkala-Sa is able to preserve much of the mystical, magical, supernatural, and mythical quality of the original oral trickster tradition. She also uses the oral trickster tradition to describe and critique her particular nineteenth-century situation, the larger historical, cultural, and political context of the Sioux Nation, and Native American oppression under the United States government. Chapter 4 examines the African American oral tradition, provides examples of African and African American trickster tales, and explains their meaning, purpose, and cultural grounding. The chapter ends with close readings of the trickster tale elements embedded in William Wells Brown's Clotel; or, The President's Daughter (1853), Harriett Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), and Martin R. Delany's Blake, or the Huts of America (serialized 1859 - 1862). Chapter 5 shows how Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman rests upon African-derived oral trickster myths, legends, and folklore preserved in enslavement culture. Throughout the Conjure tales, Chesnutt uses the supernatural as a metaphor for enslaved people's resistance, survival skills and methods, and for leveling the ground upon which Blacks and Whites struggled within the confines of the enslavement and post-Reconstruction South. Native American and African American oral and written trickster tales give voice to their authors' concerns about the social and political quality of life for themselves and for members of their communities. My dissertation allows these voices a forum from which to "speak."

Temple…

English

This dissertation is a study of antebellum literature about the home and the post-Revolutionary conceptualization of domesticity as political participation. Analyzing texts that take the construction, management, and pursuit of a home as central concerns, I trace a cultural preoccupation with isolation in the idealization of the home. The cult of domesticity that emerged and was reflected in these texts was a troubled, conflicting response to the ideology of Republican Motherhood, which defined a woman's political contribution as raising good citizen sons and patriotic daughters. By taking a previously private role and turning it into a public duty, the mother became a highly visible and symbolically loaded figure. It also made her sphere of action, the home, a highly charged political space, subject to government intervention and social control. In conduct manuals, magazines, memoirs, and fiction, women writing about the home represent it as vulnerable to unwelcome intrusion, invasion, and influences, giving both power and critique to the ideal of home as isolated and pure, and, ultimately, attempting to reveal a domestic ideology that was at odds with Republican Motherhood and notions of liberal privacy that held the home to be a completely private, independent space. Tracing this tension in canonical and popular literature, I construct comparisons of texts not frequently put into conversation with each other, drawing provocative parallels and important distinctions between them and opening up scholarly understandings of domesticity with discussions of isolation and purity. Beginning with an analysis of domestic manuals by Catharine Beecher and Lydia Maria Child, I read these texts side by side with manuals on the construction of the asylum and penitentiary, which along with the home were built on models of isolation. These prescriptive texts attend obsessively to air purity and proper ventilation, and the figure of the nation's "inmate" emerges: a version of subjecthood in which self-development and redemption rely on an environment protected from all external influences (physical, political, economic, and social). Following this version of the ideal home as it plays out in the most popular women's magazine of the period, Godey's Lady's Book, I next examine how the figure of the child becomes a powerful symbol for vulnerability and freedom, unpacking the ways that sentimental rhetoric both served and failed the American homebuilding project. In the last two chapters, I analyze the female authors Caroline Kirkland and Fanny Fern and their attempts to transplant the American home to the West and the urban center, respectively. In A New Home, Who'll Follow?, Kirkland's "hut in the wilderness" becomes the best embodiment of the American Myth. Finally, in the autobiographical novel Ruth Hall and in her newspaper writings, Fanny Fern places her heroines "beyond the pale of female jurisdiction," rejecting the bonds of womanhood, but also revealing fears for the isolated woman and her potential for desolation…

English

Several literary historians have discussed how literary authorship became a profession in America. The act of imaginative writing evolved, by the middle of the nineteenth century, from an amateur pursuit into a big business. The rapid commercial growth of letters after the Civil War meant that American writers could realize themselves precisely as literary professionals who often performed no other sorts of work and who were publically respected for their “writerly” work. However, our historiography glosses over the widespread cultural confusion and skepticism in Gilded Age America over the legitimacy of literary work and the rightful status of literary authors as workers in the nineteenth century’s newly emergent social hierarchy of labor. Scholars have not accounted for one of the central tensions of late-nineteenth century American literature: as fiction writing evolved into a professional, commercial activity, and, thus, a potentially viable way to earn a living, many of America’s most successful and otherwise significant writers struggled against pervasive public assumptions that challenged the notion of writing as “real” work. My dissertation is essentially a study of ideas about the work of writing in America from the Civil War to World War I, when American authors were thinking about literary authorship increasingly in vocational terms. In particular, my study explores how professional writers understood the nature and meaning of their literary endeavors in a culture that often refused to recognize those endeavors as work. I demonstrate how Gilded Age authors, operating within a fully professionalized business of letters, conceived of the nature of their work and its relation to the work performed by others. My project responds to the gap outlined above by offering a new account of postbellum authorship, one that foregrounds the influence of what might be called “vocational anxieties” on the careers of three representative Gilded Age writers: William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, and Jack London. The term “vocational anxieties” describes the acute sense of worry shared by countless American writers who faced the cultural assumption that writing was not work and, therefore, writers were not actual workers. My dissertation also looks at the inherent conflicts created for professional writers by the mass literary marketplace, the commercial conditions of which thrust literary artists into the new and, often times, uneasy role of literary businessmen and businesswomen. My project explores the nature of these problems and, in particular, the ways in which Howells, Chesnutt, and London responded to them. The heart of my argument is that cultural suspicions about the literary enterprise caused a transition of authorial consciousness, whereby an array of American authors tried to define themselves, foremost, as laborers, and the act of imaginative writing as an authentic form of work. Each chapter in my dissertation explores the respective attempts made by Howells, Chesnutt, and London to rhetorically…

English

In nineteenth-century medicine, it was generally agreed that “true hermaphroditism,” or the equal combination of male and female sexual characteristics in one body, was impossible in humans. Yet true hermaphroditism remained a significant presence in both fictional and non-fictional texts. Much of the scholarly literature is on the history of hermaphroditism as a history of intersexuality. Fantasizing Hermaphroditism: Two-Sexed Metaphors in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture is a study of both hermaphroditism and the hermaphrodite as a fantasy. My approach is a combination of historicization and close reading. The chapters are in chronological order, and each chapter is centered on a single text. Chapter 1 addresses Julia Ward Howe’s fictional manuscript, The Hermaphrodite; Chapter 2, S.H. Harris’ case narrative on “A Case of Doubtful Sex”; Chapter 3, James Kiernan’s theoretical treatise on “Responsibility in Sexual Perversion”; and Chapter 4, a memoir by an author who went by the names Ralph Werther and Earl Lind, titled Autobiography of an Androgyne. I begin with the broader cultural moment of the text’s writing, and then explore the text’s language and structure in greater depth. This range of texts demonstrates that the hermaphrodite was a fantasy for nineteenth century authors, described as an impossibility but inspiring very real fear and pleasure. The language that they—and we—use in fantasies about the unreal hermaphrodite can help us to unpack these anxieties and desires around marriage, the body, race, and the definition of the individual.

Temple University – Theses

English

What does Mexico mean to the cultural imagination of the United States? What has it meant in the past? In what ways has the U.S. incorporated aspects of Mexican culture into its own? This dissertation explores these questions of cultural and intellectual exchange between the U.S. and Mexico during the 1920s and 1930s by positioning itself amid the present “transnational” and “hemispheric” turn in U.S. literary study. Its subject matter ranges from architecture and urbanism to journalism and travel writing to short stories and novels to muralism and the visual arts. Such an interdisciplinary approach is bolstered by crossing scales of geography from the international to the continental, the national, the regional and the local. Positioning the discussion in geographic terms allows one to see how the possibilities for cultural exchange could never be fully realized, as the ways in which U.S. writers and intellectuals understood Mexico – then and now – can rarely be separated from either the physical proximity or the cultural dissimilarity of the two countries, a relationship that has been described as one of “distant neighbors.” This dissertation takes the spatial components of culture seriously, employing useful concepts from the disciplines of human geography and cultural landscape studies to inform its understanding of how diverse figures ranging from Conrad Aiken, Stuart Chase, José Clemente Orozco, Katherine Anne Porter, Sophie Treadwell, William Carlos Williams – among others less widely known – understood Mexico and presented it to a U.S. audience during the interwar period. Their narratives often employ the symbolic landscape of Mexico to communicate the qualities of Mexican culture while unwittingly obscuring the reality of what the country itself. Nonetheless, each example points to possible correctives in the pattern, offering a hemispheric perspective from which much can still be learned today.

Temple University – Theses

English

Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, critical scholarship concerning the fairy tale genre has done much to address the social, historical, cultural, and national motivations behind transformations of the fairy tale from a European starting point. However, the fairy tale’s development in the United States, including both its media-based adaptations and literary extensions, has been given limited attention. While the significance of Walt Disney’s animated films to the American fairy tale tradition has been addressed (by literary and film scholars alike), an interdisciplinary study drawing together Disney’s European and early twentieth century precursors (from literature, stage, and film); his own influential, modern debut; respondent literary and animated work of his immediate successors; and postmodern and twenty-first century adaptations has not been done. By examining the trajectory of a single tale, Snow White (or for Disney, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), this dissertation aims to acknowledge the scholarly attention given to Disney’s animated films, while further examining attributes which I suggest have enabled Disney to have a “folkloric impact” on the fairy tale genre in the United States. Disney’s work stands upon the bedrock of not only European but American Snow White variations and makes these “new” through an innovative deployment and unification of word or language, sound, and image, unimagined prior to the debut of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). The effects of Disney’s influence, as a master storyteller, on both the fairy tale genre and commercial market were so profound that this particular version of the tale refuses to be forgotten, its shadow haunting successors who aimed to counter or redefine its understanding of fairy tale in light of shifting American values and culture. Therefore, even as the fairy tale is frequently understood to have moved beyond its folkloric “origins” (I use this term loosely, as the origins of fairy tale are surrounded by controversy), using the critical framework of folklorists Steven Swann Jones and Linda Dégh, as well as filmic folklorists, Sharon R. Sherman and Juwen Zhang, I explore how Disney’s patchwork of tradition, new technology, and media generated an easily recognizable and communicable tale, one that would be recalled, repeated, and reformed through adaptation by generations of audiences. These subsequent storytellers, in turn, extend American fairy tale tradition and lore still further.

Temple University – Theses

English

This dissertation investigates why literary dreams of the West have been categorically dismissed as mythical. Western critics and authors, ranging from Thomas Jefferson to Owen Wister to Patricia Nelson Limerick, have sought to override dreams of the West by representing the western genre as, in Jane Tompkins’ words, a “craving for material reality.” This focus on authenticity betrays an antipathy to the imagination, which is often assumed to be fantastical, escapist, or utopian – groundless, and therefore useless. Such a prejudice, however, has blinded scholars to the value of the dreams of western literary characters. My project argues that the western imagination, far from constituting a withdrawal from reality, is worthy of critical attention because it is grounded in the land itself: the state of the land is directly correlated to a character’s ability to formulate a reliable vision of his setting, and this image can enable or disable agency in that space. By investigating changes in western land practices such as gold-mining, homesteading, and transportation, I show that the ways characters imagine western landscapes not only model historical interpretations of the West but also allow for literary explorations of potential responses to the land’s real social, political, and economic conditions. This act of imagining, premised on Louis Althusser’s explanation of ideology, follows Arjun Appadurai’s conception of the imagination as “social practice.” Ultimately, my dissertation explores geographical visions in western novels across the 20th century in order to demonstrate the imagination’s vital historical function in the creation of the West.

Temple University – Theses