This project will focus on the multi-ethnic American mother in the mid-to-late twentieth century and where she fits into contemporary American society. I will be taking a Cultural Feminist/Historical approach to motherhood and the mother figure in multi-ethnic American families. This approach will allow me to use a feminist lens and relevant historical context to consider how the “traditional” mother or “ideal” mother figure has become a model for how mainstream society thinks the mother figure should be. Attention to this model will demonstrate how the non-traditional, ethnic mother breaks this mold the implications and repercussions of her inability to achieve the golden standard. I will use this lens combined with a cultural feminist approach to look at the literary works that I have chosen: Toni Morrisons The Bluest Eye 1970), Sula 1974) and Tar Baby 1981)； Alice Walkers The Color Purple 1982)； Maxine Hong Kingstons The Woman Warrior 1975)； Ann Petrys The Street 1946) and Sandra Cisneros House on Mango Street 1987). For the project, I intend to delve into multi-ethnic motherhood to articulate how these mothers challenge and often fail when trying to attain societys model of white, middle class motherhood. Each of the literary mother characters that I explore in this project embodies strength, yet often has the inability to rise above adversity that is created by this model. I will show that although she exemplifies a different “model” of motherhood, she is set up for failures by a society who places unrealistic expectations on women of color. The historical contextualization and feminist cultural analysis of the “ideal” mother in society will help me establish and create a framework to answer the following questions: “How does multi-ethnic motherhood challenge the ideals set by American society and do these ideals set her up for failure?” Also, “What influence has the multi-ethnic mother made on the American family, literature, and society in the late twentieth century； and what does this impact say about motherhood in general?”

Partial Affinities: Fascism and the Politics of Representation in Interwar America, is grounded in a comparatist sensibility, arguing that American culture can be fruitfully explored in its relation to socio-historical contexts extending beyond the borders of the United States. This is exemplified in the assertion, stemming from my research, that we cannot fully understand American culture without a careful investigation into our past engagements with the question of fascism. Cultural changes between the wars, such as the Great Depression, technological modernity, mass consumerism, and urbanization, all generated points of reflection that served to amplify American self-scrutiny. Americans from across the political and social spectrum mirrored their uncertainties about this period of social turmoil in their contradictory descriptions of fascism. Between the wars, Americans asked about the future of democracy, the feasibility of mass culture, and the difficulties of a diverse polity as they were posed through the fears, hopes, and fantasies that circulated around the notion of fascism. This work explores a wide variety of figures across disciplinary boundaries, as literature, film, radio, and the visual arts intersect in the political/aesthetic representations of the American cultural imaginary. The introduction addresses the scholarship on fascism in order to locate a feasible understanding of fascism for students of American culture. The first three chapters look at the development of social technologies such as mass spectacle in the New York Worlds Fair), radio culture, and the changing notion of the human in the new industrial ecology of interwar America. The final three chapters focus on literary culture and everyday life in the period of fascism. In a discussion of authors ranging from John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway to Carson McCullers and William Faulkner, chapter four and six explore the pervasive concern with fascism in American interwar literature. Chapter five, on the Southern Agrarians and the New Critics, addresses their reaction to fascism as they developed a depoliticized method of literary investigation that still grounds much of our thinking about literature and culture today.

This dissertation illuminates the ethics of a liberal culture in the United States as reflected in the plays and fiction of Susan Glaspell 1876 – 1948). Liberal culture flourishes in colleges and universities, and it also has a social geography associated with places such as New York and Massachusetts as well as Chicago and Iowa. Through a close reading of Glaspells 1921 drama Inheritors, this dissertation builds a deeper understanding of the ethics of liberal culture — ways of thinking and behaving that encourage sexual freedom, that value ethnic diversity, that practice peace, that resist the degradations of free market capitalism, and that confront the legacies of European colonialism. My analysis of Glaspells work demonstrates the resonance of these values with classical liberal political philosophy. This study also explores ideas that emerged with these ethics, but did not gain the cultural traction of other liberal values: a biological and religious concept of progress. Glaspells voice sounds in a chorus of reformist voices from the Progressive Era: John Dewey, Margaret Sanger, Alice Paul, Upton Sinclair, Walter Lippman and Herbert Croly. Glaspell, to a greater degree than her contemporaries, associated progress with a kind natural religion. My study of Glaspells work finds new ways to trace the instabilities that made this concept of progress untenable at the time, and unearths some aspects of this progress that might still be viable. My purpose is to bring into relief the situation of liberal culture — that it has a coherent set of ethics around which groups of people already congregate, but that such groups remain, in a sense, dispirited. In the conclusion of this dissertation, I turn to the Glaspells work as it reflects on the idea of a university. The purpose of this conclusion is to trouble our contemporary notion of disciplinarity. Glaspell wrote about the university as the moral compass of society, but her plays and fiction were unpalatable to the twentieth-century critics who established the disciplinary boundaries of literary study. Ironically, the ethics of which Glaspell wrote are inscribed everywhere in the humanities, underlying much of our contemporary scholarship.

Gilles Deleuze, following the work of D.H. Lawrence, claimed that the highest purpose of Herman Melville’s writing was to “escape.” As provocative as this assertion may be, however, it has not yielded a general consensus among Melville scholars, and the question of what exactly Melville was attempting to escape from remains an open one. This dissertation attempts to address this question by bringing it together with another, equally mysterious and long-standing problem: Melville’s brief but intense friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the impact of this relationship upon Melville’s work. It is not by accident that Melville’s most feverish period of writing followed his initial encounter with Hawthorne, nor is it by chance that these texts are in dialogue with Hawthorne’s work. This dialogue, in turn, helped transform Melville’s art, forcing him to revisit earlier work and retrieve and rework certain figures, motifs and themes. That Melville’s “major phase,” roughly 1850 to 1857, a period which saw the publication of Moby-Dick (discussed in chapter one), Pierre (chapter two), and The Confidence-Man (chapter three), as well as all of his short stories, several of them masterpieces of the form—also ended with the demise of this enigmatic friendship is likewise no coincidence. By putting a sharper edge on the point of Melville’s critique—in other words, clearly identifying that from which he was attempting one way or another to “escape”—this dissertation attempts to fill a gap in current scholarship and contribute to discussion and debate concerning those tumultuous and still-poorly understood years of Melville’s “major phase.” I argue three main points: that Melville was desperately trying to escape from the confines of, first, the nation-state (discussed in chapter one), second, the family (in chapter two), and third, subjectivity (in chapter three). His encounter with Hawthorne—its initial shock of recognition and joyful passion, its deepening affection and maturity, as well as its eventual dissolution and subsequent disappointment and pain—provided Melville with the impetus to construct various “bachelor machines,” a term adopted from Deleuze that I employ in order to articulate the manner in which Melville attempted to “escape.”

In 1919, The Education of Henry Adams—published the year before—won the Pulitzer Prize. In 1999, The Modern Library named The Education the best nonfiction book of the twentieth century. In the eighty years between these two events, Henry Adamss “autobiography” remained a topic of scholarly discussion, underwent numerous reprints, and entered canonical editions such as the Library of America. This dissertation explores how exactly The Education became an “American classic”—one of the most revered and influential nonfiction works of the twentieth century—by examining the specific type of influence The Education has had in American culture and what this influence signifies. Although this study explores the reception of The Education throughout the entire twentieth century, the focus is on the Cold War era； the ultimate success of The Education in entering the American consciousness in an enduring manner depended upon a group of intellectuals—public officials, scholars, novelists, journalists, and artists—embracing Henry Adams in the particular way that readers did after the Second World War. This embrace was not strictly historical or academic—Adams and The Education were consciously used as models for creating both public and literary personas. This embrace was also not limited to one particular political persuasion—Adams and The Education were appealing to both liberals and conservatives. The specifically political and social concerns fostered by the Cold War influenced the aesthetic, stylistic, and philosophical tone of the work of many intellectuals, and it was at the confluence of these different concerns that many readers found The Education to be relevant, insightful, comforting, and useful. Many Cold War intellectuals were attracted to The Education as they explored the question of what their responsibility was in a democratic society that seemed difficult to reform； Adams was a compelling example, and justification, for intellectuals who believed that there was little they could do to alter the social and political structure. In this respect, Adams was able to articulate a response and provide a pose for readers who confronted social and economic conditions that made them, like Adams, feel like American misfits.

That, throughout their history in the “New World,” blacks have felt rage in response to systematic racial oppression should be taken as a given. That black writers have always found ways to represent that rage is also a given. What is more contentious is both the nature of that rage and the ways that it has entered the cultural imaginary. The question that those invested in analyzing black rage raise is whether it can be harnessed into a legitimate form of political protest, or if it is merely a visceral reaction or violent lashing out against racial oppression? Dangerous Accumulations looks at a particular historical moment to understand how certain writers during a specific historical period answered these questions. By performing close readings on Arna Bontemps’s, Chester Himes’s, Richard Wright’s and Ann Petry’s short fiction, poetry, and journalistic writing in conjunction with their better-known novels, I demonstrate their insistence that literary productions had to give voice to social inequality. During this protest era, 1936–1946, these writers challenged the racism, classism, and sexism that limited the life chances of black people by dramatizing the dire effects of the dangerous accumulations of black rage. The Jim Crow laws that held social and legal sway in the South alongside the unofficial Jim Crow of the North and West gave coherence to this literary undertaking. In order to most effectively dramatize blacks’ emotional responses to sexism and racism, these authors employed literary naturalism. The works of these authors belied the telos of progress. They showed that despite seeming advances in race relation brought about by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal initiatives and Great Migrations, that racism still dominated black people’s lives. The persistence of racism gave lie to the mantra of racial progress that has been used to cloak the ways in which the racial hierarchy has remained the status quo throughout the nation’s history.