This collection is, more than anything, a series of self-portraits. It attempts to depict how various speakers move through suffering, madness, addiction, lust, heartbreak, and settings ranging from rural Ohio to Brooklyn. The diction and syntax suggest both pathos and comedy, often within a single line. The ordinary experience becomes an opportunity for exploration and discovery, and sites of tragedy are not sites of victimhood, but spaces for productive play.

Lacan, as a post-structuralist, combined Saussures linguistics with Freuds psychology and linked Derridas notion of “the other” to his notion of “objet petit a” as the impossible object of the subjects phallic desire, in order to re-think the modern consciousness of “the self.” In the Lacanian account, “the other” does not exist as the absolute transcendental without involvement, but ex-sists as the traumatic and extimate exteriority with-in “the self.” The ex-centric other is epitomized by the iconic inverted) triangular center &bigxdtri； ) of Lacans Borromean Knot. As the immanent exteriority of both the subject and the Symbolic, the feminine w)hole, resembling vaginal entry &bigxdtri； &vbm0； ), is where the subjects phallic fantasy and the symbolic representation system fail. With regard to the paradox of the non-All, it is associated with Lacans notion of woman. In the triangular vacant center, woman dwells as the irreducible excess surpassing the phallus and as the ek-static site of the subjects being； she embodies the central space open to “the other,” in which the feminine ethics to transgress and traverse ego boundaries occurs. In this project, I call her “Delta,” to emphasize its association with overflowing water and its cognate relation with the Hebrew letter “Dalet” which signifies “openness” and “selflessness.” From this perspective, the aim of the project is to explore how the feminine vacant center what I call Delta) is depicted in Faulkners and Hitchcocks texts. As high modernists of the twentieth century, these two great chroniclers of the same generation intensively displayed the disruptions or failures of human cognition and representation through various experimental narrative techniques. Their texts challenge any ideas of certainty, suspend any phallic attempts to find a fixed meaning, and require us to re-think what we read and what we see, with regard to what does not appear in them. If that is because of the Delta in the texts, as the “in and beyond” of the text, my aim is at reading the delta woman, to re-think our way of “being” in a different way, in association with “being able to think the other” and “being-together-with-others).” Keyword: Delta, woman, the other, objet petit a, vacant center, Lacans Borromean Knot, Faulkner, Hitchcock, w)hole, non-All, the immanent exteriority, the feminine, overflowing, openness, feminine ethics

This collection is, more than anything, a series of self-portraits. It attempts to depict how various speakers move through suffering, madness, addiction, lust, heartbreak, and settings ranging from rural Ohio to Brooklyn. The diction and syntax suggest both pathos and comedy, often within a single line. The ordinary experience becomes an opportunity for exploration and discovery, and sites of tragedy are not sites of victimhood, but spaces for productive play.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the medical profession in America began to transform itself from a motley group of practitioners—registering remarkably disparate levels of education, expertise, and credibility—into a cohesive and exclusive body, enjoying ever-increasing status and income and solidifying what social historians have termed their “professional sovereignty” within the larger culture. The concomitant appearance of numerous novels and stories preoccupied with the figure and the business of the doctor suggests that these texts from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries not only documented but also intervened in the professionalization of medicine. Scientific Methods juxtaposes literary texts with non-literary documents and with material culture in order to determine the nature and the extent of these interventions and to delineate competing narratives within the history of medicine. By interrogating a range of professional performances represented in American fiction between 1880 and 1940, Scientific Methods establishes a complementary narrative to accounts of medical professionalization constructed by social historians. Although social historians have managed to destabilize the master narratives of scientific progress elaborated by the physician-historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, their investigations into the history of professionalization still center on physicians in conflict with each other and in thrall to science and technology, neglecting public perceptions of the professionalization process. Literary representations of this process, on the other hand, chart the ways in which popular understandings of the figure and the business of the physician arose and circulated, elucidating points of accord and disparity between professional ideologies and lived experience and exposing the dynamics of power between doctors and patients. These fictions of medical professionalization both reflected and produced beliefs； thus they stand as essential tools for understanding the consolidation of authority around doctors. In addition, I utilize a diverse range of archival materials—from hospital records to WPA posters—to complicate my readings of these fictional engagements with the professionalization process and to illuminate the relationship of literature to other cultural domains. I argue that this textual sequence recasts the pursuit of professionalism and the gradual consolidation of cultural authority around doctors as a constant tension between the discipline of self—as the popularity of nineteenth-century “conduct books” for physicians demonstrates—and the discipline of Others. Lacking pervasive cultural authority at the end of the nineteenth century, doctors concentrated upon cultivating professional identity through professional “pantomimes” that simultaneously demonstrated their mastery of specialized knowledge and of middle-class social norms. Eventually, these professional “pantomimes” migrated from the stage of community practice to the arena of eminently consumable, ubiquitous popular entertainments such as radio programs and public art. This movement coordinates with an increasing amount of cultural authority and a decreasing need for individual self-discipline within the profession, and with doctors—a group overwhelmingly white, middle-class, and male—feeling freer than ever to visit spectacular and invasive violence upon the raced, class, and gendered bodies of Others. These disciplinary measures include the exclusion or removal of nonwhite male and white female practitioners from the medical profession, elaborated in Frank Norriss McTeague； human experimentation by the single-minded “microbe hunters” on southern populations during the interwar period, romanticized in Sinclair Lewiss Arrowsmith ； and eugenic pressure exerted on poor women by the Depression-era discourses of public health, critiqued by Tillie Olsens Yonnondio and Meridel LeSueurs The Girl. Yet far from reflecting an idealized vision of the medical professional, replete with cultural authority, these narrations of disciplinary events reveal doctors threatened by incursions by nonwhite and female practitioners, defeated by their own experimental protocols, and agitated by the unlimited reproduction of the working class.

The Southern United States is often linked in popular culture and the media with backward, degrading, violent, nepotistic, and depraved activities. The most pervasive of these connections is the incest stigma that has a particular attachment to the South. While Southern writers like William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, and Walker Percy have contributed to incest as a theme in the Southern literary genre, modern and contemporary Southern women writers and dramatists, such as Dorothy Allison, Kaye Gibbons, Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, Marsha Norman, Paula Vogel, Carson McCullers, Naomi Wallace, Toni Morrison, and Lydia Diamond, have delved further into the often darker reality of incest and sexual abuse in Southern families. This project traces the various depictions of incest in the South as it has been linked in film, television, crude humor, new documentaries, and finally, in Southern womens writing, which works not from a double-victimizing stance of blaming or shaming the victim of incest abuse； instead, these writers create narratives from the victims perspectives. They invalidate the oft-argued point that incest books could only create salacious dialogue rather than useful feminist revisioning by creating both private novel) depictions of incest and public theater) depictions. Though each work uses incest in either a literal or figurative manifestation to depict a myriad of meanings, e.g., cultural xenophobia, fear of foreign takeover, patriarchal control, and self-love/hate, the unifying theme that connects all of these pieces is the constant notion of change versus stasis. If incest is the ultimate embodiment of stagnation, then these survivors narratives overcome the debilitating effects of their abuse to create change and feminist revisioning. Included in this project are interviews I conducted with writers Dorothy Allison, Naomi Wallace, Marsha Norman, and Lydia Diamond.

Ecologies of Exception: Gender, Race and the Paradox of Sovereignty in American Literature and Culture synthesizes research in nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature and culture alongside theories of gender, race, ecofeminism and postcolonial theory. Beginning with a comparative reading of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers, the project examines how Jefferson’s cartographic writing revealed his desire to orient and produce an American national narrative predicated on a scientific, spatialized code of ethics that systematically disavowed the actual “living” portion of the land itself. By privileging order, mapping and spatialized environments over and against ecological alterity, I argue that Notes on the State of Virginia was a harbinger for the political and ecological problems that developed throughout the course of the nineteenth-century. By placing Cooper’s The Pioneers in conversation with Notes, I reveal how Jefferson’s eco-spatial “vision” had begun to permeate the literary consciousness of American writers. Building from this analysis, the majority of my project examines the relationship between exclusionary geographies, gendered forms of racial oppression and environmental destruction. For example, I theorize the writings of Sojourner Truth in concert with Harriet Jacobs and Harriet E. Wilson, revealing how the devaluation of African women’s bodies under the institution of slavery was commensurate with the exploitation of the land and the burgeoning development of American Empire. I argue that, as revealed within these narratives, it was on the fringes of America’s spatialized, ordering power that the sheer violence underwriting empire became uncomfortably explicit. Following my analysis of these “African American Ecofeminists,” I read Nathaniel Hawthorne as an ecocritical author whose project was intended to demystify the patriarchal, racialized, eco-imperial impulses of the American cultural imagination. I conclude with an examination of Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, emphasizing that Cather’s recapitulation of Jeffersonian agrarian democracy, land development, science, technology and empire served to revive the imperatives of American patriarchy—the very institution that had oppressed women throughout American history—by falsely promoting the belief that women could achieve emancipation through land ownership and development.

My dissertation brings a contemporary black feminist rendering to a rhetorical tradition that reaches back to the nascent days of the United States. This project is the first scholarly study to analyze the ways in which black women confront social injustices through a critical performance of the American Jeremiad, a “political sermon” whose historical location at the crossroads of politics and religious authority in the seventeenth century meant that this rhetorical tradition would be reserved exclusively for men. I argue that African American women in the post-Civil Rights era articulate a distinctive Black Female Jeremiad as a mode of resistive performance that operates on two critical levels. First, the Black Female Jeremiad offers a religio-political critique of one of the most foundational narratives of American identity—the belief in the United States as a “chosen” nation—by pointing out the discrepancy between an exceptionalist “City on a Hill” and a nation-state riddled with racial, economic, and gender injustices. Second, in performing a critique that calls into question the American national sense of self, the Black Female Jeremiad must negotiate what I term the maternal/militant bind of black womens subjectivity in the U.S. cultural imagination. Because the Madonna/whore dichotomy of white femininity is not transferable to black women, whose bodies have always already been labeled as debased, I argue that a maternal/militant binary in which both sides are marked as pejorative is the racialized gender stereotype for African American women. While tropes such as the compliant mammy, the emasculating black matriarch, and the parasitic welfare mother plague representations of black maternity, a militant black woman faces ridicule for her inherent promiscuity, as the trope of the angry black woman is marked by the indiscriminate use of her words, deeds, and body. Ultimately, I argue that the Black Female Jeremiad is characterized by her ability to navigate both the maternal and the militant in previously unacknowledged ways and that this subjective hybridity leads to the Black Female Jeremiads marginalization from mainstream discourse through dismissive charges of insanity, blasphemy, and/or treason to American ideals. Moreover, the Black Female Jeremiads mobility between bifurcated representations of black womanhood results in a vexed maternity and a generative militancy that complicates Black feminist thoughts predominant articulation of black motherhood as a site of power and activism. Thus, my dissertation prioritizes a missing strand within contemporary Black feminist thought by analyzing often-overlooked texts such as Toni Morrisons Paradise , Carolivia Herrons Thereafter Johnnie, Octavia Butlers Parables series, and Lauryn Hills live album, MTV Unplugged 2.0, while at the same time deepening our understanding of literary predecessors such as late seventeenth-century sermons and nineteenth-century abolitionist texts.

Most scholarly studies and even general personal reflections about Julia Child portray her as a figure that changed the face of cooking, cookbooks, and cooking television for audiences of the late twentieth and twenty first centuries. While this is true, many of these studies and reflections do not acknowledge Child’s ability to change mainstream ideas by conforming to some of them. While Child radicalized perceptions toward food and those who cook, she also represented a domestic woman and a wife. While Child’s politics were indeed liberal, for the most part, her lifestyle was actually quite moderate. This project is an examination of how Julia Child straddled the lines between subversive and conforming, threatening and safe, and housewife and feminist, and in doing so, was able to create a new cooking methodology for Americans who, historically, have a disconnected relationship toward food in general. Using Child’s reactions to Cold War mentalities, I demonstrate how Child was able to perform certain roles, specifically the “housewife,” in order to penetrate the nuclear family bubble and implant new ideas about food, cooking, and femininity.

I examine several women artists whose work, both creative and theoretical, pays serious attention to the presence of material culture, particularly textiles and dress. I extend current critical interest in the materiality of language by arguing for the inclusion of the work of craft theorists in these discussions, and by investigating how we might reconceive early experimental art and writing as intimately connected to and in conversation with material culture studies. The women artists I examine–filmmaker Maya Deren, Bauhaus weaver Anni Albers, and poets Laura Riding, Lorine Niedecker, and Gertrude Stein–all used writing and language in order to explore and articulate the relationship between humans and non-human objects, particularly objects of dress and bodily ornamentation.

That Americans are driven by wealth and the pursuit of material markers of financial achievement is anything but new. “We who are without kings”—as Arthur Miller famously termed Americans in “Tragedy and the Common Man” 1949)—have always granted de facto status of nobility to those with the means to show it off. However, this study harmonizes apparently dissonant American notes by dissecting the nation in order to establish a unified voice in Nineteen Twenties Fiction. By juxtaposing the canonical with the obscure, the seemingly conservative with the assumed liberal, the minority with the majority, and the South with the North, the true consistency and complexity of the American economic consciousness comes into greater light. Furthermore, although the Twenties presents a unique historical and literary moment for American writers, the decade ultimately showcases a phenomenon of economic obsession and discomfort that has only expanded and become more defined in contemporary American culture. The primary argument within “The Troubled Economic Consciousness” is that concerns over fiscal identity, labor, and materialism are so overwhelming in the American fiction of the Twenties that even many texts that seemingly share little with the subject of economy are actually engulfed by this overarching discussion. The chapters are organized along geographic delineations that highlight critical examples of the fiction arising in particular regions. The first chapter presents Nineteenth Century precursors to Modernism that evince a vague but perceptible awareness of the developing importance of labor to personal identity. Following this look back at the previous century, the next four chapters each involve a different physical region of Twenties fiction and include the South, the Midwest, the Harlem Renaissance, and expatriate writings. These disparate regions serve to collectively prove the assertion that a common thread of economic anxiety overwhelms literary discourse and cannot be removed from Twenties fiction. Finally, the conclusion asserts a context for the Modernist fiction of the Twenties that is ultimately consistent with the economic consciousness of contemporary American culture. Economic trepidations are ubiquitous in Twenties fiction, but in contemporary American culture, discussions and displays of wealth have become audacious and explicit.