Since the mid-1970s, punk has operated to fulfill the postmodern objective to destabilize and disrupt metanarratives. In the early days of punk, US and UK punks used their Do It Yourself (DIY) aesthetic and ethos to counter the aggressive capitalist takeover of music and media. With its roots in anarchism, egalitarianism, and individuality, punk’s philosophical and ideological base, methods for pushing boundaries, and monstrous aesthetics have made a lasting impression that can be clearly identified in many of the social justice movements of the past 40 years. This project examines punk publics and publishing praxes and argues that marginalized groups utilize punk’s disruptive strategies to disseminate culture beyond the boundaries of hegemonic systems of knowledge production. This dissertation focuses on punk not as a counterpublic but as what I call a parapublic due to its position alongside the dominant culture. As punk’s recognizable signifiers continue to be absorbed into and consumed by capitalism, these signifiers become part of the mainstream, leading to a reconfiguration of punk. The reconfigurations signal a shift in the dominant culture because punk seeks to make itself abject to appear monstrous. We can look at the abject as occupying a position between the subject and the object, and then we can see that punk allows us to examine culture’s fears and desires through the embodiment of its monsters. This project centralizes the figure and the function of the monster within the works and publishing practices of zines and the punk authors Dennis Cooper and Kathy Acker.

This thesis explores how to read the American experimental novel VAS: An Opera inFlatland, a collaboration between Steve Tomasula and graphic designer Stephen Farrell. VAS demonstrates how twenty-first-century tools and technology can construct a narrative that resembles the human experience shaped by contemporary tools and technology. VAS includes not only a conventional story line but also narrative elements outside the story line, such as collage material and a multimodality, all of which contribute to the novel’s emerging, posthuman narrative. The reading experience of the conventional novel is immersive; experiments with the novel disrupt the immersion of reading, and this disruption produces a presence: the reader becomes conscious of reading, of narrative structure, of the broken conventions, and even of the novel itself. Martin Heidegger’s analyses of tools and technology can elucidate how novels produce presence by breaking conventions, for conventions are like tools, and broken tools, such as a broken hammer, become present to the user that was a moment ago immersed in their use. The reading of VAS that results is two-fold: (1) a stylistic comparison of VAS and This Is Not a Novel by David Markson, two experimental novels that differ in the technology used and represented and, ultimately, the presence made, and (2) a reading of VAS that considers how the novel makes present its narrative dimensions, out of which emerges the novel’s narrative.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States Midwest stood poised to lead the nation economically, politically, and ideologically. Its literary productions of this time open upon a landscape of seemingly endless possibilities and expansive futures. My project studies the ideological constitution of these possibilities, finding that they arise from the condition of unprecedented secularity which marked early twentieth-century U.S. modernity. I employ Charles Taylor’s definition of secularization as the shift to belief as possibility rather than assumption, in which new options for belief or unbelief expand like a spiritual nova. This definition makes visible in Midwest texts the different attempts protagonists make to achieve authenticity in a secular age that offers new options for living meaningfully. Like windows onto a figurative landscape, different texts reveal unique vantages as well as startling parallels. I examine the following text grouping, which underscores the heterogeneity of the Midwest: O. E. Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth, Oscar Micheaux’s The Homesteader, Willa Cather’s My Antonia, Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, and Black Elk and John Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks. As rural texts, they collaboratively depict the rural Midwest as a region that is both heartland and subaltern, at once the center of the nation but also estranged from supposed loci of modernity. I argue that their peculiar searches for authenticity offer insight on modern selfhood in a secular age, which constitutes the meaning of the Midwest then and now.

Ernest Hemingway and Cuban author Guillermo Cabrera Infante met at least twice: on a fishing trip in Cuba on the American writer’s famous boat, El Pilar; and briefly in passing at a restaurant in Madrid. Many scholars have documented Hemingway’s clear influence on Cabrera Infante’s style, as well as how often he surfaced in the Cuban writer’s many works of fiction and non-fiction. However, scholarship has never comprehensively examined the extent of Hemingway’s influence and the relationship between the writers’ identities, vocation, and body of work. My dissertation transcends current scholarship, analyzing the interstices of Hemingway and Cabrera Infante’s lives, in addition to how and why their work intersects at critical points. It also considers the factors that influenced Cabrera Infante’s imagination of Hemingway, which I argue is inherently tied to U.S.-Cuban relations before and after the Cuban Revolution. While my scholarship accounts for the impact of U.S. hegemony on this perspective, it also foregrounds refreshing camaraderie regarding how Hemingway and Cabrera imagined Cuba in their respective works. In all, this dissertation represents a fruitful juxtaposition of U.S.-Cuban authors–a treasure trove for the aspirational fields of Inter-American, transatlantic, and comparative studies.

This thesis analyzes the unsettling presence of the Holocaust in Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl (1980), Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer (1979), and Nathan Englander’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (2013). Characters in these texts struggle to maintain a stable sense of what it means to be Jewish in America outside of a relationship to the Holocaust. This leaves the characters only able to form negative associations about what it means to live with the memory of the Holocaust or to over-identify so heavily with the memory that they can’t lead a normal life. These authors construct a re-formed memory of the Holocaust in ways that prompt a new focus on how permanently intertwined the Holocaust and Jewish identity are. In this context, re-formed means the way Jewish American writers have reconstructed the connection between Jewish identity and its relation to the Holocaust in ways that highlight issues of over-identification and negative identity associations.

By pushing past the trope of unspeakability that often surrounds the Holocaust, these authors construct a re-formed memory that allows for the formation of Jewish American identity as permanently bound with constant Holocaust preoccupation, the memory of Anne Frank, and the Holocaust itself. The authors’ treatment of issues surrounding Jewish identity contribute to the genre of post-Holocaust literature, which focuses on re-forming the discussion about present day Jewish American connection to the Holocaust. Giving voice to the Holocaust in new ways provides an opportunity for current and future generations of Jewish Americans to again consider the continued importance of the Holocaust as a historical event within the Jewish community.

In a world that is once again becoming increasingly anti-semitic as a result of the current political climate, white supremacist riots, desecration of Jewish grave sites, and shootings at temples, the discussion that these texts open up is increasingly important and should remain at the forefront of American consciousness. The research in this thesis reveals that through the process of Holocaust memory constantly being re-formed through the work of these Jewish American authors, its continued influence on Jewish American culture is not forgotten.

This dissertation is an examination of a modernist desire to construct future materiality via material language, which represents a desire to overcome biology and the biological body. As such, modernist discourses of material language must be understood within their broader historical context, as these textual constructs developed against a cultural backdrop replete with eugenicist ideologies. Modernists wielded discourses of material language to determine via cultural reproduction which futures might materialize, as well as which bodies could occupy those futures and in what capacities. This dissertation argues that these modernist constructs contain their own failure in their antibiologism and their refusal to acknowledge the agency of corporeal materiality before them. Unlike language, the body expresses biopower through its material (re)productivity—its corpo-reality—which, though it can be shaped and repressed by discourse, persistently ruptures through the restraints of eugenicist ideologies and the autonomous liberal model of white masculine embodiment they uphold. This work analyses sexually marginalized bodies in texts by Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, Nathanael West, and Ernest Hemingway that, through their insistently persistent biological materiality, disrupt modernist discourses of material language that offer no future for feminine, queer, and disabled corporeality. By exploring how intersecting issues of gender, sexuality, and disability complicate theories of language’s materiality in modern American literature, this dissertation brings attention to writers and texts that challenge broader attempts in the early decades of the twentieth century to subvert the biological body through eugenicist projects of cultural reproduction.

In modern legal and political debates, Lochner v. New York is regularly praised by libertarians for its rejection of economic regulation. To understand the libertarian impulse for revitalizing the Lochner decision, we must examine the foundations Lochner was decided on and the cases and laws that led to the end of the Lochner Era. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (Wagner Act) was passed as a counter-revolution to the anti-regulatory framework of the Lochner Era, and it found its legal accompaniment in the West Coast Hotel and NLRB v. Jones decisions. Some retrenchment followed: The Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 (Taft-Hartley Act) was passed to undercut the Wagner Act in ways that is possible to see as either a return to Lochnerism or as the rise of an executive supremacy argument in to the labor market. Writing during the negotiations of Taft-Hartley, Max Horkheimer, in Eclipse of Reason, explicitly rejects the economic premises that Taft-Harley rests upon and criticizes its logic of governance. We can learn from Horkheimer’s critique of the rationality behind the Taft-Hartley Act in order to understand the fundamental issues with the Lochner decision and modern libertarian attempts at confining governmental regulation to means that ensure the functioning of free-markets. This paper analyzes the economic rationality of the Wagner and Taft-Hartley Acts, arguing that the Wagner Act was a rejection of Locherian logic and that there is latent Lochnerian premises within the Taft-Hartley Act. This paper defines the Lochner zombie and seeks to understand the attractive power that the decision has on modern legal thought. Libertarian groups use the premises of the Lochner decision, civil rights and protection of contract as a means to render all, or almost all, governmental market regulation unconstitutional. I will be examining the cases of Lochner v. New York and West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish. In doing so, I will be utilizing the legal theories of Roberto Mangabeira Unger and the critical theory of Max Horkheimer as a framework for understanding the resurrection of the Lochner zombie. Part of the purpose of this paper is to establish a linkage between Horkheimer’s analysis of means-ends rationality and the reconstructive legal interpretation advocated by Unger. Using both Unger and Horkheimer together allows for a more robust critique of the ever more dominating libertarian legal theories. The Taft-Hartley Act and modern libertarian attacks on governmental regulation seek to replace the institutional and regulatory model of the Wagner Act with a theory of legal disciplinarity bound to economics and contract theory such that it would systematically exclude ethical and social justice forms of rationality from the canons of legal thinking. I counter this by proposing legal interdisciplinarity that utilizes critical theory and rationalizing legal analysis to promote democratization and governmental regulation. The only way to slay the Lochner zombie is to develop a reconstructive theory of law as a discipline situated relative to economics and other social sciences.

"The Problem of Hope: Literary Tragedy in Mid-Twentieth Century American Fiction" examines Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar through the lens of tragedy. This thesis delves into how conflicts between internal and external identities can create a tragic individual, what kinds of success count toward achievement of the "American Dream," and whether the tragic "common man" is the socially normative one or the socially disenfranchised one. It raises a three-dimensional theoretical approach to American tragedy and, most importantly, considers the significance of tragic hope for American literature. This paper questions the construction of American identities across class, race, and gender according to social scripts. It seeks to uncover what forces these scripts exert on American cultural myths and rereads those myths through tragedy to explore Miller's idea of a noble common man. By moving from Miller to Ellison to Plath, this thesis traces the undercurrents of tragedy through some of the most identity-focused novels of mid-twentieth century American fiction to see how the overarching American narrative changed from 1940 to 1969 as the US underwent significant social changes domestically and image changes abroad. Ultimately, this paper concludes that tragedy in mid-twentieth century American fiction points toward a new idea of American success as a success that occurs beyond social scripts.

The relationship between mental illness (or "madness," as Socrates labeled psychosis, as well as a wide range of states of thought and emotion [Jamison, 1993]) and creativity has been noted since before the times of Socrates. The questions that this noted relationship pose are significant. Famous authors, poets, artists, and musicians who suffered from various forms of mental illness are littered throughout history. Edgar Allen Poe himself noted, "Men have called me mad but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence \u2014 whether much that is glorious \u2014 whether all that is profound \u2014 does not spring from disease of thought \u2014 from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect." Only in recent years have researchers begun to classify these disorders of past artists using modern diagnostic measures. While the concept of a relationship between creativity and mental illness is fascinating in and of itself, understanding the implications of a possible correlation is essential to the care and treatment that individuals with the diseases are given. If, indeed, creativity is linked with affective disorders, what does this mean for the treatment of these disorders? By eliminating the symptoms of mood disorders, are we also inadvertently eliminating creativity? It is important to acknowledge the possibility that mental illnesses like bipolar disorder include benefits to those afflicted. How can we treat the negative symptoms of mood disorders while enhancing the positive symptoms? In order to conclude that there is a link between creativity and mood disorders, it is first necessary to reexamine and reestablish the processes by which mood disorders are diagnosed. Although currently diagnosed on a categorical scale \u2014 meaning the patient is diagnosed under the black-and-white category of manic or depressive at a given point in time \u2014 this paper will argue that mood disorders can be better diagnosed and treated on a continuum of mood states. Furthermore, by viewing mood disorders on such a continuum, writers like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, whose diagnoses are debated by historians and professionals, can be established as having a diagnosable affective disorder, since both experienced symptoms of depression and mania, if not in the precise timing and manner proscribed by the Diagnostic Manual. Finally, by determining these writers' diagnoses, a relationship can be explored between their creative states and their mood states.

This project charts the development of autobiography as a genre through two pairs of writers: Benjamin Franklin and Jean-Jacques Rousseau of the Enlightenment, and Oscar Wilde and James Weldon Johnson of the fin de siècle, leading into the twentieth century. The Enlightenment thinkers took an Augustinian confessional approach to the autobiography as a genre, revealing their flawed selves to the public in order to make themselves both authentic and virtuous. Through both these writers, autobiography became a way to replace the religious precepts of the Middle Ages, as the flawed self could be redeemed through society in its current historical moment rather than God. Franklin’s autobiography shows how self-making through economic credit is conducive to virtue, while Rousseau turned inward toward a natural goodness lacking in corrupt social relations. Despite their differences, both furthered the development of autobiography as an account of authentic self-making.

The fin de siècle writers fictionalized the autobiography and derived a concept of authenticity that develops from the suffering of social otherness. Wilde praised the poor over the bourgeois in a British Philistine society, while Johnson’s narrator argued for the authenticity of an African-American class striving for economic and social justice. Both writers redeemed suffering through the ideals of the subjective self, a turn inward that resembles Rousseau’s own look into his natural, innermost self. Overall, this project focuses on how the development of the genre between these two pairs of thinkers gives multiple accounts of self-making leading to the social Other becoming an agent for authenticity; how is the self to be read, understood, and made authentic through its imperfections and sufferings? The fictionality of the later works casts an overarching question: is attaining authenticity through autobiography merely fictional?