Subjectivity, phenomenology, and the expression of the human/nonhuman other are critical impasses for makers to challenge, curate, or circumvent within Posthumanism. Through an Abnatural aesthetic ungrounding of the WE as self/other/avatars, identities of a maker are infinitely reconstituted into variable signatures, logics, ethics, and moralities.Avatars exist as differentiable iterations of the perceived self, but they are also independent beings that flicker between states of the real/fake as simulacrums and contradictions embedded within the WE. This unfixity of a formal silhouette provides the self, as a maker, the opportunity to move beyond Paragonical structures toward x. Troubling in an unpredictable liminal directionality, the WE is subjected to another kind of alterity that fronts imperceivable biases. This process, rather than being extractive and intrusive, seeks expansive freedoms into the unexplored landscapes of each maker by dismantling the socio-cultural confines of practice. As an amateur, as a maker, and as an avatar, the WE is challenged to perceive otherness from within. In so doing, it becomes embedded, knowable, demystified, and embodied as a new modality for made/maker. How far can these tentacular forms reach, stray, and grasp? Pushing toward a nonhuman space, to critique the Posthuman, an Abnatural aesthetic produces elastic, generative collaborations that simultaneously critique the WE. Through case studies on Combinatorial strategies to frame objects, subjects, and making practices, an asymptote of trouble arises where subjects are entangled within their unfixable subjectivity. Experiencing as an avatar, how can an Abnatural aesthetic generate pathways toward inclusive and expansive making practices?

"Shapeshifting through Words" investigates the history of literature from nonhuman perspectives to determine how people understand animal experiences of the world. I gauge this history through a taxonomy, compiling around 500 stories from nonhuman vantage points to mark trends in publication frequency, as well as number and types of perspectives extracted from the data. A trope and genre analysis follows, along with the hallmarks for what constitutes a nonhuman narrative. Finally, this knowledge is adapted to a framework in the form of a booklet in how to construct a nonhuman perspective based on its cognitive and sensory understanding of the world.

Criminal detection emerged as a significant literary element in mid-Victorian Realist and Sensation novels. These fictional detectives, much like their 20th-century successors, promised clarity and resolution as they solved crimes, caught criminals, helped victims, and explored complex narrative and social connections as they did so. However, while these fictional detectives may solve crimes and mysteries, they rarely provide the narrative resolution of later fictional detectives.This dissertation examines how Victorian Realist and Sensation fiction demonstrate how corrupt individuals and institutions legitimize themselves through displaced responsibility. The literature does this by subverting the expectations of the detective plot: those the detective pursues as criminals may be the real victims when the real villains – those in privileged and protected positions – persist without official consequence. Rather than provide narrative resolution, fictional detectives contribute to and reinforce these legitimizations while the literature displays how corrupt characters exploit their positions in social institutions, such as the law, the family, philanthropy, etc., that contribute to the victimization and criminalization of other characters. The literature responds to these conditions with the formation of care communities, or smaller social organizations where individuals can attend to these needs of one another. Rather than strike out at these corrupt social institutions’ pretenses of innocence, care communities provide havens for the abused and opportunities at recuperation, repentance, and forgiveness. Demonstrations of the ability or inability of detection, care, and social corruption to resolve social problems provide nuanced representations and the consequences of providing help or harm. This study focuses on 3 novels with investigative plots. First, Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (1852-3) as an example of Realist fiction that critiques how legal and philanthropic endeavors can be exploitative and contribute to crime and the social problems they are designed to prevent. Second, Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861) as an example of Sensation fiction and how mismanaged domestic spaces can lead to crime and wrongdoing in other social spaces. Third, Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868) as an example of Sensation fiction turning into detective fiction that considers how ingrained social and cultural values and practices initiate and perpetuate crime and wrongdoing.

In Arizona: A History, Thomas E. Sheridan writes that Arizona isn't something real but "only a set of arbitrary lines on a map." I disagree with that statement. Writers such as Jane Allison, Jerome Stern, and Peter Turchi have all written craft books analyzing the structures of narrative, and it could be argued that at the core of their individual arguments is the shared sentiment that it is the shape of something which gives it meaning. As such, those "arbitrary lines" which Sheridan dismisses have created geographical perimeters in the real world, which have fostered historical, cultural, political, ideological, familial, artistic, and literary perimeters as well. So arbitrary or not, those lines have created boundaries which have given real meaning to people's lives. This dissertation attempts to explore the lives shaped by Sheridan's arbitrary lines. Based on what historian Robert L. Dorman calls the "localist west" in Hell of a Vision: Regionalism and the Modern American West, this dissertation uses fiction to investigate the state of Arizona as its own unique yet limited knowledge apparatus, specifically how the state's mostly forgotten cowboy heritage, both real and mythic, serves as an underlying ontological practice for part of its population. The stories presented here attempt to be reflective of the metaphysics for that population and are constructed from an assemblage of the region's territorial-to-present history, literature, conservative politics, economies, racial discourses and populations, and its arid yet diverse desert ecologies. There's also some Waylon Jennings. While this work examines existence within a limited Arizona population--mostly lower to middle class conservative white folk living within the mythos and realities of the Western tradition and its associated spectrums of masculinity--it does not prove a thesis for it. I did not collect quantifiable data or make conclusions about how and why a particular population acts they way it does. Instead, I've simply tried to undertake what Milan Kudera writes in The Art of the Novel is the writer's purpose, to be an "explorer of existence."

The archive has always been a central piece to William S. Burroughs’ generative legacy. I argue that the William S. Burroughs Papers accentuate the cut-up/fold-in as contingent on perception and a product of being-in-the-world, as described in The Third Mind and in interview. These experimentalist forms are noticeably replicated throughout the W.S.B Papers, and are a heuristic to his literary oeuvre: specifically, the relationship between word and image, and entering the “image” within his word. The cut-up/fold in methods are more than a literary device. They are captured throughout the archive as a rhetorical tool. As curator Robert Sobieszek observes that Burroughs introduced a new dimension into the field of writing (1996), this paper displays the visual overture of this new dimension accentuated via an interdisciplinary approach: Burroughs utilizes the fields of visual culture (with collaborator Brion Gysin) and photography to apply a replication of the cut-up (a literary form) to the image, illuminating newfound, semiotic pathways of visual communication. Through evidence of cut daily news, plural grids, and pantropic street photography, Burroughs’ new dimension germinates visually, and is a reflection of how and what Burroughs, one of the most profound authors of the 20th century, keeps in his field of view. In the W.S.B Papers at Arizona State University, the cut-up pattern, if cut and shot appropriately, is applicable to both word and image.

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.

The coyote of the natural world is an anthropomorphic figure that occupies many places within Southwestern Pueblo cultures in oral traditions as well as the natural environs. The modern-day coyote is a marginalized occupant of Southwestern milieu portrayed as an iconic character found in cartooned animations or conceptualized as a shadowed symbol of a doglike creature howling in front of a rising full moon. Coyote is also a label given to a person who transports undocumented immigrants across the United States–Mexico border. This wild dog is known as coyote, Coyote, Canis latrans, tsócki (Keresan for coyote), trickster, Wylie Coyote, and coywolf. When the biology, history, accounts, myths, and cultural constructs are placed together within the spectrum of coyote names or descriptions, a transmergent materiality emerges at the center of those contributing factors. Coyote is many things. It is constantly adapting to the environment in which it has survived for millions of years. The Southwest landscape was first occupied by rudimentary components of life evolving into a place first populated by animals, followed by humans. To a great extent, the continued existence of both animals and humans relies on their ability to obtain food and find a suitable niche in which to live. This dissertation unpacks how the coyote that is embedded in American Pueblo literature and culture depicts a transmergent materiality representing the constantly changing human–animal interface as it interprets the likewise transformative state of food systems in the American Southwest in the present day.