The Literature of Disaffection: Political Dysphoria and British Modernism after 1930

This dissertation argues that “disaffection” is an overlooked but foundational posture of mid-twentieth-century British and Anglophone literature. Previously misdiagnosed as quietism or apathy, disaffection instead describes how many late modernist writers mediated between their ideological misgivings and the pressure to respond to dire political crises, from the Second World War to the creation of new postcolonial nations. Stylists of disaffection—such as Henry Green, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and V. S. Naipaul—grappled with how limiting cultural assumptions, for instance, about class and nation, seemed to inhere in particular aesthetic techniques like stream of consciousness or realism. Disaffected literature appeals to but then disrupts a given technique’s projection of these assumptions and the social totality that they imagine. This literary “bait-and-switch” creates a feeling of dysphoria whereby readers experience a text unnervingly different from what they had been led to expect. Recognizing the formative work of literary disaffection in late modernism offers an original way to conceptualize the transition between modernist and postmodernist literature in the twentieth century.

Characterization and analysis of the exogenous application of selected phytohormones on C. reinhardtii metabolism

Gemstone Team Genes to Fuels

Humankindness: Illness, Animality, and the Limits of the Human in the Victorian Novel

This project posits a link between representations of animals or animality and representations of illness in the Victorian novel, and examines the narrative uses and ideological consequences of such representations. Figurations of animality and illness in Victorian fiction have been examined extensively as distinct phenomena, but examining their connection allows for a more complex view of the role of sympathy in the Victorian novel. The commonplace in novel criticism is that Victorian authors, whether effectively or not, constructed their novels with a view to the expansion of sympathy. This dissertation intervenes in the discussion of the Victorian novel as a vehicle for sympathy by positing that texts and scenes in which representations of illness and animality are conjoined reveal where the novel draws the boundaries of the human, and the often surprising limits it sets on sympathetic feeling. In such moments, textual cues train or direct readerly sympathies in ways that suggest a particular definition of the human, but that direction of sympathy is not always towards an enlarged sympathy, or an enlarged definition of the human. There is an equally (and increasingly) powerful antipathetic impulse in many of these texts, which estranges readerly sympathy from putatively deviant, degenerate, or dangerous groups. These two opposing impulses—the sympathetic and the antipathetic—often coexist in the same novel or even the same scene, creating an ideological and affective friction, and both draw on the same tropes of illness and animality. Examining the intersection of these different discourses—sympathy, illness, and animality-- in these novels reveals the way that major Victorian debates about human nature, evolution and degeneration, and moral responsibility shaped the novels of the era as vehicles for both antipathy and sympathy. Focusing on the novels of the Brontës and Thomas Hardy, this dissertation examines in depth the interconnected ways that representations of animals and animality and representations of illness function in the Victorian novel, as they allow authors to explore or redefine the boundary between the human and the non-human, the boundary between sympathy and antipathy, and the limits of sympathy itself.

Sonic Movie Memories: Sound, Childhood, and American Cinema

Though the trend rarely receives attention, since the 1970s many American filmmakers have been taking sound and music tropes from children’s films, television shows, and other forms of media and incorporating those sounds into films intended for adult audiences. Initially, these references might seem like regressive attempts at targeting some nostalgic desire to relive childhood. However, this dissertation asserts that these children’s sounds are instead designed to reconnect audience members with the multi-faceted fantasies and coping mechanisms that once, through children’s media, helped these audience members manage life’s anxieties. Because sound is the sense that Western audiences most associate with emotion and memory, it offers audiences immediate connection with these barely conscious longings. The first chapter turns to children’s media itself and analyzes Disney’s 1950s forays into television. The chapter argues that by selectively repurposing the gentlest sonic devices from the studio’s films, television shows like Disneyland created the studio’s signature sentimental “Disney sound.” As a result, a generation of baby boomers like Steven Spielberg comes of age and longs to recreate that comforting sound world. The second chapter thus focuses on Spielberg, who incorporates Disney music in films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Rather than recreate Disney’s sound world, Spielberg uses this music as a springboard into a new realm I refer to as “sublime refuge” - an acoustic haven that combines overpowering sublimity and soothing comfort into one fantastical experience. The second half of the dissertation pivots into more experimental children’s cartoons like Gerald McBoing-Boing (1951) - cartoons that embrace audio-visual dissonance in ways that soothe even as they create tension through a phenomenon I call “comfortable discord.” In the final chapter, director Wes Anderson reveals that these sonic tensions have just as much appeal to adults. In films like The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), Anderson demonstrates that comfortable discord can simultaneously provide a balm for anxiety and create an open-ended space that makes empathetic connections between characters possible. The dissertation closes with a call to rethink nostalgia, not as a romanticization of the past, but rather as a reconnection with forgotten affective channels.

The Drama of History: Representation and Revolutionaries in Haitian Theater, 1818-1907

Since the beginning of the Haitian theatrical tradition there has been an ineluctable dedication to the representation of Haitian history on stage. Given the rich theatrical archive about Haiti throughout the world, this study considers operas and plays written solely by Haitian playwrights. By delving into the works of Juste Chanlatte, Massillon Coicou, and Vendenesse Ducasse this study proposes a re-reading of Haitian theater that considers the stage as an innovative site for contesting negative and clichéd representations of the Haitian Revolution and its revolutionary leadership. A genre long mired in accusations of mimicking European literary forms, this study proposes a reevaluation of Haitian theater and its literary origins.

“In The Good Old Days of Long Ago": Echoes of Vaudeville and Minstrelsy in the Music of Uncle Dave Macon

Uncle Dave Macon provided an essential link between nineteenth-century, urban popular stage music (especially the minstrel show and vaudeville) and commercialized country music of the 1920s. He preserved through his recordings a large body of songs and banjo techniques that had their origins in urban-based, nineteenth-century vaudeville and minstrelsy. Like the minstrel and vaudeville performers of the nineteenth century, Macon told jokes and stories, employed attention-grabbing stage gimmicks, marketed himself with boastful or outrageous slogans, and dressed with individual flair. At the same time, Macon incorporated many features from the rural-based folk music of Middle Tennessee. Overall, Macon’s repertoire, musical style, and stage persona (which included elements of the rube, country gentleman, and old man) demonstrated his deep absorption, and subsequent reinterpretation, of nineteenth-century musical traditions. Macon’s career offers a case study in how nineteenth-century performance styles, repertoire, and stage practices became a part of country music in the 1920s. As an artist steeped in two separate, but overlapping, types of nineteenth-century music—stage and folk—Macon was well-positioned to influence the development of the new commercial genre. He brought together several strains of nineteenth-century music to form a modern, twentieth-century musical product ideally suited to the new mass media of records, radio, and film. By tracing Macon’s career and studying his music, we can observe how the cross-currents of rural and popular entertainment during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries interacted to form the commercial genre we now know as country music.

MEN WRITING WOMEN: “THE WOMAN QUESTION” AND MALE DISCOURSE OF IRANIAN MODERNITY"

In this dissertation I explore “The Woman Question” in the discourse of Iranian male authors. A pro-modernity group, they placed women’s issues at the heart of their discourse. This dissertation follows the trajectory of the representation of “The Woman Question” as it is reflected in the male discourse over the course of a century. It discusses the production of a literature that was anchored in the idea of reform and concerned itself with issues pertaining to women. These men challenged lifelong patriarchal notions such as veiling, polygamy, gender segregation, and arranged marriages, as well as traditional roles of women and gender relations. This study is defined under the rubrics of “The Woman Question” and “The New Woman,” which I have borrowed from the Victorian and Edwardian debates of similar issues as they provide clearer delineations. Drawing upon debates on sexuality, and gender, this dissertation illustrates the way these men championed women was both progressive and regressive. This study argues that the desire for women’s liberation was couched in male ideology of gender relations. It further illustrates that the advancement of “The Woman Question,” due to its continuous and yet gradual shifting concurrent with each author’s nuanced perception of women’s issues, went through discernible stages that I refer to as observation, causation, remedy, and confusion. The analytical framework for this project is anchored in the “why” and the “how” of the Iranian male authors’ writings on women in addition to “what” was written. This dissertation examines four narrative texts—two in prose and two in poetry—entitled: “Lankaran’s Vizier,” “The Black Shroud,” “‘Arefnameh,” and “Fetneh” written respectively by Akhundzadeh, ‘Eshqi, Iraj Mirza, and Dashti. Chapter one outlines the historical background, methodology, theoretical framework, and literature review. The following chapters examine, the advocacy for companionate marriage and romantic love, women and nationalistic cause, veiling and unveiling, and the emerging figure of the New Iranian Woman as morally depraved.

The Ethics of Eating Animals in Tudor and Stuart Theaters

A pressing challenge for the study of animal ethics in early modern literature is the very breadth of the category “animal,” which occludes the distinct ecological and economic roles of different species. Understanding the significance of deer to a hunter as distinct from the meaning of swine for a London pork vendor requires a historical investigation into humans’ ecological and cultural relationships with individual animals. For the constituents of England’s agricultural networks – shepherds, butchers, fishwives, eaters at tables high and low – animals matter differently. While recent scholarship on food and animal ethics often emphasizes ecological reciprocation, I insist that this mutualism is always out of balance, both across and within species lines. Focusing on drama by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and the anonymous authors of late medieval biblical plays, my research investigates how sixteenth-century theaters use food animals to mediate and negotiate the complexities of a changing meat economy. On the English stage, playwrights use food animals to impress the ethico-political implications of land enclosure, forest emparkment, the search for new fisheries, and air and water pollution from urban slaughterhouses and markets. Concurrent developments in animal husbandry and theatrical production in the period thus led to new ideas about emplacement, embodiment, and the ethics of interspecies interdependence.

An Ethics of Refusal: Sympathy, Intimacy and Fidelity in British Romanticism

Despite a current emphasis in Romantic scholarship on intersubjectivity, this study suggests that we still have much to learn about how theories of intersubjectivity operate in Romantic-era writings that focus on the family—the most common vehicle for exploring relationships during the period. By investigating how sympathy, intimacy, and fidelity are treated in the works of Mary Hays, Felicia Hemans, and Mary Shelley, this dissertation discovers the presence of an “ethics of refusal” within women’s Romantic-era texts. Texts that promote an ethics of refusal, I argue, almost advocate for a particular mode of relating within a given model of the family as the key to more equitable social relations, but, then, they ultimately refuse to support any particular model. Although drawn towards models of relating that, at first, seem to offer explicit pathways towards a more ethical society, texts that promote an ethics of refusal ultimately reject any program of reform. Such rejection is not unaccountable, but stems from anxieties about appearing to dictate what is best for others when others are, in reality, other than the self. In this dissertation, I draw from feminist literary critiques that focus on ethics; genre-focused literary critiques; and studies of sympathy, intimacy, and fidelity that investigate modes of relating within the context of literary works and reader-textual relations. Psychoanalytic theory also plays an important role within my third chapter on Mary Shelley’s novel Falkner. Scholarship that investigates the dialectical nature of Romantic-era literature informs my entire project. Through theorizing and studying an ethics of refusal, we can more fully understand how intersubjective modes functioned in Romantic literature and discover a Romanticism uniquely committed to attempting to turn dialectical reasoning into a social practice.

The Sword and the Pen: Life Writings by Militant-Authors of the Việt Minh and Front de Libération Nationale (FLN)

This dissertation examines four life writings by militant-authors of the Việt Minh and Front de la Libération Nationale (FLN): Ngô Văn Chiêu’s Journal d’un combattant Viet-Minh (1955), Đặng Văn Việt’s De la RC 4 à la N 4: la campagne des frontières (2000), Si Azzedine’s On nous appelait fellaghas (1976), and Saadi Yacef’s two-volume La Bataille d’Alger (2002). In describing the Vietnamese and Algerian Revolutions through the perspectives of combatants who participated in their respective countries’ national liberation struggles, the texts reveal that four key factors motivated the militants and led them to believe that independence was historically inevitable: (1) a philosophical, political, and ideological framework, (2) the support of multiple segments of the local population, (3) the effective use of guerrilla and psychological warfare, and (4) military, moral, and political assistance provided by international allies. By fighting for the independence of their countries and documenting their revolutionary experiences, the four militant-authors leave their mark on the world using both the sword and the pen.

FROM THE AETHIOPICA TO THE RENAISSANCE: RECOVERING A STAGE TRADITION OF POSITIVE REPRESENTATION OF AFRICANS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

This dissertation looks at the connection between Heliodorus's fifth-century prose romance, An Aethiopian History, certain Renaissance texts, and how these texts helped influence an alternate representation of Africans in the early modern world. Through their portrayals of Africans, early modern English playwrights frequently give the impression that Africans, especially black Africans, were people without accomplishments, without culture. Previously, however, this was not the case. Africans were depicted with dignity, as a tradition existed for this kind of representation--and Renaissance Europe had long been acquainted with the achievements of Africans, dating back to antiquity. As the source of several lost plays, the Aethiopica is instrumental in dramatizing Africans favorably, especially on the early modern stage, and helped shape a stage tradition that runs alongside the stereotyping of Africans. This Heliodoran tradition can be seen in works of Greene, Heywood, Jonson, Shakespeare, and others in the motifs of crosscultural and transracial romance, male and female chastity, racial metamorphosis, lost or abandoned babies, wandering heroes, and bold heroines. In Jonson's Masque of Blackness and Masque of Beauty, I establish a connection between these two masques and Heliodorus's Aethiopica and argue for a Heliodoran stage tradition implicit in both masques through the conceit of blanching. In The English Moore, I explore how Richard Brome uses the Heliodoran and Jonsonian materials to create a negative quality of blackness that participates in the dramatic tradition of the degenerate African on the English Renaissance stage. With Othello, I contend that it is a drama that can be seen in the Heliodoran tradition by stressing certain motifs found in the play that derives from the Aethiopica. Reading Othello this way provides us with a more layered and historicized interpretation of Shakespeare's protagonists. Othello's nationality and faith make his exalted position in Venice and the Venetian army credible and logical. His nobility and heroic status become more sharply defined, giving us a fuller understanding of the emphasis he places on chastity--both for himself and for Desdemona. Instead of a traditional, compliant, and submissive Desdemona, a courageous, resourceful, witty, and pure heroine emerges--one who lives by the dictates of her conscience than by the constraints of societal norms. Recovering the tradition of positive portrayal of Africans that originated from the Aethiopica necessitated an examination of eleven plays that I contend helped to frame the dramatic tradition under investigation. Six of these plays are continental dramas, and five are English. Although three of the English plays are lost and the other two are seventeenth-century dramas, their titles and names of their protagonists, like those of the six extant continental plays, share the names of Heliodorus's hero and heroine, making an exploration of the continental plays imperative to facilitate their use as paradigms in reconstructing the three lost English plays. These continental dramas show that plays whose titles derive from the Aethiopica itself or reflect the names of its major characters follow Heliodorus's text closely, enabling an investigation of the Heliodoran tradition on the early modern English stage. Recovering the Heliodoran tradition adds to the exploration of racial politics and the understanding of the dramatic tradition that constrained and enabled Renaissance playwrights' representation of race and gender.