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- Creators: Broglio, Ron
- Creators: Broglio, Ronald
- Member of: Theses and Dissertations
- Member of: Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Description
This dissertation considers the literary and cultural response of the labor-class poets to the emerging forces of Foucauldian biopolitics in early modern Britain to shed new light on the cultural impacts of biopower upon the rural community in early modern Britain. The analysis demonstrates how the labor class literary response is characterized by an exterior experience with the nonhuman in an alternative mode to the Wordsworthian experience of the interior. I then use labor-class poets to counter Wordsworthian notions of the immaterial State population through a critical expose of state-Subject, subject-object, and human nonhuman exterior relations as they are depicted in the labor-class poetry of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain. Employing an object-ontological reading of community, I explore how the effects of biopower were inscribed in the literary artifacts of the labor-class. As a final consideration, I explore the response to postcolonial biopolitics in J.M. Coetzee's 1999 novel, Disgrace. The research takes a focused historical view, surveying a range of literary, political, and historical texts between 1760-1840 to offer new readings of Robert Bloomfield, Robert Burns, John Clare, William Cobbett, Ebenezer Elliott, Olivier Goldsmith, James Hogg, and William Wordsworth. In complement, the research offers a new reading of postcolonial biopolitics in the contemporary work of J.M Coetzee.
ContributorsBisnoff, Robert W (Author) / Lussier, Mark S. (Thesis advisor) / Bixby, Patrick (Committee member) / Broglio, Ron (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
"Romantic Cyber-Engagement" offers a new type of dissertation organized around three projects that combine the core values of the Digital Humanities with the hypertext tradition of scholarly pursuits in the field of Romanticism. The first of the three Digital Humanities contributions is to the profession. "A Resource for the Future: The ICR Template and Template Guide" articulates a template for the construction and operation of an advanced conference in Romantic studies. This part of the project includes the conference web site template and guide, which is publicly available to all interested organizations; the template guide includes instructions, tutorials, and advice to govern modification of the template for easier adaptation for future conferences. The second project, "Collaborative Literature Projects in the Digital Age: The Frankenstein Project" is a functional pedagogical example of one way to incorporate Digital Humanities praxis as an interactive part of a college course. This part of the dissertation explains the "Frankenstein Project," a web site that I created for an undergraduate critical theory course where the students contributed various critical approaches for sections of the novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. The final project, "'[W]hat they half-create, / And what perceive': The Creation of a Hypertext Scholarly Edition of 'Tintern Abbey;'" is a critical approaches section in which I created an interactive web site that focused on the primary work, "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey: On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798." This advanced, multimodal site allows viewers to examine various critical approaches to each section of the primary work, and the viewer/reader can interactively engage the text in dialogue by contributing their own interpretation or critical approach. In addition to the three products and analysis generated from this dissertation, the project as a whole offers an initial Digital Humanities model for future dissertations in discipline of English Literature.
ContributorsMatsunaga, Bruce (Author) / Lussier, Mark S (Thesis advisor) / Broglio, Ronald (Committee member) / Wright, Johnson K (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
The mid-eighteenth century publication of national British folk collections like James MacPherson's Works of Ossian and Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, placed a newfound interest in the ancient literature associated with Northern/Gothic heritage. This shift from the classical past created a non-classical interest in the barbarism of Old Norse society, which appeared to closely resemble the Anglo-Saxons. In addition to this growing interest, Edmund Burke's seminal treatise, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, provided a newfound aesthetic interest in objects of terror. The barbaric obscurity and exoticism associated with the Norse culture provided the perfect figures to explore a Gothic heritage while invoking the terror of the sublime. This interest accounted for a variety of works published with Gothic themes and elements that included Old Norse pagan figures. Though a few scholars have attempted to shed light on this sub-field of Romanticism, it continues to lack critical attention, which inhibits a more holistic understanding of Romanticism. I argue that "Norse Romanticism" is a legitimate sub-field of Romanticism, made apparent by the number of primary works available from the age, and I synthesize the major works done thus far in creating a foundation for this field. I also argue that one of the tenets of Norse Romanticism is the newfound appreciation of the "Norse Woman" as a democratized figure, thus opening up a subversive space for dialogue in women's writing using the Gothic aesthetic. To illustrate this, I provide analysis of three Gothic poems written by women writers: Anna Seward's "Herva at the Tomb of Argantyr," Anne Bannerman's "The Nun," and Ann Radcliffe's "Salisbury Plains. Stonehenge." In addition, I supplement Robert Miles' theoretical reading of the Gothic with three philosophical essays on the empowerment of the imagination through terror writing in Anna Letitia Aikin (Barbauld) and John Aikin's "On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror" and "On Romances" as well as Ann Radcliffe's "On the Supernatural in Poetry."
ContributorsLines, Sydney (Author) / Lussier, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Broglio, Ronald (Committee member) / Bivona, Daniel (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
What does it mean to be human or for that matter, posthuman, according to a cyberpunk? This paper navigates the experience of being human in the dystopian and highly technologized future worlds found within the cyberpunk literary tradition of the 1980s and early 1990s. This work explores the implication of what it means to be posthuman in these worlds, which are comprised of virtual realities and disembodied identities. This project first addresses posthumanism as a critical theory and its destabilization of the traditional concept of humanism with particular attention to the relationship between the human being and technology. After building a theoretical framework of posthumanism based on works by Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Bernard Stiegler, this paper then offers a survey of the cyberpunk tradition and the key themes developed and examined within the genre. The project then investigates two seminal works of the cyberpunk movement, William Gibson's 1984 novel, Neuromancer, and Neal Stephenson's 1992 work, Snow Crash, in order to trace a becoming posthuman as it is found within cyberpunk. As this paper further explains, the process of uncovering the posthuman within these texts produces a sense of loss and also nostalgia for a previous experience of being human which was already posthuman. The cyberpunk tradition and these novels in particular, reveal that there has always already been a degree of indeterminacy surrounding the question of what it means to be human. Through destabilizing traditionally held conceptions of humanism, cyberpunk and posthumanism offer the potential to rethink ourselves and our comportment towards the world knowing that technology always already informs our experience of being human.
ContributorsCarr, Joshua (Author) / Broglio, Ronald (Thesis advisor) / Lussier, Mark (Committee member) / Finn, Edward (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
William Blake created a large body of artistic work over his lifetime, all of which is a testament to a unique man, a man who would not live by standards that he felt were binding and inadequate. Blake stated that he needed to create his own system so as not to be enslaved by a paradigm not of his own making. The result of this drive can be seen in his mythology and the meaning that he attempts to inscribe upon his own world. Throughout the corpus of his writings, Blake was working with complex systems. Beginning with contraries in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and The Songs of Innocence & Experience, he then took his work in the contraries and applied it to history and psychology in Europe a Prophecy and The First Book of Urizen. In Blake's use of history and psychology, he was actually broaching the idea of social systems and how they interact with and effect psychic systems. This paper looks at the genesis of Blake's systems through the contraries, up to the point where he attempts to bring social and psychological systems together into a universal system. He uses projection and introjection to try to close the gap in double contingency. However, grappling with this problem (as well as the issue of a universal system) proves to be too much when he reaches The Four Zoas. In his later works, some of these issues are resolved, but ultimately Blake is not able create a universal system.
ContributorsFacemire, Challie (Author) / Lussier, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Broglio, Ronald (Committee member) / Mann, Annika (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This dissertation considers the potential of desire to protect humans, animals, and the environment in the biopolitical times of late capitalism. Through readings of recent South African Literature in English from a postcolonial ecocritical perspective, this project theorizes desire as a mode of resistance to the neocolonial and capitalist instrumentalization of communities of humans and nonhumans, where they are often seen as mere "resources" awaiting consumption and transformation into profit. Deleuze and Guattari posit this overconsumption as stemming in part from capitalism's deployment of the psychoanalytic definition of desire as lack, where all desires are defined according to the same tragedy and brought into a money economy. By defining desire, capitalism seeks to limit the productive unconscious and attempts to create manageable subjects who perform the work of the capitalist machine--subjects that facilitate the extraction of surplus value and pleasure for themselves and the dominant classes. Thinking desire differently as positive and as potentially revolutionary, after Deleuze and Guattari, offers possible resistances to this biopolitical management. This different, positive desire can also change views of others and the world as existing solely for human consumption: views which so often risk bodies towards death and render communities unsustainable. The representations of human and animal desires (and often their cross-species desires) in this literature imagine relationships to the world otherwise, outside of a colonial legacy, where ethical response obtains instead of the consumption of others and the environment by the dominant subjects of capitalism. This project also considers other attempts to protect communities such as animal rights, arguing that rethinking desire is a necessary corollary in the effort to protect communities and lives that are made available for a "non-criminal putting to death" since positive desire precedes the passing of any such laws and must exist for their proper administration. These texts often demonstrate the law's failures to protect communities through portraying corrupt officials who risk the communities they are charged with protecting when their protection competes with government officials' personal capitalist ambitions. Desire offers opportunities for imagining other creative options towards protecting communities, outside of legal discourse.
ContributorsPrice, Jason (Author) / Broglio, Ron (Thesis advisor) / Adamson, Joni (Committee member) / Mallot, J. Edward (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
The most horrific, darkest, and powerful forms of the sublime take place inside the enclosure of the human psyche; the interior of the mind is the playground for the sublime--not the crag and canyon filled natural world. For Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke, the driving force of the power of the sublime stems from the feelings of pain and fear: where is that more manifested than in the mind? Unlike the common, traditional, and overwhelmed discussion of Percy Shelley and his contemporaries and the power of the sublime in nature, I will argue that in The Cenci, Shelley, through well-chosen diction and precise composition of terrifying images, fashions characters and scenes in an emotion-driven play that elevates the mind of the reader to a transcendent sublime experience. Through a discussion of the theories of the aesthetic of the sublime laid out by Longinus, Burke, and Kant, I will provide a foundation for the later discussion of the rhetorical sublime evoked by Shelley in the ardent and horrifying play that is The Cenci. Looking at the conventional application of the theories of the sublime to romantic writing will make evident the holes in the discussion of the sublime and romantic writings that have almost forgotten the powerful and psychological rhetorical aspect of the sublime that is emphasized in the theoretical writings of both Burke and Kant. To clarify what is traditionally associated with Shelley and the sublime, a brief analysis of the Shelleyean sublime and Shelley's 1816 poem "Mont Blanc" will prepare the reader for an unconventional, but every bit important and powerful, function of the sublime in the 1819 play The Cenci based on the horrific happenings of a historical 16th century Italian noble family.
ContributorsGowan, Kaitlin (Author) / Lussier, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Corse, Douglas Taylor (Committee member) / Broglio, Ronald (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
John Herdman provides a brief explanation for neglecting the Victorian sensational double in his work The Double in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, "Nor have I ventured into the vast hinterland of Victorian popular fiction in which doubles roam in abundance, as these are invariably derivative in origin and break no distinctive new territory of their own" (xi). To be sure the popular fiction of the Victorian Era would not produce such penetrating and resonate doubles found in the continental, and even American, literature of the same period until the works of Scottish writers James Hogg and later Robert Louis Stevenson; and while popular English writers have been rightly accused of "exploit[ing] it [the double] for sensational effects," (Herdman 19) the indictment of possessing "no distinctive new territory of their own" is hardly adequate. In particular, two immensely popular works of fiction in the 1860's, Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White (1860) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), employ the convention of the double for a simultaneous sensational and sociological effect. However, the sociological influence of the double in these two texts is not achieved alone: the "guise of lunacy" deployed as a cover-up for criminality acts symbiotically with the sensational double. The double motif provides female characters within these works the opportunity to manipulate the "guise of lunacy" to transgress patriarchal boundaries cemented within the socio-economic hierarchy as well as within other patriarchal institutions: marriage and the sanatorium. Overall this presentation formulates "new distinctive territory" in the land of the Victorian sensational double through the works of Collins and Braddon.
ContributorsSims, Rachel (Author) / Bivona, Dan (Thesis advisor) / Broglio, Ron (Committee member) / Lussier, Mark (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Victorian London was often confronted with the filth and waste that was the result of urban civilization. The Victorians saw themselves as a race of humanity above the savage tribes. While steps were taken to repress these natural and instinctual products of humanity, human waste and filth were powerfully incorporated in the fictional writings of Charles Dickens and George Gissing. I argue that this incorporation of filth and waste in both OUR MUTUAL FRIEND and THE NETHER WORLD serves as a metaphorical statement on the living conditions of the Victorian lower class. Using the urban travelogues of Dickens and Gissing's contemporaries, along with the analysis on waste and filth done by Sigmund Freud and Julia Kristeva, I argue that the interpretation of waste by Dickens and Gissing define a permeable boundary between London's residuum and the rest of urban society. Oftentimes, the definition of waste and filth become entangled with the definition of value and money. While Dickens chooses to focus on an optimistic outcome of the use value of waste; Gissing sees no hopeful future for the inhabitants of London's slums. I argue that Dickens, throughout his novel, showcases a modernistic use value for the waste of civilization through the recyclable qualities of waste. Gissing, in opposition to Dickens' optimism, sees a more fatalistic future for civilization. Both novels are able to provide a blueprint for the future of urban society, by establishing that filth and waste is a unifying element of civilization, and by establishing the important role that filth can play within the value system of Victorian London.
ContributorsBangerter, Alison (Author) / Bivona, Daniel (Thesis advisor) / Lussier, Mark (Committee member) / Broglio, Ronald (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This dissertation examines cultural representations that attend to the environmental and socio-economic dynamics of contemporary water crises. It focuses on a growing, transnational body of “hydronarratives” – work by writers, filmmakers, and artists in the United States, Canada, and the postcolonial Global South that stress the historical centrality of water to capitalism. These hydronarratives reveal the uneven impacts of droughts, floods, water contamination, and sea level rise on communities marginalized along lines of race, class, and ethnicity. In doing so, they challenge narratives of “progress” conventionally associated with colonial, imperialist, and neoliberal forms of capitalism dependent on the large-scale extraction of natural resources.
Until recently, there has been little attention paid to the ways in which literary texts and other cultural productions explore the social and ecological dimensions of water resource systems. In its examination of water, this dissertation is methodologically informed by the interdisciplinary field of the energy humanities, which explores oil and other fossil fuels as cultural objects. The hydronarratives examined in this dissertation view water as a cultural object and its extraction and manipulation, as cultural practices. In doing so, they demonstrate the ways in which power, production, and human-induced environmental change intersect to create social and environmental sacrifice zones.
This dissertation takes an interdisciplinary environmental humanities approach, drawing on fields such as indigenous studies, political ecology, energy studies, cultural geography, and economic theory. It seeks to establish a productive convergence between environmental justice studies and what might be termed “Anthropocene studies.” Dominant narratives of the Anthropocene tend to describe the human species as a universalized, undifferentiated whole broadly responsible for the global environmental crisis. However, the hydronarratives examined in this dissertation “decolonize” this narrative by accounting for the ways in which colonialism, capitalism, and other exploitative social systems render certain communities more vulnerable to environmental catastrophe than others.
By attending to these issues through problem water, this dissertation has significant implications for future research in contemporary, transnational American and postcolonial literary studies, the environmental humanities, and the energy humanities. It demonstrates the potential for a focus on representations of resources in literary texts and other cultural productions to better grasp the inequitable distribution of environmental risk, and instances of resilience on a rapidly changing planet.
Until recently, there has been little attention paid to the ways in which literary texts and other cultural productions explore the social and ecological dimensions of water resource systems. In its examination of water, this dissertation is methodologically informed by the interdisciplinary field of the energy humanities, which explores oil and other fossil fuels as cultural objects. The hydronarratives examined in this dissertation view water as a cultural object and its extraction and manipulation, as cultural practices. In doing so, they demonstrate the ways in which power, production, and human-induced environmental change intersect to create social and environmental sacrifice zones.
This dissertation takes an interdisciplinary environmental humanities approach, drawing on fields such as indigenous studies, political ecology, energy studies, cultural geography, and economic theory. It seeks to establish a productive convergence between environmental justice studies and what might be termed “Anthropocene studies.” Dominant narratives of the Anthropocene tend to describe the human species as a universalized, undifferentiated whole broadly responsible for the global environmental crisis. However, the hydronarratives examined in this dissertation “decolonize” this narrative by accounting for the ways in which colonialism, capitalism, and other exploitative social systems render certain communities more vulnerable to environmental catastrophe than others.
By attending to these issues through problem water, this dissertation has significant implications for future research in contemporary, transnational American and postcolonial literary studies, the environmental humanities, and the energy humanities. It demonstrates the potential for a focus on representations of resources in literary texts and other cultural productions to better grasp the inequitable distribution of environmental risk, and instances of resilience on a rapidly changing planet.
ContributorsHenry, Matthew S. (Author) / Adamson, Joni (Thesis advisor) / Sadowski-Smith, Claudia (Thesis advisor) / Broglio, Ronald (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018