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This dissertation analyzes contemporary American literature, which includes novels, graphic novels, film, and television of the last forty years, to deconstruct the critical relationship between lived space, institutional power, and trauma. It examines literary representations of traumatic moments in recent American history--the attacks on the World Trade Center, Hurricane Katrina,

This dissertation analyzes contemporary American literature, which includes novels, graphic novels, film, and television of the last forty years, to deconstruct the critical relationship between lived space, institutional power, and trauma. It examines literary representations of traumatic moments in recent American history--the attacks on the World Trade Center, Hurricane Katrina, the emergence of the Homeland Security state, and the introduction of the "new metropolis"--to demonstrate that collective trauma at the turn of the century is very much a product of the individual's complex relationship to the state and its institutional auxiliaries. As many philosophers and social critics have argued, institutional forces in contemporary America often deprive individuals of active political engagement through processes of narrative production, and this study discusses how literature both represents and simulates the traumatic consequences of this encounter. Looking to theories on urban, domestic, and textual space, this dissertation explores and problematizes the political and psychological dimensions of space, demonstrating how trauma is enacted through space and how individuals may utilize space and exploit narrative to achieve critical distance from institutional power. Literature as a narrative medium presents vital opportunities both for exposing the machinery of institutional power and for generating positions against the narratives produced by the state.
ContributorsPattison, Dale (Author) / Gilfillan, Daniel (Thesis advisor) / Clarke, Deborah (Thesis advisor) / Thompson, Ayanna (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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Environmental Justice Witnessing in the Modernist Poetry of Lola Ridge, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Elizabeth Bishop analyzes the poetic forms used by four modernist American women poets to trace depictions of social oppression that are tied to specific landscapes. My focus is on what I term "environmental justice witnessing,"

Environmental Justice Witnessing in the Modernist Poetry of Lola Ridge, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Elizabeth Bishop analyzes the poetic forms used by four modernist American women poets to trace depictions of social oppression that are tied to specific landscapes. My focus is on what I term "environmental justice witnessing," which I define as accounts that testify to experiences of injustices that affect humans and the environments they inhabit. Integrating theories of witnessing, which to date have focused exclusively on humans, with environmental justice criticism, I fashion a lens that highlights the interconnectedness of social and environmental problems. In this way, I theorize the study of texts of witness and how they document the decay, disease, and exploitation of urban and rural landscapes in the twentieth century. In this dissertation, I focus on Lola Ridge's "The Ghetto" (1918), Muriel Rukeyser's "The Book of the Dead" (1938), Gwendolyn Brooks' "In the Mecca" (1968), and poems about Brazil from Elizabeth Bishop's Questions of Travel (1965) and New Poems (1979). I argue that these women poets depict environmental injustices as an inherent facet of social injustice and do so by poetically connecting human bodies to environmental bodies through sound, diction, figurative language, and imagery.

In Environmental Justice Witnessing, I expand arguments made by environmental scholars about the exchange of environmental elements among humans, animals, and landscapes to include the way poets reflect this transfer poetically. The poetry of Ridge, Rukeyser, Brooks, and Bishop allows me to investigate the ways the categories of race, gender, and class, typically thought of as human qualities, are integrally tied to the geographic, national, and cultural bounds in which those categories are formulated. This argument has clear implications on the study of poetry and its environmental contexts as it invites discussions of the transnational conceptions of global citizenship, examinations of the relationships among communities, the environment, and overarching power structures, and arguments surrounding the ways that poetry as art can bring about long-term social and environmental awareness.
ContributorsGrieve, Sarah (Author) / Hogue, Cynthia (Thesis advisor) / Adamson, Joni (Committee member) / Clarke, Deborah (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Jason Bryant Queering Home: Domestic Space and Sexuality in Postmodern American Fiction This dissertation explores narratives of homosexuals and trans men and women occupying domestic spaces, discerning the ways that “home” shapes understandings about sexuality and examining the ways that understandings of sexuality shape how domestic spaces are occupied. Queer

Jason Bryant Queering Home: Domestic Space and Sexuality in Postmodern American Fiction This dissertation explores narratives of homosexuals and trans men and women occupying domestic spaces, discerning the ways that “home” shapes understandings about sexuality and examining the ways that understandings of sexuality shape how domestic spaces are occupied. Queer artists and intellectuals have deconstructed the legacy of normativity that clings to the metaphor of the domestic realm. Queering Home argues that writers have used the discursive concept of home to cultivate sociopolitical communities (Audre Lorde, Zami) while also insisting upon material spaces of shelter and comfort for individuals queered by gender performance, sexual orientation, and resultant adverse economic conditions (Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues). Two novels, Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina and Mike Albo's Hornito, challenge the coming-of-age tradition of narrating childhood/adolescence through the redeeming prism of the confident, queer adult; in particular, these novels trouble the problematic notion of domesticated maturation as a heteronormative condition that continues to cling to much contemporary American lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) politics. The third chapter examines Marilyn Hacker's sonnet collection, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons in correspondence with Carl Phillips's collection, Cortège, as they queer the concept of domestic bliss, the goal toward which romantic partners are “supposed” to be committed. Hacker and Phillips revise the same-sex couple as a processing of gay ways of life, which resists positing normative, married futures for lesbians and homosexuals. Finally, the study investigates Terrence McNally's play, Lips Together, Teeth Apart and a series of still life paintings by Joey Terrill for their depiction of narratives of domestic spaces (pools, open-concept design, medicine cabinets), which condition the subjectification and desubjectification of gay male sexuality and domesticity in the era of HIV/AIDS. Throughout, this dissertation draws energy by challenging the “given” and “inevitable” heteronorms that condition domesticity, sexuality, and space, demonstrating how late twentieth century writers and artists have queered the home.
ContributorsBryant, Jason (Author) / Clarke, Deborah (Thesis advisor) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Bebout, Lee (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013