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- Genre: Doctoral Dissertation
Description
"Modernist Vintages" considers the significance of wine in a selection of modernist texts that includes Oscar Wilde's Salomé (1891), Dorothy Richardson's Honeycomb (1917), James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), and Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (1945). The representations of wine in these fictions respond to the creative and destructive depictions of wine that have imbued the narratives of myth, religion, and philosophy for thousands of years; simultaneously, these works recreate and reflect on numerous wine-related events and movements that shaped European discourse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The modernists use wine's conventional associations to diverse and innovative ends: as the playwright August Strindberg writes, "New forms have not been found for the new content, so that the new wine has burst the old bottles." Wine in these works alternately, and often concurrently, evokes themes that were important to the modernists, including notions of indulgence and waste, pleasure and addiction, experimentation and ritual, tradition and nostalgia, regional distinction and global expansion, wanton intoxication and artistic clarity. This project also discusses various nineteenth- and twentieth-century contexts that informed these works and that continue to shape our reading of them, including the propagation of restaurant culture; the development of a gastronomic literary tradition; the condemnation of alcohol by temperance strategists; the demarcation of wine as a "luxury good"; the professionalization and slow democratization of wine drinking and buying; the rise of popular, philosophical, and professional interest in the psychological and physiological effects of intoxication; and the influence of war on wine markets and popular attitudes toward wine. "Modernist Vintages" aims to demonstrate that the inclusion of objects like wine in modernist fiction is purposeful and meaningful, and thus inspires new and fruitful discussion about the works, writers, and nature of literary modernism in Europe.
ContributorsWaugh, Laura (Author) / Lussier, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Bivona, Daniel (Committee member) / Bixby, Patrick (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
From Frankenstein to District 9: Ecocritical Readings of Classic and Contemporary Fiction and Film demonstrates how American studies methodologies, ecological literary criticism, and environmental justice theory provide both time-tested and new analytical tools for reading texts from transnational perspectives. Recently, American literary scholars have been responding to calls for collective interdisciplinary response to widening social disparities and species collapses caused by climate change in the new epoch recently being termed "the anthropocene." In response, I analyze canonical texts, such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World in juxtaposition with Neill Blomkamp's South African science fiction thriller District 9 and contemporary US American novels such as Toni Morrison's Sula, William Faulkner's "The Bear" in Go Down, Moses and Richard Power's Generosity and The Echo Maker, to show how writers, filmmakers, and academics have been calling attention to dramatic climate events that consequently challenge the public to rethink the relationships among human beings to other species, and to ecological systems of low predictability, high variability, and frequent extremes. Rather than focusing solely on the "human," I examine how the relationships and livelihoods of multi-species communities shape and are shaped by political, economic, and cultural forces. As a whole, this dissertation seeks to make abstract, often intangible global patterns and concepts accessible by providing models for what I call "readings in the anthropocene" or re-readings of classic and contemporary texts and film that offer insights into changing human behavior and suggesting alternative management practices of local and global commons as well as opportunities to imagine how to live in and beyond the anthropocene.
ContributorsTurner, Kyndra (Author) / Adamson, Joni (Thesis advisor) / Lussier, Mark (Committee member) / Sadowski-Smith, Claudia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
This project will attempt to supplement the current registry of lesbian inquiry in literature by exploring a very specific topos important to the Modern era: woman and her intellect. Under this umbrella, the project will perform two tasks: First, it will argue that the Modern turn that accentuates what I call negative valence mimesis is a moment of change that enables the general public to perceive lesbianism in representations of women that before, perhaps, remained unacknowledged. And, second, that the intersection of thought and resistance to heteronormative structures, such as heterosexual desire/sex, childbirth, marriage, religion, feminine performance, generate topoi of lesbianism that lesbian studies should continuously critique in order to index the myriad and creative ways through which fictional representations of women have evaded their proper roles in society. The two tasks above will be performed amidst the backdrop of a crucial moment in history in which lesbianism jumped from fiction to fact through the publication and obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall's novel, The Well of Loneliness. Deconstructive feminist and queer inquiry of under-researched novels by women from the UK and the US written within the decade surrounding the trial reveals the possibilities of lesbianism in novels where the protagonists' investment in heteronormativity has remained unquestioned. In those texts where the protagonists have been questioned, the analysis of lesbianism will be delved into more deeply in order to illustrate new ways of reading these texts. I will focus on women writers who, as Terry Castle suggests, "both usurped and deepened the [lesbian] genre" with the arrival of the new century (Literature 29). It is my attempt to combat heteronormativity through a more positive approach. As Michael Warner asserts, "heteronormativity can be overcome only by actively imagining a necessarily and desirably queer world" (xvi). This is not to say this study will be all roses and no thorns; a desirably queer world is not about a wish for an utopia. For this project, it is about rigorously engaging in the lesbianism of literature while acknowledging how a lesbian reading, a reading for lesbianism, can continue to both expand and enrich the critical tradition of a text and the customary interpretation of various characters.
ContributorsWagner, Johanna M. (Author) / Clarke, Deborah (Thesis advisor) / Lussier, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Mallot, Edward (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This research conceptualizes Gothic literature featuring undead characters produced and popularized by Britain in the early nineteenth century as educational texts. As an influx of new ideas at home and abroad disrupted the lives of the Romantics, not to mention the literal uprising of bodies in the French Revolution and the lost war with the North American colonies, British citizens dedicated themselves to preserving the relative safety of their shores from external and internal threats. I expand the definition of the “undead” to include any tangible, corporeal being once technically dead and now reanimated. In doing so, I invite a broader range of texts, and authors, into the conversation of Gothic literature and the genre’s continued legacy. My work reads male and female authors in dialogue with one another, both sexes working within common networks, rather than as creating separate or disparate traditions. The production of instructive undead bodies becomes particularly important to the development of British national identity and reveals a reliance on the maternal to educate and inform future citizens. The texts examined in this dissertation reveal the necessity of contemplating the histories and experiences of the past, of non-white voices, and of the female influence.
The texts range in publication date from 1805 to 1863 and thus demonstrate the continued used of the undead in the Gothic genre. An examination of the reanimated corpse in Romantic narrative demonstrates how authors utilized the undead as an educational tool both for the characters inside the text and the actual individuals reading the narrative. The undead offers a lens to look at the Gothic not regarding authorial gender or even a character’s gender, but rather in how the genre portrays bodies, and how those bodies interact with and instruct others. This dissertation’s perception of the undead as a powerful educational force in literature assists in the attempt to complete a more comprehensive analysis of Gothic, and therefore Romantic, literature.
ContributorsZarka, Emily (Author) / Lussier, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Looser, Devoney (Committee member) / Broglio, Ron (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
By focusing on photojournalists for LIFE and Ladies’ Home Journal, I investigate mental health care in state institutions located in America during the Great Depression and World War II immediately prior to the great deinstitutionalization that began in the 1950s. Relying upon scholars of medical humanities, social theory, disability studies, feminist studies, the history of psychiatry, and the history of art, I consider the iconography used to represent mental illness in photography during the first half of the twentieth century to explore the ways mentally ill individuals were presented as disordered and lacking humanity. I explore the didactic nature of both photography and film, emphasizing how the artists and directors imbued their mediums with medical credibility and authority. The photographs of Alfred Eisenstaedt, Jerry Cooke, and Esther Bubley from the 1930-40s reveal the state of mental health care in America during the Great Depression and World War II. I will investigate the stereotypes seen in representations of mental illness in photographs and how these depictions shaped and were in dialogue with popular films like Spellbound (1945), The Snake Pit (1948), The Three Faces of Eve (1957), and Marnie (1964). As a point of contrast to the images and films representing mental illness, I examine depictions of healthy people in mental health clinics during this time. Finally, I offer four examples of public, contemporary art, including House for a Gordian Knot (2013), Bloom (2013), 1000 Shadows (2013), and Faces of Mental Health Recovery (2013), that explore mental illness to illustrate the enduring legacy of the iconography and stereotypes represented in the photography and films explored in the first half of this dissertation.
ContributorsTaggart, Vriean Diether (Author) / Fahlman, Betsy (Thesis advisor) / Codell, Julie (Committee member) / Lussier, Mark (Committee member) / Moore, Sarah (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
Scientific and Cultural Interpretations of Volcanoes, 1766-1901 analyzes nineteenth-century conceptions of volcanoes through interdisciplinary literature and science studies. The project considers how people in the nineteenth century used science, aesthetics, and other ways of knowing to understand volcanoes and their operations. In the mid-eighteenth century, volcanoes were seen as singular, unique features of the planet that lacked temporal and terrestrial reach. By the end of the nineteenth century, volcanoes were seen as networked, environmental phenomena that stretched through geological time and geographic space. Scientific and Cultural Interpretations of Volcanoes, 1766-1901 offers a new historical understanding of volcanoes and their environmental connections, using literature and science to show how perceptions of volcanic time and space changed over 135 years.
The first chapter, using texts by Sir William Hamilton, Hester Piozzi, and Priscilla Wakefield, argues that in the late eighteenth century important aspects of volcanoes, like their impact upon human life and their existence through time, were beginning to be defined in texts ranging from the scientific to the educational. The second chapter focuses on works by Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Charles Lyell to demonstrate the ways that volcanoes were stripped of metaphysical or symbolic meaning as the nineteenth century progressed. The third chapter contrasts the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa with Constance Gordon-Cumming’s travels to Kīlauea. The chapter shows how even towards the end of the century, trying to connect human minds with the process of volcanic phenomenon was a substantial challenge, but that volcanoes like Kīlauea allowed for new conceptions of volcanic action. The last chapter, through a post-apocalyptic novel by M. P. Shiel, shows how volcanoes were finally beginning to be categorized as a primary agent within the environment, shaping all life including humanity. Ultimately, I argue that the change in thinking about volcanoes parallels today’s shift in thinking about global climate change. My work provides insight into how we imagine ecological catastrophes like volcanic eruptions or climate change in the past and present and what that means for their impact on people.
The first chapter, using texts by Sir William Hamilton, Hester Piozzi, and Priscilla Wakefield, argues that in the late eighteenth century important aspects of volcanoes, like their impact upon human life and their existence through time, were beginning to be defined in texts ranging from the scientific to the educational. The second chapter focuses on works by Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Charles Lyell to demonstrate the ways that volcanoes were stripped of metaphysical or symbolic meaning as the nineteenth century progressed. The third chapter contrasts the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa with Constance Gordon-Cumming’s travels to Kīlauea. The chapter shows how even towards the end of the century, trying to connect human minds with the process of volcanic phenomenon was a substantial challenge, but that volcanoes like Kīlauea allowed for new conceptions of volcanic action. The last chapter, through a post-apocalyptic novel by M. P. Shiel, shows how volcanoes were finally beginning to be categorized as a primary agent within the environment, shaping all life including humanity. Ultimately, I argue that the change in thinking about volcanoes parallels today’s shift in thinking about global climate change. My work provides insight into how we imagine ecological catastrophes like volcanic eruptions or climate change in the past and present and what that means for their impact on people.
ContributorsLinthicum, Kent Robert (Author) / Lussier, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Bivona, Daniel (Committee member) / Looser, Devoney (Committee member) / Tromp, Marlene (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Situated within seminal debates on the questions of liberation and justice viewed from the postcolonial context, this dissertation evaluates freedom narratives from both sides of the colonial divide during the period of high imperialism. Creating a transnational grouping of three diverse historical figures, E. M. Forster, M. K. Gandhi, and James Joyce, I argue for similarities in these writers’ narrative construction of “freedom” against colonial modernity. I argue that despite these writers’ widely disparate historical and cultural determinations, which uniquely particularize each of their freedom formulas as well as freedom “ideals” – the ideal of culture for Forster, renunciation for Gandhi and aesthetic apprehension for Joyce, these writers conceive of a commensurate/globally related form of “freedom” as postcoloniality and demonstrate cosmopolitan ambition. I also argue that the global form of postcoloniality they each practice can only be articulated through a close attention to each of their specific and local difference.
The key contribution of the dissertation is to establish a new significance of the notion of fetishism for postcolonial studies, from both historical and theoretical perspectives. From a background that emphasizes the primacy of the concept of fetishism in its historical evolution within colonizing narratives of various Western discourses, especially fetish’s constitutive role in Enlightenment philosophy’s othering narrative of “primitive” natives, the work foregrounds a novel theoretical and narrative insight that the fetish demonstrates a unique potential to articulate/embody freedom as post-coloniality. Through a detailed critical analysis of each freedom narrative, I demonstrate how the clashes of particular contradictory cultural ideologies, in fact, determine each freedom narrative and how these contradictions are projected onto and galvanized by a fetish object(s). The work extends the ideas of Sigmund Freud, William Pietz, Homi Bhabha, Anne McClintock and Jacques Derrida on fetishism. Employing the framework of fetishism it brings into view similarities among the said three writers’ definition and practice of freedom. The work weighs in on critical debates between Marxist and Post-structural camps in postcolonial studies and proposes a new form of cosmopolitanism.
The key contribution of the dissertation is to establish a new significance of the notion of fetishism for postcolonial studies, from both historical and theoretical perspectives. From a background that emphasizes the primacy of the concept of fetishism in its historical evolution within colonizing narratives of various Western discourses, especially fetish’s constitutive role in Enlightenment philosophy’s othering narrative of “primitive” natives, the work foregrounds a novel theoretical and narrative insight that the fetish demonstrates a unique potential to articulate/embody freedom as post-coloniality. Through a detailed critical analysis of each freedom narrative, I demonstrate how the clashes of particular contradictory cultural ideologies, in fact, determine each freedom narrative and how these contradictions are projected onto and galvanized by a fetish object(s). The work extends the ideas of Sigmund Freud, William Pietz, Homi Bhabha, Anne McClintock and Jacques Derrida on fetishism. Employing the framework of fetishism it brings into view similarities among the said three writers’ definition and practice of freedom. The work weighs in on critical debates between Marxist and Post-structural camps in postcolonial studies and proposes a new form of cosmopolitanism.
ContributorsMehta, Bina P (Author) / Bivona, Daniel (Thesis advisor) / Codell, Julie (Committee member) / Lussier, Mark (Committee member) / Mallot, Jr., Jack (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
The union between England and Scotland, which created the United Kingdom of Great Britain, generated heated discussion both before and after the Acts of Union took effect on May 1, 1707. Members of Parliament, the nobility, clergymen, pamphleteers, and authors from both nations participated in debates on the Union, in many kinds of writing, for many years after 1707. The voices of British women, however, have not been sufficiently considered in our scholarship, and are often conspicuously absent from our accounts of these polemical wars, which were still raging in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This dissertation seeks to fill this gap in the academic conversation by taking Scottish, English, and British nationalisms as its theoretical paradigm in approaching writing by female authors. The dissertation's chapters examine how the Anglo-Scottish Union figures in the works by five women writers (Jane Austen, Cassandra Cooke, Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Brunton, and Susan Ferrier) publishing from 1780 to 1820.
I argue that, in the aftermath of the Union, these women writers often expressed specifically gendered concerns— such as the maintenance of social etiquette, better education for women, making sense of national prejudices, and the erasure of regional socio-economic differences. In doing so, they ranged beyond a typically masculine focus on parliamentary politics, international military endeavors, macro economy, and national churches. English women writers' attitudes towards the Union were more positive than those entertained by Scots authors, but compared with contemporary male writers, both sides were less optimistic about the potential for building a blanket national identity for the entire Kingdom.
Taken together, the chapters of the dissertation provide a more comprehensive view of how the Anglo-Scottish Union figured in the minds of Britons, male and female, a century after its establishment, when the Kingdom was going through the Napoleonic Wars and another union with Ireland. The dissertation enriches our research on women's use of literary genres and techniques when taking part in political debates. It also serves to point out the need for more extensive surveys of the nuances of individual women writers' national affiliations.
I argue that, in the aftermath of the Union, these women writers often expressed specifically gendered concerns— such as the maintenance of social etiquette, better education for women, making sense of national prejudices, and the erasure of regional socio-economic differences. In doing so, they ranged beyond a typically masculine focus on parliamentary politics, international military endeavors, macro economy, and national churches. English women writers' attitudes towards the Union were more positive than those entertained by Scots authors, but compared with contemporary male writers, both sides were less optimistic about the potential for building a blanket national identity for the entire Kingdom.
Taken together, the chapters of the dissertation provide a more comprehensive view of how the Anglo-Scottish Union figured in the minds of Britons, male and female, a century after its establishment, when the Kingdom was going through the Napoleonic Wars and another union with Ireland. The dissertation enriches our research on women's use of literary genres and techniques when taking part in political debates. It also serves to point out the need for more extensive surveys of the nuances of individual women writers' national affiliations.
ContributorsYu, Tong (Author) / Looser, Devoney (Thesis advisor) / Lussier, Mark (Committee member) / Lockard, Joe (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was no universal term to describe a person who practiced science. In 1833, the term “scientist” was proposed to recognize these individuals, but exactly who was represented by this term was still ambiguous. Supported by Bruno Latour’s theory of networks and hybridity, The Emerging Scientist takes a historical approach to analyze the different collectives of individuals who influenced the cultural perception of science and therefore aided in defining the role of the emerging scientist during the nineteenth century.
Each chapter focuses on a collective in the science network that influenced the development of the scientist across the changing scientific landscape of the nineteenth century. Through a study of William Small and Herbert Spencer, the first chapter investigates the informal clubs that prove to be highly influential due, in part, to the freedom individuals gain by being outside of formal institutions. Through an investigation of the lives and works of professional astronomer, Caroline Herschel, and physicist and mathematician, James Clerk Maxwell, chapter two analyzes the collective of professional practitioners of science to unveil the way in which scientific advancement actually occurred. Chapter three argues for the role of women in democratizing science and expanding the pool from which future scientists would come through a close analysis of Jane Marcet and Agnes Clerke, members of the collective of female popularizers of science. The final chapter examines how the collective of fictional depictions of science and the scientist ultimately are part of the cultural perception of the scientist through a close reading of Shelley’s Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitude and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ultimately, The Emerging Scientist aims to recreate the way science is studied in order to generate a more comprehensive understanding of the influences on developing science and the scientist during the nineteenth century.
Each chapter focuses on a collective in the science network that influenced the development of the scientist across the changing scientific landscape of the nineteenth century. Through a study of William Small and Herbert Spencer, the first chapter investigates the informal clubs that prove to be highly influential due, in part, to the freedom individuals gain by being outside of formal institutions. Through an investigation of the lives and works of professional astronomer, Caroline Herschel, and physicist and mathematician, James Clerk Maxwell, chapter two analyzes the collective of professional practitioners of science to unveil the way in which scientific advancement actually occurred. Chapter three argues for the role of women in democratizing science and expanding the pool from which future scientists would come through a close analysis of Jane Marcet and Agnes Clerke, members of the collective of female popularizers of science. The final chapter examines how the collective of fictional depictions of science and the scientist ultimately are part of the cultural perception of the scientist through a close reading of Shelley’s Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitude and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ultimately, The Emerging Scientist aims to recreate the way science is studied in order to generate a more comprehensive understanding of the influences on developing science and the scientist during the nineteenth century.
ContributorsSoutherly, Kaitlin (Author) / Lussier, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Broglio, Ronald (Committee member) / Bivona, Daniel (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Did the Victorians live in a “rape culture”? London between 1870 and 1890 was certainly a place in which sexual violence was publicly condemned as an overall concept (W. T. Stead’s “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, for example). Yet, in contrast to the moral denunciation, the historical archive demonstrates excuses constantly condoned sexual violence (as evidenced in parliamentary debates, criminal transcripts, newspaper crime coverage, and social campaigns like those of Josephine Butler). Forensic medical doctors, police, coroners, journalists, illustrators, and editors all contributed and reinforced a system that sustained and condoned rape as evidenced by the newspaper crime reports; but, to blame them for their actions, as if each action was performed with malicious intent, would hide the greater system of oppression that operated both blatantly and in the shadows. When one demographic holds significant power over another – as men did over women in Victorian England – those power relations become embedded into its culture in ways that are never clearly transparent and continue to haunt the future until exposed and rectified. To this end, my dissertation investigates newspaper crime narratives to reveal the heterocryptic ghosts and make their multiple legacies visible.
Murder of women by men are significantly linked via cultural perceptions. Anna Clark discovered this with Mary Ashford’s rape and murder in 1817. Though Ashford died from drowning, the narratives rewrote her death as if it was the rape that had killed her. Based on this correlation, this study focuses on six cases of unsolved female murder and dismemberment. The decision to use unsolved cases stems from the hypothesis that more gendered assumptions would manifest in the crime narratives as the journalists (and police, coroners, and forensic doctors) tried to discern the particulars of the crime within contexts that made sense to them. Analytical coding of the data demonstrates the prevalence of rape myths operating within the narratives in conjunction with misogynistic and classist beliefs. From initial discovery to forensic inspections to inquest verdicts and beyond a number of myriad historical materializations are exposed that continue to haunt the present.
Murder of women by men are significantly linked via cultural perceptions. Anna Clark discovered this with Mary Ashford’s rape and murder in 1817. Though Ashford died from drowning, the narratives rewrote her death as if it was the rape that had killed her. Based on this correlation, this study focuses on six cases of unsolved female murder and dismemberment. The decision to use unsolved cases stems from the hypothesis that more gendered assumptions would manifest in the crime narratives as the journalists (and police, coroners, and forensic doctors) tried to discern the particulars of the crime within contexts that made sense to them. Analytical coding of the data demonstrates the prevalence of rape myths operating within the narratives in conjunction with misogynistic and classist beliefs. From initial discovery to forensic inspections to inquest verdicts and beyond a number of myriad historical materializations are exposed that continue to haunt the present.
ContributorsBoyd, Monica (Author) / Lussier, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Tromp, Marlene (Thesis advisor) / Bivona, Dan (Committee member) / Free, Melissa (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020