My dissertation argues that lyric is best defined as an indirection of voice rather than the subjective experience of a persona. Following Paul de Man, …
This dissertation examines representations of antisecular religion (herein referred to as the “religion of the disinherited”) in the late nineteenth and twentieth century American novel, …
“Between Law and Justice” considers how American literature after WWII responded to political and philosophical debates about the interrelation of law, conscience, and democracy. From …
This dissertation aims to explain the emergence of a set of vital, if unrecognized, realist imperatives in American literature and critical thought at mid-twentieth century. …
Making a Living Poetry investigates modern and contemporary American poetry’s reworking of the religious and romantic valences of a vocation in order to resist and …
This dissertation examines the discourses and silences around blackness in the ever-shifting frontier territory of the United States, arguing against narratives that figure the West …
My dissertation attends both philosophically and historically to the affect of seriousness in contemporary American culture. It focuses specifically on expressions and performances of seriousness, …
“Paper Urbanism” explores what I refer to as American literature’s "urban design imagination," as it evolved between the end of the nineteenth century and the …
Professional Sentiments argues that nineteenth-century U.S. fiction revised sentimental models of subjectivity and social relations to evolve an affectivity of professionalism. Challenging a critical practice …
This dissertation examines a series of strange intimacies in twentieth-century literature by focusing on works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Richard Wright, Graham Greene, …
My dissertation examines the relationship between aesthetic forms and the governance of life. I argue that the materially reductionist accounts of persons in realist and …
This dissertation argues that a driving force in the evolution of the nineteenth-century American novel's theoretical and formal concerns was a broadly shared uncertainty about …