- Title Information
- Title
- The Death Of Difference in American Modernism: Faulkner, Barnes, West
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Hasratian, Avak Ovhaness
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- creator
- Origin Information
- Copyright Date
(keyDate="yes", encoding="w3cdtf")
- 2008
- Physical Description
- Extent
- vi, 214 p.
- digitalOrigin
- born digital
- Note
- Thesis (Ph.D.) -- Brown University (2009)
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Armstrong, Nancy
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- director
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Burrows, Stuart
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- reader
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Bewes, Timothy
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- reader
- Name:
Corporate
- Name Part
- Brown University. English
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- sponsor
- Genre (aat)
- theses
- Abstract
- I show how American novels from the 1930s experimented with the notion that one must be an individual by showing instead that we are all parts of a multiple mind and body that
extends across species and into the eco-biome itself. Select novels of William Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, and Nathanael West, I argue, pose a challenge to the individual as the constituent unit of
modern society. Rather than imagine self-enclosed individuals that can be assigned a race, gender, and class, they create a mass body made of a series of similar and generic body parts,
functions, instincts, behaviors, thought-processes, and affects?which themselves flow and circulate unpredictably through the population. These novels negate race, gender, and class as the major
categorical divisions that kinship and normative reproduction introduces within our species and consequently take us beyond the logic of disavowal that says to be one kind of person we cannot be
another. There are no others, only a species-body that makes the Enlightenment idea that we are made of one mind housed in one body into an irrelevant attempt to reduce the multiplicity, make it
into a unity, and assign it an identity. I connect the mass body, in the first chapter, to the anthropology of alimentation, theories of "bare life," and the theoretical biology of the
human/animal "divide"; in the second chapter, to queer theory, the history of sexuality, and narrative theories of "multiplicity"; and in the third chapter, to post-Marxist theories of the
"multitude," mass media and the public sphere. The chapters are united in their concern over the shifting status of the life, death, and wellness of the species-body.
- Subject (Local)
- Topic
- gender
- Subject (Local)
- Topic
- class
- Subject (Local)
- Topic
- species
- Subject (Local)
- Topic
- queer
- Subject (Local)
- Topic
- media
- Subject (Local)
- Topic
- theory
- Subject (FAST)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/1086436")
- Topic
- Race
- Subject (FAST)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/1114160")
- Topic
- Sex
- Subject (FAST)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/987769")
- Topic
- Kinship
- Subject (FAST)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/1071476")
- Topic
- Population
- Subject (FAST)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/810196")
- Topic
- Anthropology
- Record Information
- Record Content Source (marcorg)
- RPB
- Record Creation Date
(encoding="iso8601")
- 20091218
- Language
- Language Term:
Code (ISO639-2B)
- eng
- Language Term:
Text
- English
- Identifier:
DOI
- 10.7301/Z09Z933H
- Access Condition:
rights statement
(href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/")
- In Copyright
- Access Condition:
restriction on access
- Collection is open for research.
- Type of Resource (primo)
- dissertations