Department of English

Novels produced during the fin de siècle historically resist literary periodization. Scholars including Ann Banfield, Toril Moi & S Pearl Brilmyer have identified the ontological debate between idealism & materialism as the epochal divide of social realism & high modernism. However, I consider the ‘interregnum’ periodization an unsatisfactory approximation. I argue the late nineteenth century is characterized by a nonhierarchical & fluid rendering of this debate. My project considers the narratological constraints the serial novel imposes on the ontologies of characters & personhood. This disjunction led to what Elizabeth C. Miller & David Kurnick respectively identify as the “anti-novel” turn in the nineties. Whereas the great social novelists perfected serialization by aligning it with their aspirations for social reform. David Payne argues authors from Dickens to Eliot “reenchanted” literature in exciting ways to reckon with its commodification. The near-cluttering abundance of objects in the serial novel becomes a metonym of capitalist processes. Likewise, Alex Woloch argues that the abundance of characters in the realist novel represents a social totality. Mimetic segmentation of metaphysical phenomena shares the atomistic ethos of “mechanical objectivity” that Lorraine Daston & Peter Galison identify as the dominant aperture for reality in the mid-nineteenth century. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the “scientific-self” developed in tandem with psychology becoming a natural science; its earliest testing ground became the novel. William James’s “stream of consciousness” is the ontological model I employ to account for the conflict in serial segmentation. I take for my case study texts written by the last titans of the Victorian novel—The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson & The Princess Casamassima by Henry James—to argue that an antisocial milieu arose as its populace shrunk & minor characters became objects for major characters to achieve this new concept of personhood. 

The formal structure of Woolf’s fiction— multiplicity of perspectives, stream of consciousness, emphasis on the ordinary moment— is informed by an attempt to accurately depict the real world, including the fact of social division in modern life, domestically and abroad. It is certainly also informed by the philosophy of Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore (particularly the former). My imperative in this paper is to demonstrate that these influences— modern reality and analytic philosophy— operate together to produce the social critique implicit in the form of Woolf’s fiction, particularly her critique of national identity. I draw from the work of Ann Banfield, Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, and Jaako Hintikka to clarify the axiomatic formal structure of Woolf's fiction, model the systematized process of subject-formation depicted therein, and finally to concretize her critique of nationalism and the imperial project. Ultimately, I contend that reading Woolf's critique of national identity in terms of its relationship to her application of early analytic philosophy yields deeper insight into both her critique and the philosophy. Her fiction becomes a heuristic through which we might better understand the relationship between the prima facie abstract, socially detached thinking of Russell and Moore and an explicitly critical understanding of one's social surroundings (as modeled by Woolf).

Percy Shelley has a particular propensity for negation – through prefixes and suffixes, phrases with “not” or “no,” “un-” or “-less.” Shelley’s lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound is a text in which Shelley’s tendency towards negation intensifies. Interestingly, also a text in which his thinking on love culminates, therefore making it an ideal text to show how these concepts interact for Shelley. In this paper, I argue that Shelley’s language of negation opens a radical space of potentiality that is actualized by a love that breaks down self/other distinctions. I demonstrate a new facet of Shelleyan style: that Shelley’s rhetorical practice not only reflects his political beliefs, but in fact enacts those beliefs, making visible his belief in non-hierarchical collectivity. I argue that Shelley’s poetics of negation is both a means of revitalizing language and of accessing this space of potentiality, which allows us to imagine and think with love.

East Asian diasporic comedians living in the US and the UK have always been associated with their racial identities and, consequently, either adopt or are forced to adopt racial stereotypes that alienate their performances. As a contribution to scholarship in Asian diasporic studies, media studies, and humor studies, this paper offers contemporary Chinese diasporic comedies as a case study into how Chinese comedians use these stereotypes to reclaim a voice. Comedians such as Ali Wong, Evelyn Mok, Jimmy O. Yang, and Nigel Ng are able to use comedic mediums such as standup, romantic comedy, comedy television series, and YouTube videos to address racialized East Asian stereotypes, empower the East Asian community through comedic counter-narratives, and educate the non-Asian public about their reality and culture. By doing so, these comedians adopt the incongruity in comedic discourse to demystify the East Asian/Asian American community to represent their current realities as well as the ones that belong to the older generation and situate it all in a global and historical framework. They debunk East Asian American sexuality stereotypes by performing the racial mundane. At the same time, they also ridicule these stereotypes through abjection humor or what I call “comedic trickster” figures to potentially challenge the existing power dynamics in the western world. Instead of assimilating the Asian heritages and merging into the dominant white culture, these comics acknowledge their difference and address these racialized stereotypes.

The ways that scholars have interpreted Invisible Man stem from firstly, the concerns of earlier generations of black communities who sought to move towards a future where black people have political influence and secondly, a problem within literary criticism, a field that has decided that novels must move beyond the black experience in order to be taken seriously. In one way or another, it seems that some of the critics of the 1960s and 1970s are responding to this decision, either denouncing Invisible Man or defending it. Some of the newer critics fall into this debate and end up defending the book with representational politics. However, at this moment our reading of the novel must change. For at this moment, when even the Civil Rights Movement has secured black political influence, when the Black Arts Movement has secured black pride, and when the Black Lives Matter Movement has sought to affirm what its predecessors took as a given, black people still face deadly racialized terror. This moment feels like the ditto of the archives, and it is this aspect of black life, constantly in danger, at risk, that Invisible Man reckons with. Yet, for all of its resonance with the past, this moment is distinct because progress has been interpreted as a decrease in risk. However, such a notion is false, and scholars like Christina Sharpe, Achille Mbembe, Saidiya Hartman, and others attest to this dangerous falsehood. Therefore, as we turn to black cultural production to guide us through a moment that feels so familiar but is perhaps even more dangerous, we need to consider what older methods of reading Invisible Man might have missed: Ellison’s concern with the racial terror that persists even after the gains of black politicians and intellectuals. Ellison takes black life seriously, life that encounters, survives, and moves beyond gratuitous violence. It is time to read Invisible Man through lenses that take up this living. 

The comic book industry in the 1970s produced the first mainstream superhero comic to utilize social commentary and character revisionism. Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams’ Green Lantern/Green Arrow: Hard Traveling Heroes addresses the milieu of the 70s and is analyzed alongside documentary evidence to create connections between the textual narrative and social events. The narrative alone focuses on divorcing its title heroes from their traditionally conservative ideologies. The dialectical unity of these components creates an overall picture of innovation in the industry. It also denotes a generational shift in ideology that reflects the change in cultural values between the ‘60s and ‘70s.