Browsing by Author "Lurie, Susan"
Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Emergent identities: The African American common woman in United States literature, 1831--1903(2001) Taylor, Michelle Lynette; Lurie, SusanThis dissertation examines the intersection of resistance, gender, and respectability in African American literature from 1831 to 1903 through the figure of the "common woman." As a category of analysis, the common woman is an alternative to the bourgeois African American heroine, and is characterized by a number of qualities: the lack of formal education; reliance on folk-based methods of knowledge; non-traditional views on the family; aggressive articulation of her rights and the rights of the community; and finally, her use of labor as a tool for manipulating the culture of oppression. While current theoretical frameworks of literary representations of resistance rely heavily on the primacy of iconographic black protagonists, the common woman is a new imagining of black respectability that is defined by a folk-based construction of the black self. I trace the literary development of the common woman through a historically grounded evaluation of black women's labor within the context of the West Indian and American slave pasts, Reconstruction, and racial uplift rhetoric. I argue that placing the literary common woman in conversation with black women's labor history destabilizes the emphasis on the bourgeois, representational heroine by establishing a pattern in which the common woman resists white racism by virtue of her position in the economy. Because the common woman is not generally regarded as race leader, she is free from the imperative to facilitate exchange with Anglo-Americans and is thus free to assertively critique and subvert racism. In short, by focusing more on labor than on literacy, and more on maintaining the black community than on fostering interracial exchange, the common woman is the means through which nineteenth-century African American writers voice violent, subversive, and otherwise unspeakable critiques of the American nation that challenge the serviceability of the genteel heroine as the primary voice of resistance. By using the common woman as the voice of resistance, middle-class writers were able to critique the nation while also coming to terms with the complexities of intra-racial class conflict.Item "Keeping up her geography": Women's writing and geocultural space in early twentieth-century United States literature and culture(2004) Kennedy, Tanya Ann; Lurie, SusanI argue that the current trend in U.S. studies to move beyond the public-private dichotomy is based on a reductive understanding of that binary as primarily a manifestation of separate spheres ideology. Recently, literary critics and historians have argued that to use the language of separate spheres is to mistake fiction for reality. However, there is a tendency in this criticism to ignore the work of feminist political theorists who argue that a range of ideologies of public and private consistently work to mask the gendered inequalities of public policy. I claim that these inequalities are shaped by multiple, but interconnected, spatial constructions of the public and private in U.S. culture, and that emerging and intersecting (re) definitions of key spatial concepts---the nation, the urban, the regional, and the domestic---in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century provide a crucial context for understanding how the public-private binary has been constructed and contested. In chapter one, I focus on how women speakers at the World's Columbian Exposition negotiated their liminal position at the Exposition. Their understanding of the public-private binary is more complex than has been acknowledged and offers theorists new ways of understanding why the genderedness of the public-private binary. In chapter two, I show how middle-class women's anxieties about urbanization's transformation of the domestic leads to their contestation of the home-work divide that maintains the working-girl's social and economic inequality and isolates the middle-class woman. In chapter three, I argue that Ellen Glasgow challenges the southern agrarians' construction of the public-private binary by revealing its dependence on the female body and female labor. In chapter four, I contend that Zora Neale Hurston and Agnes Smedley negotiate the public-private binary by appropriating the frontier as a model of citizenship. This appropriation, however, becomes disenabling when they try to articulate the difference that the female body makes to citizenship.Item Playing on the margins: Childhood and self-making in twentieth-century ethnic United States fiction(2004) Keller, Delores Ayers; Lurie, SusanThis dissertation investigates twentieth-century African American and Chicano/a novels that privilege childhood play as a site for defining the self through or against an array of social norms and dominant ideologies. Although narratives of children at play are a neglected category in literary criticism, the playing child often functions as a central literary figure for conveying the conflicted processes of self-definition for children on society's margins. In conversation with theories of play, I argue that a range of Chicano/a and African American texts predicate adult possibilities for either resistance or capitulation to conventional expectations on what transpires during childhood play. The writers in this study respond, in part, to the ideology of the early twentieth-century playground movement and its aim of instilling a sense of civic duty in the children of European immigrants. While playgrounds may have been designed to integrate certain children into U.S. society, they also excluded other children---in particular, children viewed as racial others---through segregation. Even though the children of both Mexican Americans and African Americans were not included in the play movement's goals and have continued to be excluded throughout the twentieth century, the child characters in the novels that I examine frequently contend with unsettling issues of national identity during play. Unlike the proponents of the play movement who viewed assimilation through play as a form of progress, the writers in my project often show that play is a site where capitulation to dominant values is neither progressive nor desirable for their child characters. Chapter one investigates childhood play as a key factor in determining how Chicano masculinities will be lived in relation to women, class, ethnicity, and national identity. Chapter two examines childhood play as a stage for rehearsing gender-specific adult identities that empower Chicanos but disempower Chicanas. Chapter three foregrounds childhood play as a crucial arena for working out the tensions caused by racism and sexism in relationships between African American women and girls.Item Productions of blasphemy: Nationalism and sexual difference in the postcolonial novel(1998) Challakere, Padmaja N.; Lurie, SusanThis dissertation focuses on the narrative representation of moments of blasphemy in the writings of Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Sara Suleri, Carolyn Steedman, and Mukul Kesavan by focusing on the issue of 'what narrative energies motivate the production of blasphemy' and 'from where does the decision to blaspheme come'. By reading these representations of blasphemy in the context of 'blasphemy' as it was invoked in the "Rushdie affair" and the reactionary nationalist work it performed, I challenge the tendency to locate blasphemy in an act, intention, program, or a proper name. By drawing on the Foucauldian sense of transgression as that which is determined by, rather than an overcoming of the limits of law, I argue that the texts of Rushdie and Kureishi offer too narrow a view of blasphemy. This is because blasphemy here is tied to an exuberant iconoclasm that is assumed to generate a radical social agency. In contrast, the texts of Sara Suleri, Steedman, and Kesavan show up the problems involved in naming an act as transgressive. The texts of Suleri and Steedman show us the labor, body, and cost of transgression that is suppressed in Rushdie's texts by giving us a history of agency that does not cross over into visibility. A feminist and materialist analysis of the scene of blasphemy's production can produce new and productive ways of thinking about blasphemy. Such a reading tells us that blasphemy in Rushdie's texts emerges out of a male sexual anxiety about authorship and authority. Such a reading also shows how Kureishi's anxiety about imagination in the "post-Rushdie affair" predicament has forced him to transfix London as the natural site of modernity, secularism, and imagination. This becomes clear when we read this novel against his "pre-Rushdie affair" text, "Sammy and Rosie get Laid" where he lays bare the binding of London and Pakistan. If blasphemy in Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman and Suleri's Meatless Days takes the form of an exposure of nationalism's power to conscript woman's body as a cultural signifier for nation-making, in Kesavan's historical novel Looking Through Glass blasphemy is a metaphor for the failed activism of the ordinary people of Indian nationalist history.Item Unknown Revising the feminine self in the fiction of Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf(1992) Smith, Lenora Penna; Lurie, SusanThe fiction of Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf is situated, as are the writers themselves, in the late-Victorian middle-class ideology of individualism, defining the self as autonomous and self-determining and positioning women with domesticity, defining them as relational and self-denying. Although their representations of women and strategies of point of view indicate construction within these dominant discourses, their narratives also refute, sometimes inadvertently, these same discourses. Richardson's fiction suggests an image of identity rooted in individualism, in notions of an autonomous, unified individuality, associated in her culture with the masculine, whereas Woolf's suggests a basis in individualism's denial of an autonomous, unified feminine identity. The fiction of both assumes a transcendental self, a notion key to individualism, in the image of a "true" self that avoids situation within material and social circumstances. This image appears in Richardson's fiction in the perception of an untouched self and in Woolf's, in the perception of a dispersed self. In their representations of women, both also rely on notions of feminine identity that reiterate the cultural definitions of gender. In Pilgrimage, Richardson's central character, Miriam imagines her self as autonomous, essential, and transcendental. This notion also appears to govern the narrative focused through Miriam's perspective and related through a voice sometimes indistinguishable from hers. But the narrative provides a dual perspective on Miriam that refutes the notions of individualism grounding it and her imagined self. In contrast to Richardson's, Woolf's female characters, in particular in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, are not unified, autonomous individuals, but instead are fragmented and dispersed, and in their dispersal, they recapitulate both relational, self-denying femininity and transcendental individuality. Woolf's narrative techniques also seem to valorize the culturally constructed feminine by incorporating multiple perspectives and voices. However, Woolf's narrative strategy, like Richardson's, exposes the ideology that grounds it by granting the female narrators an authority ordinarily denied women and by exposing the failure of the relational ego to create a community of characters.Item Unknown Sexual Deregulation: Reading U.S. Subjects of Affective Labor from the Early Cold War to the Neoliberal Era(2016-06-13) Fax, Joanna; Hennessy, Rosemary; Lurie, SusanIn recent years, critics of neoliberalism have turned to new forms of affective labor as one of the features of late-capitalist shifts in production. What remains less scrutinized, however, is the extent to which these forms of labor, as they are structured by the industries that make use of them, play a role in the development of homosexual identity categories that have also been understood and represented as affective. My study interrogates how the cultural regulation of postwar bodies intersects with an economic program that valorizes market freedom. I view this phase of homosexual modernity as unfolding through the logic of deregulation, linking new homosexual subjects to larger systems of flexible, affective labor integral to the ongoing project of free-market hegemony. Affect theory frames this story as the embodied and emotive capacity for social bonding, an element of labor that must be managed by and extracted from working subjects. My readings of novels featuring gay and lesbian subjects at work disclose writers’ critical engagement with cultural and economic deregulation from its nascent stages in the United States. My analysis traces the narration and re-narration of this modernizing program from the mid-twentieth to early twenty-first-century writers who wrestle with neoliberalism’s ambivalent impact on sexual identity and politics. The project consists of two parts each engaging neoliberal adjustments inaugurated in the early Cold War epoch. My analysis of works by James Baldwin, Patricia Highsmith, Jane Rule, and the lesbian pulp author Paula Christian in the first two chapters explores the recurring centrality of service labor as a significant though under-examined feature of the representation of homosexuality in fiction in the 1950s and early 1960s. These works showcase authors confronting the fraught relationship between homosexuality and deregulation ideology, which diminishes the dominance of particular heteronormative arrangements at the same time as it collaborates with new exploitative regimes under late capitalism. The two chapters of the dissertation’s second part examine the significance of historical fiction that revisits the McCarthy period. I read Audre Lorde’s 1982 biomythography Zami and Barbara Kingsolver’s 2009 novel The Lacuna as pivotal commentaries that re-examine this history through the lens of emotional labor to explore the racial, national, and class-based dimensions of queer identity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.Item Unknown Trafficking in the Spaces of Poverty: Reading the Post-War Wars of American Literature and Culture(2014-07-21) Bezusko, Adriane M; Hennessy, Rosemary; Lurie, Susan; Howe, CymeneTrafficking in the Spaces of Poverty reorients the “post-war” period of American literature and culture through a reading of various cultural and ideological wars at home: the Cold War, the War on Welfare, the War on Poverty and the War on Terror. By bringing together policy documents, sociology, psychology, literature and film, this project analyzes the discursive limits of portraying lives lived in and along the lines of poverty. To tease out the underlying assumptions about the people whose bodies are marked by poverty, I set up the historical contours of the period and then discuss the ways in which literature resists, supports, and traffics in the spaces of poverty as it was being variously defined in the period. The narratives that I have chosen are tutor texts designed to disclose the conditions and circumstances of poverty as well as their ideological displacement. Reading against the grain of the dominant discourses, I argue that writers who are typically read as working against various forms of oppression actually enforce a neoliberal commonsense, performing the emotional work of absolving middle and upper class guilt when faced with the persistence of inequality. Managing the poor through these discourses has stabilized white middle-class privilege and produced uneven geographies. These spaces are socially managed and constructed through ideology to maintain uneven geographies but they are also deployed to explain why the poor remain poor. Movement in and out of spaces of poverty and spatial freedom as a way to express social and class mobility characterizes much of the literature that I read in Trafficking in the Spaces of Poverty. Migration, or the traffic of bodies across space, is another organizing principle of this dissertation. Social relations are expressed and enacted in and across spaces where identities are divided, defined, and limited. I argue that in their processes of trafficking in poverty, actual impoverished conditions and peoples’ unmet needs become fetishized and as fetishes enables a readjusted national imaginary and new ideological configurations of freedom and home, race, masculinity, motherhood, and the child.Item Unknown White Women's Heritage Organizations in Texas, 1870-1970(2014-01-29) Harper, Mercedes; Camp, Stephanie M.; Boles, John B.; McDaniel, W. Caleb; Lurie, SusanThis study offers an analysis of three white women’s heritage organizations—the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), and the Daughters of the Republic of Texas (DAR)—from 1870 through 1970. These three