Browsing by Author "Minter, David L."
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Item Bawdy talk: The politics of women's public speech in nineteenth-century American literature and culture(1995) Levander, Caroline Field; Minter, David L.Throughout the pages of nineteenth-century American fiction men remain fascinated by the sound of women's speech. Literary depictions of men's intense interest in women's pleasing and distinct utterance occur with a frequency that suggest not so much that there "are" unalterable differences between American men's and women's speech, but that the imagining of that difference is central to the nation's understanding of itself as a distinct entity or to the creation of what Lauren Berlant calls a "national symbolic." These lengthy depictions of women's speech thus participate in cultural work of a profound, enduring, and to date unspecified nature. It is the project of this dissertation to describe the cultural burden placed on women's language in mainstream nineteenth-century American literature and, then, to carve out new ways of thinking about the public significance of women's speech and its impact on the nineteenth-century political arena. In chapter one, I analyze the writings of, among others, Henry James, Sarah Hale, and Noah Webster in order to show that the separation of women's speech from the public arena was a process that depended for its success on the attention that men paid to the sound of women's talk and to the desire that sound produced. In short, I establish a clear relation between the creation and reinforcement of the public sphere and the depictions of women's speech that occur repeatedly in American fiction. In my second chapter, however, I show that by mid-century a minority of American writers, including Herman Melville and E. D. E. N. Southworth had begun arguing that the sexually explicit subject matter, rather than eroticized sound, of women's language recenters their speech in the public sphere. Using their figuration as a departure point, I show, in chapters three through six, how Maria Monk, Caroline Lee Hentz, Harriet Jacobs, Lillie Devereux Blake, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps employed and foregrounded this alternative paradigm of women's speech in their political fictions in order to influence, respectively, the nativist, pro-slavery, abolitionist, women's suffrage, and labor reform movements. My analysis thus revises the critical consensus that nineteenth-century women's speech failed to impact America's political life.Item "But chiefly we now engaged in mutual listening": Participation in "Art as Experience" and "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men"(1994) Howard, Catherine Elaine; Minter, David L.James Agee and Walker Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and John Dewey's Art as Experience converge in several fundamental ways, all hinging on the notion of participation in art. Although Agee and Evans may seem at first glance to be stylistically mismatched in their book, an examination of their work in light of pragmatic aesthetic theories introduced by Dewey reveals several ways in which they meet. For Dewey experience and community are the major components in confronting existence; Agee and Evans also examine their tenant families in terms of experience and community. Specifically, they approach Deweyan goals in emphasizing the art of the everyday, in using art as a communicative tool to improve a social situation, and in employing art as a way to approximate "truth." Thinking in terms of experience, the more subjective individual factor, gives rise to the idea of perception, of basing one's aesthetic frame on current experience and memories of past experiences. Agee and Evans both participate in this process, which Dewey calls "consummatory experience." In addition, both artists evoke consummatory experiences from the reader. The more objective factor, community, leads to a consideration of democracy, a cooperative of shared moral values. Again, Agee and Evans come together in examining community and in searching for democracy, particularly in their uses of art for communication. A fundamental problem with subject-object dichotomy occurs both in Dewey's theory and in Agee and Evans' work. Subjects, those observing, and objects, those observed, are not equal. Some of the objects that Agee and Evans examine are human beings, potential subjects, who are not allowed to participate in consummatory experience. Dewey emphasizes that thinking of subjects and objects as separate entities is not fruitful; rather, subjectivity and objectivity are processes to be undertaken, and true art occurs when subject and object merge. Although Agee and Evans fall short of a merging of subject and object, both of them mix subjective and objective techniques in their respective portraits of a time and a place. Agee, Evans, and Dewey meet in their uses of participation, both in goal and in method.Item Estranged affections: Literary writing and the public sphere in Poe, Emerson, and Melville(1998) Norberg, Peter C.; Minter, David L.This dissertation examines the influence of romantic aesthetics on the development of literary writing as a profession in America during the 1840s and 1850s. In opposition to the new historical claim that literary texts are purely reflective of the ideological presuppositions of the culture in which they were written, my analysis demonstrates how literary writing can function as an effective means of cultural transformation. By examining how Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Herman Melville, respectively, take up romantic aesthetics in their work, I advance a materialist theory of history that is better suited to the study of culture in a democracy. Unlike the new historical approach to cultural analysis, which interprets historical change with reference to market forces that are thought to be rationally determinate, the materialist approach to cultural analysis I develop understands historical change to proceed via the pragmatic construction of overdetermined social identities that are written in response to changing cultural circumstances. Although this materialist approach requires critics to abandon the project of writing a total and complete history of American cultural life, it is better suited for cultural analysis in a democracy because it insists that we--not some transhistorical force like the market--bear the responsibility for determining our relation to our culture.Item "No refuge": The woman within/beyond the borders of Henry Adams, Henry James, and others(1994) van Oostrum, Duco C.; Minter, David L.The dissertation investigates whether there is a place of refuge for women characters within and/or beyond American literary texts written by men around the turn of the twentieth century. Besides major and minor texts of leading American men of letters, Henry Adams and Henry James, the texts also include two Dutch novels, Multatuli's Max Havelaar and Frederik van Eeden's Van de koele meren des doods. In examining these texts, the dissertation seeks for a male feminist practice that does not immediately turn into a male practice of appropriation and violence, I adopt a feminist practice of exposing gender representations in canonical male-authored texts, giving particular attention to the results of their representations for women. The question I ask of them is also a question I ask of my critical practice: is a genuine representation of female characters by male authors possible? The metaphors of feminism as a "no man's land" and American literature as a "territorial battle" connect issues central in Adams, James, Multatuli, and Van Eeden. The inclusion of the Dutch texts "within" American literature takes place not only on the basis of intertextual links with Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, but also because their preoccupation with gender resembles gender systems in texts of Henry Adams and Henry James. All these male authors share an interest in the representation of women in their literary works. Henry Adams argues in The Education that there is "no refuge" for modern American women except "such as the male created for himself." After analyzing the Dutch novels, James's The Wings of the Dove, and Adams's Esther, his South Seas letters, and The Education of Henry Adams, I locate these dubious moments of refuge for women within male representation in strategies of idealizations of female alterity, self-reflexivity, exposure of the cultural construction of gender, and silence. Whether these places of refuge for women within the borders of the male texts go beyond already staked out territories into "no man's land" is a question at the heart of the dissertation.Item Self (reliance) and feminine desire: Strategies for engagement in literature(s) written by women(1999) Massengale, Kate J. S.; Minter, David L.Fictional and nonfictional texts by Elizabeth Stoddard, Edith Wharton, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, Ellen Glasgow, and Zora Neale Hurston are read against the background of Emersonian ideals of self reliance and friendship. The close readings have discovered a number of strategies for creating an individual feminine consciousness and for creating space for both the play of self-reliance issues and feminine desire. By thinking in terms of strategies, readers more fully engage with these elements and open the readings of each of the texts. No "ideal" reading may be determined; rather there are many and complex moments in which self reliance and desire get to be played out to different levels of success. Stoddard employs complex mother-daughter relationships, witch markers, the theology of the Puritan past, and first-person narration as strategies to represent two strong female characters (two sisters) as they move into the realm of independence and face their own desires (The Morgesons ). Wharton finds that letter writing and self-created definitions of friendship allow both herself and her character, Charity Royall in the novel Summer, to act upon desires not morally sanctioned by their societies. The use of typology and direct address to multiply the possibilities of feminine selves and feminine desires, both profound and profane, is Sedgwick's technique in Hope Leslie. The reversals of masculine and feminine qualifies as well as reversals of behavior in Glasgow's novel Barren Ground, make the best readers uncomfortable enough to look at their own narrow definitions of what it means to be self reliant and female and which desires are worth pursuing. Finally, Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God moves like waves, contracting and expanding, as she explores the power of the storyteller and the incredibly important role of the listener (reader). She, more than most, will not allow solid ground under our reading feet, but shifts the Florida mud so that every reading is aware of its immediacy and its contingency. The examination of how different female authors engage issues of desire and the development of a creative, independent self greatly opens our understandings and readings of these texts.Item The bordering nation: Problems of American identity in selected novels from "Our Nig" to "George Washington Gomez"(1997) Creighton, Jane Margaret; Minter, David L.The dynamics between "American" constructions of ethnicity and the aspiration for and resistance to "American" identity are central to this study of several novels marked by their subjects' diverse racial, ethnic, gendered, regional, and class provenance. Beginning with the African-American tradition, I consider how Harriet Wilson's Our Nig (1859) and James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912) recognize and critique the evolution of race and class politics from the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth. These novels, positioned as "bookends" to the troubled history of post-emancipation politics, sharply delineate the problems of self-authorizing "other" voices in dialogue with national identity at the same time that they establish prior historical ground for considering what is at stake in subsequent texts. The major portion of this study concerns four novels from the 1920s and 1930s, and is drawn from two cultures differently absorbed in the dialogicism of borders--urban Jewish New York and Chicano Texas along the Texas-Mexican border. The texts include Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers, Jovita Gonzalez's and Eve Raleigh's Caballero, and Americo Paredes's George Washington Gomez. Among these texts exists a wealth of discourses that constitute rich pre-conditions for current debates on multiculturalism. The juxtaposition of Jewish and Chicano novels suggests parallel problems in cultures marked both by strong religious and secular traditions and by histories of diverse persecutions that finally meet within the contested meaning of Americanization. The worlds these novels reveal assert an ongoing making of an "America" that is fundamentally multicultural in the complex, often fraught negotiation of Anglo hegemony. The uneven parallel between the immigrant Jew who arrives from elsewhere and the colonized Mexican who remains surrounded by colonizers provides variant ways of looking at persistent conceptions of the "New World." If early Anglo mythology has long been dependent on notions of recurrent frontiers harboring "a nation of immigrants" within a consensual state of monologic Anglo hegemony, the shifting continental borders of the U.S. along with the immensity of its ongoing demographic changes have always offered a different model. The ways in which these novels dissect and contest that hegemony give this subject its voice.Item Unmasking the female spectator: Sighting feminist strategies in Chopin, Glasgow, and Larsen(1993) Dressler, Mylene Caroline; Minter, David L.The term "female spectator" has, since its first appearance within feminist theoretical formulations, and in particular within feminist psychoanalytic interpretations of film, been the subject of contentious debate. Attempting to answer such questions as, What is a female spectator? Who does she represent? How meaningful is she as a social or textual construction?, feminist theorists of literature and film have sought and constructed a complex syntax of meanings, one which reveals the nomenclature of "female spectatorship" as a site not of looked-for, stable opportunity, but rather of multiple and unpredictable identifications. Drawing on the work of critics including Mary Ann Doane, Tania Modleski, and Teresa de Lauretis, this study seeks to explore that multiplicity through a construct of "masquerade": locating the strategic importance of female spectatorship, not only in its ability to figure female recognitions of gender as performance, but in its capacity to describe the very watching of that recognition, and the larger masks of theory that construct watching itself--and so authorizing feminist tropes of specularization, and a female "gaze" that deconstructs specularization as local, limited, and strategic. To this end, the dissertation is imagined as a series of "unmaskings" or textual re-visions which dramatize and self-consciously narrativize feminist "sights" of critical engagement with works by women which seek to encode female specularity. Chapter 1 offers a Lacanian analysis of The Awakening, an interpretation which is in turn challenged and complicated by the re-vision of Chapter 2, incorporating previously absent demarcations of race, class, and sexuality. Chapter 3 examines Barren Ground as a text which encodes the very watching of female textual production enacted in the first two chapters, and further as a work which expresses female visual authority precisely through such return and redress. Chapter 4, finally, reads the impulse to self-revision as itself open to a second look, offering an analysis of Quicksand which exposes the potentially "mirroring" and enclosed effects of white female spectatorship deployed as self-observation. Yet Larsen also holds out hope for the masks of female watching; masks which, when recognized, may reconstruct women viewers as diverse, distinct, and discerning.