Browsing by Author "Roof, Judith"
Now showing 1 - 12 of 12
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Fashion and the Shifting Semiotics of Sex and Gender in Modernist Lit and Culture(2018-04-19) Rindell, Suzanne; Roof, Judith; Campana, JosephEarly 20th century women’s fashion increasingly included the trope of “borrowing” – a trend that translated into women appropriating styles previously reserved for other subjectivities (children, men, athletes, blue-collar workers, etc). These borrowed fashions engaged an ambiguous semiotics that enabled multiple “readings” (linking a specific fashion to the demographics of a specific subjectivity) to exist simultaneously, and in some cases provided the occasion for opposite readings to exist simultaneously. This dissertation surveys a series of examples found in literature and popular culture during the early 20th century (focusing primarily on the 1920s and 1930s), analyzing the ways these “borrowed” women’s fashions collectively create a semiotic mechanism that fluidly negotiates the shifting terrains of gender representation and sexual desire – at some intervals easing cultural resistance to “transgressive” genders and desires, and in other instances underscoring previously existing regimes of heteronormative conformity.Item Hoax Machina: A Hermeneutics of Hoaxing(2021-08-11) Lowe, Annie; Roof, JudithHoax Machina: A Hermeneutics of Hoaxing reinterprets the relationships between literary and popular traditions of hoaxing. The titular “hoaxing” of a hermeneutics of hoaxing names a particular practice of interactive writing and reading, by which the historical and material conditions of texts, their mimetic techniques and diegetic devices, and popular reflection and debate are all brought into the public domain of extended exegesis, wherein information is merely the pretense for performance, and perception is already participation.Pursuing this definitional premise through a historical range of hoaxes—from Jonathan Swift’s and Benjamin Franklin’s fake astrological predictions through Barnumesque humbugs, Houdini’s art of mystification, financial frauds, and forged fictions, to digitally-automated artifices of intelligence—this project theorizes their interplay of suspicious and credulous interpretation and contestation in terms of an alternative popular hermeneutics. Hoaxing turns analytic questions into complex riddles and elaborate confidence games that materialize existential and epistemic propositionality; such a hermeneutics could both debunk and restore our prevailing, misdirective stories of knowledge, belief, and truth.Item Embargo Loose Lips: Sex and Aurality in European and American Modernist Fiction(2023-06-29) Clark, Brooke; Roof, JudithFrom plaintive whimpers, to low moans, to high-pitched cries, to deep grunts, sex is an incredibly audible phenomenon. Despite sex’s aurality, literary criticism as well as modernist studies tend to interpret sexual intercourse and the like through the visual field instead of through other sensory forces, including the aural. Alongside modernist literature’s tendency to fill out the sensory world, its narratives also flesh out the sounds of sex, so to speak. Developing in tandem with the modernist movement, Freudian psychoanalysis also takes a keen interest in audible phenomena, especially the sounds of speech, not only by listening to an analysand’s symptoms but also by attuning to the sexual undercurrents flowing and emitting from their vocals. Instead of reproducing the readily identifiable sighs and wails of arousal, foreplay, and orgasm, European and American modernist texts as well as Sigmund Freud’s writings offer multiple acoustics to evoke sex. Loose Lips: Sex and Aurality in European and American Modernist Fiction examines the ways modernist fiction’s experimental aesthetics appeal to the ear rather than the eye when rendering sex acts, behaviors, and desires. Whether through voice, sound, or noise, these texts convey sexual acts across a variety of bodies, sexes, and sexualities as a sprawling resonant force that enters one’s ear but can never fully escape from one’s mouth. Following and extending the Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic premise that sex is untethered from knowledge yet bounded to pleasure’s and unpleasure’s irreducible mixture, modernist fiction takes up the formal trouble of conveying sex’s aurality. Thus, this project follows the double trouble of trying to read it. Fiction across the modernist spectrum—from its canon, its peripheries, to its late iterations—instantiates an array of aural sex: from the pleasures and pains of overhearing intercourse in Colette’s The Pure and the Impure and Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast; the reignition of an orgasm through memories in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room; and the sensorial cartography of climactic ecstasy in D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Together, the analyses of these texts demonstrate the ways literary renditions of both sex and aurality rework and reform each other, creating more capacious, unbounded erotic soundscapes in the process. With modernism’s investment in saying the unsayable, these texts find that sex, even in its aural forms, reaches a limit of expression. Modernist literature deploys the aural to render sex, not as a means to transcend the representational constraints on sexual acts, pleasures, and desires, but to amplify these very boundaries, to make the edges of the ineffable resound instead of remaining silent.Item Mutatis Mutandis: Reverse Mimesis and Literary Modernism(2019-12-03) Martini Paula, Rodrigo; Roof, JudithMutatis Mutandis: Reversed Mimesis in Modernist Literature traces the emergence of an aesthetic practice of “reverse mimesis” in both Anglo-American and Continental European traditions of modernist literature and visual arts. Analyzing works by H. G. Wells, Sophie Treadwell, and Alfred Hitchcok, as well as Avant-Garde pieces by Alfred Jarry, Raoul Hausmann, Fernand Léger, and Roger Caillois, this dissertation is concerned with the forms of ironic reversals that fuse and/or confuse the categories of humans, animals, and machines. The playful reversal of mimesis happens concomitantly with the increasing influence of mimetic machines in the social fabric of modernity. Within the avant-garde scene, these media machines became a way to reflect on the character of language and the process of linguistic production. These works inscribe within their diegesis representations of photographic and filmic cameras, typewriters, phonographs and other apparatuses designed to capture, store, and reproduce data. However, instead of using these machines for the sole purpose of producing meaning or of representing some purported reality, these texts actually engage in representing the apparatus itself. Reverse mimesis explores the work of representation and questions the role these media machines had in the construction of the categories of animals, machines, and the human. In the playful reversal of looking inward, these works evoke the figure of mimesis to question the notion that language, the ultimate medium, offers an unimpeded access to some deeper reality. They explore the abyss of what lies in between reality and representation, and of the small, seemingly unimportant changes that constitute the mutatis mutandis. Finally, by understanding the role of media apparatuses in the construction of humanity, these works take one last step and rebuild the world to their liking. The instances of reverse mimesis creatively reinvent ways of looking at the world; these moments ingeniously reconfigure how humans interpret the so-called “natural world” and, expanding the realm of possibilities, offer new ways of interpreting, organizing, and rendering this world.Item Narrative Durations: Time at the Intersection of Music and Twentieth-Century Literature(2018-05-31) Boyd, Sydney; Roof, Judith; Campana, JosephSpanning British and American literature, “Narrative Durations: Time at the Intersection of Music and the Twentieth-Century Novel” defines the twentieth century as an era of experimentation with musical time. While most turn to philosophical and scientific paradigms to understand evolving conceptions of temporality in the twentieth century, authors and composers constitute vital interlocutors in that conversation. By examining novels in which music and temporality play essential roles, my dissertation posits that musical terms such as leitmotif, counterpoint, timbre, and overtone, which govern conceptions of time in a musical work, affect literary renditions of temporal perception. Such a study fosters a cross-disciplinary analysis where evocations of music transform a text, where the shared qualities of duration, rhythm, metric experience, and voice reap a distinctive formulation of reoriented literary time. Scholarly efforts to isolate musical experience manifest in layers of unproductive rhetorical disassociation that use metaphor and analogy to claim that James Joyce’s Ulysses is like a fugue for instance. In E. M. Forster’s 1927 narrative treatise Aspects of the Novel, he notes: “When people apply rhythm or pattern to literature they are apt not to say what they mean and not finish their sentences” (102). Here Forster addresses the problem of understanding musical import in twentieth-century literature overall, where assessing music in a text without a methodology of comparison means grappling with a stubborn, centuries-old paradox of contained disorder. “There is an imaginary in music whose function is to reassure, to constitute the subject hearing it,” as Roland Barthes writes in his 1977 study Image-Music-Text (179). Tracing the controlled imaginary of music in a text means accepting a transformation of contemporary awareness, where bodies exist in space and time, where one listens to and creates alternative environments that provoke new experiences, and in turn, where musical systems continually redefine what it means to be human.Item Oddly Modern Times: Alternate-Temporality Clocks and Other Peculiar Modes of Access in Anglophone and German Literary Modernism(2022-04-20) Battaglia, Andrew John; Roof, JudithIn 1882, Western nations convened in Washington D.C. to debate and ultimately ratify a novel proposal: world standard time. Unlike the reigning mode of temporal accountancy in which each nation calculated and enforced its own temporal schema, the Canadian Sandford Fleming’s totalizing space-time grid sought to replace the various local times with twenty-four time zones all set against a common zero meridian, located at the Greenwich Observatory in London. In place of local solar time—which determines time by the sun’s apparent motion at a specific location—the West (and ultimately the world) elected to tell time by conventional reckoning, decoupling precision clocks and other time devices from solar time’s natural relationship to planetary motion. Reading the substitution of convention for naturality to be exemplary of literary modernism, this dissertation traces how late-nineteenth-century and twentieth-century literature stages the affordances and limitations of technical intervention in putatively natural relationships. Looking at the human face as the site of expressions, the railway timetable as a proxy for foreign locales, and the deep future as terra incognita for human development, this dissertation traces how various prosthetic armatures fail to satisfy the presumptive reliability of natural relationships just as the vast technical network that subtends world standard time fails to satisfy fully the reliable if limited role that local solar time once played.Item Proximity by Proxy: Contemporary Literature and Cultural Theory in the Age of Social Media(2019-06-12) Miller, Michael F.; Roof, JudithNew media technologies such as Web 2.0 have had a significant effect on the aesthetics, politics, and reception structures of twenty-first century literary and cultural production. This project explores a number of texts that can be loosely defined as either “social media novels” or “postdigital” literature. These texts either extensively narrate the experiences of characters who use social media technologies, or they enact work that is “postdigital,” which means that it is written, published, read, and circulated exclusively online. Considering the extent to which our experiences of and with literature and literary culture are structured by Web 2.0’s mediating presence, this project shows how writers such as Tom McCarthy, Natasha Stagg, Jarett Kobek, and Megan Boyle all reflexively stake out their proximate relation to new media, a proximity that is facilitated literally and figuratively by digital proxies. Contemporary literature’s proximal relation to new media and digital culture has also significantly altered how critics understand authorship. This dissertation shows how much of the rhetoric associated with Web 2.0 cashes in strategically on the cultural value of political idealism, and I argue that it most successfully does so by equating the use of digital technology with the creation of content. In that sense, this broad shift in literary culture redefines readers as users and authors as servers or hosts. A historical and media-theoretical examination of this shift in literary culture reassesses the resurgence of realist modes of representation and the popularity of non-fiction forms of writing such as “autofiction,” the memoir, and the personal essay. As authors become servers and hosts, what contemporary writers are serving to their readers/users is the promise of an authentic biographical persona. Tracking these broad literary shifts across historical, theoretical, and political registers, Proximity by Proxy: Contemporary Literature and Cultural Theory in the Age of Social Media seeks to better understand how the logic and politicized rhetoric of connection informs contemporary literary culture’s demand for authentic authorial personae, and it offers a robust account of the conditions by which impersonal technical media have become the preferred medium for the expression of one’s authorial personality.Item Reclaiming Authorship: The Modernist Aesthetics of Self-Production in Marianne Moore, Edith Sitwell, and Djuna Barnes(2015-06-26) Richardson, Laura K.; Roof, Judith; Wolfe, Cary; Bailar, MelissaModernism and its twentieth-century wake witnessed the gradual decline of the very power its incipience granted to the author: the authorial self in the space of writing. For modernist women authors, this facet of the period proved particularly limiting. The early twentieth century opened spaces for female authorship while closing spaces for female critics, including for women’s own comprehension of their work; while female talent was acknowledged more than ever before, critics were reticent to grant hermeneutic agency to women’s authorship. Celebrations of the work of female artists are frequently qualified by skeptical sexism—that the woman writing might “stumble upon” something poignant whose craft she didn’t quite intend. This kind of rhetoric is coterminous with the rise of literary studies as a university discipline—a movement that transferred the task of criticism from the pen of the poet-scholar to that of the university professor, moving critical agency from increasingly democratic aesthetic spaces to those populated exclusively by upper-class, formally-educated white men. Female modernist writers responded to this loss of hermeneutic agency through a system of strategies that reclaim authorship—the state of being the literary origin of a piece or body of work, of asserting authority over that work’s publishing, revision, and/or interpretation. Their strategies employ a variety of tactics to work through and against the institutions of modernism—publishing and the literary marketplace, criticism, and sex-based expectations of literary output. Marianne Moore, Edith Sitwell, and Djuna Barnes employed methodologies of restoring autonomy to their voices within their corpuses, fostering a bifurcated schema of playing into and playing along with institutional structures while producing bodies of work that challenge these very establishments—the critical modernist community, the necessary reliance on male literary imprimaturs, and the paradox between the growing tendency of literary scholarship to both pathologize women’s writing and dismiss the voice of the author within her work. Revision, criticism of one’s own work, and the refusal to publish are each moments of authoritative intervention in a text, and reassert the power of the female author over the structures that seek to remove it. Each chapter investigates a female modernist author’s aesthetic and biographical responses to the modernist climate and its scholastic reverberations in the regulation and divestment of the voice of women’s critical authorship.Item Reconsidering a Politicized Erotic: Lesbian Feminism, Mis/recognition, and Identity Practices(2014-10-03) Slattery, Molly; Roof, Judith; Wolfe, Cary; Howe, CymeneThis genealogical study examines the ways in which the discourse of identity shapes lesbianism activism as it surfaced in response to the misogynistic lesbophobia inherent to US feminist and homophilic identity political groups in the mid to late 20th century. In particular, the dissertation focuses on identity politics models that are premised upon theories of social inclusion, where recognition and visibility are presumed to signal social integration. In this register, inclusion proves to be a problematic trope because it gave rise to the demand for authenticity and the democratic prioritization of the majority stakeholders’ needs in identity political groups. In the spirit of accommodation, political lesbians capitulated to heteronormative pressures and disavowed desire, reinstating a feminist hegemony that masqueraded as “lesbian” resistance. Accordingly, this research endeavors to ascertain why lesbianism was open to critiques from other identity political groups and what mechanisms allowed lesbianism to be subsumed within those discourses. The identity politics models described herein are premised upon the assumption that visibility equals power. Because lesbian desire is not visibly inscribed on the body, lesbians may deploy strategies of misrecognition that make risk-aversive behaviors such as passing commonplace for the lesbian. Yet, identitarian groups used political models based upon the necessity of honesty, transparency, and visibility, making identity politics a hostile terrain wherein the lesbian activist found herself enmeshed. Contemporary theorists, however, have picked up on the importance of misrecognition, play, and performativity, but, when executed within the discourse of identity, critical responses reproduce hegemonic strategies of containment that normalize difference. This analysis documents moments of strategic misrecognition that operate successfully because of a conscious acknowledgement of lesbian exclusion from the social. While this research holds that identity political groups are excluded from the social to their detriment, the dissertation looks into the possibility that systemic exclusion may entail freedom and may produce novel counteralignments to the regime of identity, focusing, instead, on important “differences that make a difference.”Item Structures of the Sensible: Smelling and Tasting the Text after World War I(2022-04-20) Woudstra, Els Willeke; Roof, JudithThe period following the First World War profoundly challenged the familiar structures of the human sensorium: the global aftershocks of the war and the mass production of new technologies of perception produced countless new sensations. The rise of synthetic chemistry exposed the nose and tongue to artificial flavors and odors, constructing smell and taste as chemical senses, and challenging the relationship between external sensations and the formation of the subject. Amid the chemical disruption of the sensible, this dissertation takes smell and taste as modes of access and interpretation that move beyond the surface of representation, into the structures that shape the sensible. In the poisoning plots of Golden Age detective novels, smell and taste emerge as sensory clues through which the detective restores justice as well as the sensory order. Advertisements for Campbell’s soup and dessert puddings together with Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman (1969) and the cookbooks of Julia Child and M. F. K. Fisher reveals the construction and disruption of corporate control over the sense of taste, which prioritizes efficiency over taste. The smell of disinfectants in the narratives of the third bubonic plague pandemic reveals the medical and racial structures of olfactory control that produce notions of twentieth century ‘deodorization.’ Reading Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1937) with Mia McKenzie’s The Summer We Got Free (2013) reveals the how the literary evocation of smell and taste produces a sensory erotic that can reconstitute the sensible after the profound disruption of trauma. Smell and taste are sneaky senses: they resist both representation and isolation. Yet, in the indescribability of smell and taste lies their potential for understanding the subject’s relation to the world, and its construction as a sensory subject.Item The Hidden God: A Posthumanist Genealogy of Pragmatism(2013-06-05) White, Ryan; Wolfe, Cary; Roof, Judith; Faubion, James D.Departing from humanist models of American intellectual history, this dissertation proposes an alternative posthumanist approach to the thought of Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Charles Sanders Peirce. Beginning with Perry Miller’s influential scholarship, American thought is often cast as a search for “face to face” encounters with the unaccountable God of Calvinism, a figure that eventually evolves to encompass Romantic notions of the aesthetic, imagination, or, most predominately, individual human feeling. This narrative typically culminates in the pragmatism of William James, a philosophy in which human feeling attains priority at the expense of impersonal metaphysical systems. However, alongside and against these trends runs a tradition that derives from the Calvinist distinction between a fallen material world and a transcendent God possessed of absolute sovereignty, a tradition that also anticipates posthumanist theory, particularly the self-referential distinction between system and environment that occupies the central position in Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory. After systems theory, the possibility for “face to face” encounters is replaced with the necessary self-reference of communication and observation, an attribute expressed in Edwards, Emerson, and Peirce through, respectively, the figures of “true virtue,” an absent and inexpressible grief and, in its most abstract form, Peirce’s concept of a sign. In conclusion, Edwards, Emerson, and Peirce represent an alternative posthumanist genealogy of pragmatism that displaces human consciousness as the foundational ground of meaning, communication, or semiosis.Item Toxic Media: Poison and Pollution in the Modernist Imaginary, 1915–1965(2021-04-26) Wilson, Clint; Roof, Judith; Wolfe, CaryToxic Media: Poison and Pollution in the Modernist Imaginary, 1915–1965 recovers a wider literary legacy invested in the concept of “toxicity” as a decidedly aesthetic term, connecting a growing awareness of environmental precarity to a new kind of ecological poetics. Scholars of modernist literature have, in recent years, taken the period’s engagement with toxicity more seriously, finding tropes of “toxic refreshment,” “toxic discourse,” or other variously ambivalent portrayals of the twentieth century’s hazardous wastes and by-products. Toxic Media, however, does not recuperate modernist writers as proto-environmental thinkers, but rather reexamines how the period’s art and literature contains eccentric descriptions that helpfully image toxicity as a process of mediation and thus extend the legacies of modernism far beyond its traditional, historical boundaries. In fact, this distinctly “modernist” sense of the toxic is more in keeping with the linguistics of toxicity, where the Greek toxicos rightly means “arrow,” not “poison.” The “toxic” has long been associated, therefore, with the media of dissemination and directionality, rather than discrete moments of poisonous irruption or exposure. In redirecting to the systems of exposure, rather than finite moments of exposure, Toxic Media hopes to chart new pathways into modernist studies as well as the environmental humanities, which often privilege the dramatic event above the less visible media that serve as the conditions of possibility for those events. Between the years of 1915 and 1965, modernist writers were working through these very systems of exposure in the form of bodily breath, urban infrastructure, and sites of waste. From World War I poetry to the writings of the Black Chicago Renaissance, from the high forms of poetic Symbolisme to the contemporary articulation of ecopoetics, modernist accounts of the toxic are invaluable for the way they redirect attention to ecological and literary media, ultimately demanding a new archaeology of toxicity as a medium unto itself.