R-3 Repository :: Browsing by Author "Wolfe, Cary"

Browsing by Author "Wolfe, Cary"

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Animal Remainders, Remaining Animal: Cross-Species Collaborative Encounters in Victorian Literature and Culture
(2014-04-24) Basnett, Kattie; Michie, Helena; Wolfe, Cary; Parsons, William B.; Patten, Robert L.
“Animal Remainders” responds to the challenge of—and challenges to—Victorian animal studies, a sub-field of Victorian scholarship that has not seen the same popular critical reception as modernist or contemporary literary animal studies. Departing from the Victorian critical trend of reading literary animals as salient figures only so long as they can be imagined as symbolic or metaphoric for humans and human concerns, “Animal Remainders” takes literary animals—whether domestic pet or insect—seriously as animals. Moreover, these literary animals are acknowledged as agents of ethical production and transformation structured through a “chimerical collaboration.” The chimerical collaboration is inherently cross-species in nature and, within this collaboration, animals are capable of co-authoring the human and cross-species relations through the act of co-constitution, as well as being capable of explicitly or implicitly co-authoring texts such as literature and music in spite of communications barriers. By reading literary animals as collaborators with, rather than metaphors for, the human I demonstrate that the humanism and anthropocentrism we credit the Victorians and their literatures with as a discipline breaks down—at least in part—as Victorian literary animals are more radical than they have been given credit for. In this spirit, each chapter of “Animal Remainders” focuses primarily on critically marginalized readings of cross-species collaborations as they manifest in Victorian texts—including Charles Dickens’ early novels, Wilkie Collins’s antivivisection novel Heart and Science, animal autobiographies by Virginia Woolf and Anna Sewell, and the poetry of Michael Field—as well as in contemporary literature, experimental music, and the digital humanities. “Animal Remainders” foregrounds important methodological questions about the forces which discipline Victorian scholarship and the history informing our historicism, as well as more intimate questions about ourselves as scholars and living beings in a cross-species world. It enacts a fundamental un-knowing of the Victorian human and its—real or represented—animal other by asking, who is this nineteenth-century human (or) animal we study, but also who is the “we” doing the studying and through what histories and structures of knowledge have we come to know ourselves (and others) as such?
Apocalyptic Poetics: Reading Ecologically Across Media After 1945
(2024-10-08) Ram, Bren Marie; Wolfe, Cary
Apocalyptic Poetics: Reading Ecologically Across Media After 1945 argues that global literary techniques of imagination respond to the end of World War II as a time when it became imaginable for humans to cause the extinction of our own species. Tracing the development and production of new methods for imagining impossible futures, Apocalyptic Poetics makes the case that a robust attention to the formal and aesthetic limits of media gives the best insights into what it means for a world to end. To that end, I examine three media forms—novels, film, and poetry—to investigate the workings of apocalyptic poetics in their shifting sites and modalities. This dissertation connects the threads of environmental studies, nuclear criticism, and media theory to study the poetics—the artistic techniques of making—that are specific to certain media, such as the cinematics of risk, the interface of novelistic realism, and the spectrality of the lyric voice. By reading widely, with less regard for national borders than for the sociopolitical contexts that produce them, Apocalyptic Poetics highlights four sites where apocalyptic logics are at work, and in so doing offers four case studies on what we stand to gain when we take the end of the world as a starting point. Each chapter intervenes in its own micro-debate about temporality, locality, and apocalypse, demonstrating the richness of possibilities afforded by my method and sketching a loose portrait of the post-1945 literary imaginative landscape as attuned to concerns of “the end.” Among the texts in the project’s varied, multi-national archive are poems from the height of the AIDS crisis, films by Alfred Hitchcock, and a spy novel by Salman Rushdie. By refocusing the lens of apocalypse from “what” to “how,” I argue that accurate representation of crisis or the end of the world is less interesting than the methods of expression themselves.
Embargo
Bad Roads: Feral Transport Media in American Narrative Art, 1913-1977
(2024-06-26) Burch, Paul W.; Wolfe, Cary; Comer, Krista
In Bad Roads: Feral Transport Media in American Narrative Art, 1913-1977, I devise the biopolitical and critical regionalist framework of “the bad road” to read for moments of textual ferality in early-to-mid century American literature and film. This framework is based around an understanding of transport media—technologies of mobility, infrastructures, adjacent landscapes—as constructs that mediate and include through exclusion. In what follows, I read for the presence and function of transport media in a diverse array of narratives drawn from the pre and post-interstate eras of twentieth century America. Conducting these analyses demonstrates how both transport media, and the narratives that incorporate them, are uniquely prone to rupture and immunitary failure: moments when a protected inside becomes an outside, or an excised other makes an unheralded return. I refer to this dynamic of containment and rupture as the “bad road.” By applying the “bad road” framework to authors such as Willa Cather, John Steinbeck, Toni Morrison, and N. Scott Momaday, I unpack how the work of narrating mobility in an American colonial context is particularly fraught as the project of modernization is marked by an irrepressible plurality: cultural, geographic, interpersonal, temporal. By setting my project against the backdrop of a crystallizing culture of the “good road” as mobile privatization, I determine that how an author employs, avoids, or is subjected to, the permutations of the bad road, is intimately linked to their cultural positioning. Reading for these differences is crucial to considering the perils and possibilities of mobility in the United States—past, present, and future.
Genial Thinking: Stevens, Frost, Ashbery
(2013-09-16) Klein, Andrew; Wolfe, Cary; Doody, Terrence A.; Wood, Philip
This dissertation explores how Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery have responded to the problem of philosophical skepticism that they inherit from Emerson: that while things do in fact exist, direct knowledge of them is beyond our ken. Traditionally read within the framework of an evolving Romanticism that finds them attempting to resolve this problem through some form of synthesis or transcendence, I argue instead that these poets accept the intractability of the problem so as to develop forms of thinking from within its conditions. Chapter One explains why poetry is particularly suited to this sort of thinking and what it can achieve that philosophy (or at least a certain understanding of it) cannot. Chapter Two focuses on the act of listening in Stevens’s poetry as a way to show how Stevens is not, as is typically thought, interested in “the thing itself,” but in "the less legible meaning of sounds," the slight, keen indecision that resonates in between sense and understanding. Chapter Three focuses on those moments in Frost’s poetry when, instead of attempting to comprehend, seize, grasp, and represent reality through the use of metaphor, he chooses to regard its inappropriability or otherness. And Chapter Four focuses on how Ashbery’s constant shifts of focus are not just the wanderings of his mind, but a technique for disrupting our absorption in a single plane of attention so as to achieve new economies of engagement. Overall, though, the goal of this project is to move the discussion about this line of poets out of the epistemological register within which they are usually read and into an ethical one.
High Weirdness: Visionary Experience in the Seventies Counterculture
(2015-11-18) Davis, Erik; Kripal, Jeffrey; Parsons, William; Wolfe, Cary
This project interweaves two critical investigations into the history of religions in America, one theoretical and one historical. The theoretical investigation concerns the question of religious experience, and particularly how scholars of religion understand this category once we recognize that to label any experience “religious” already prejudices the phenomenon in question. Developing the work of Ann Taves, I call for a more fine-grained account of how forms of extraordinary experience come to be constructed as religious (or mystical, occult, etc.) through the creative assemblage of existing scripts and templates. However, using the ontological theories of Bruno Latour and Felix Guattari, this project argues that the constructionist account of religious experience does not necessarily negate the phenomenological and pragmatic dimensions of such experiences. In this sense, the project brings an ontologically rich understanding of constructionism into productive dialogue with the current of American religious experience initiated by William James. The scripts and templates associated with well-bounded religious traditions are relatively easy to identify. However, within the countercultural period, a wide variety of discourses—religious, psychological, occult, fictional, aesthetic, technological—compete and commingle as ways of shaping and understanding the myriad of intense, sublime, and profoundly weird experiences that, through psychedelics and the pursuit of a wide variety of “altered states of consciousness,” characterize so much countercultural life. Though most studies of the counterculture focus on the sixties proper, I am interested in tracking the construction of extraordinary experience into the seventies, when disappointed revolutionaries turned in droves towards gurus, self-help regimens, and proto-New Age spirituality. While analyzing some of the sociological dimensions of this influential cultural shift, the project principally investigates three symptomatic but singular intellectuals: the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, the underground author Robert Anton Wilson, and the future psychedelic raconteur Terence McKenna. Employing their own unique mix of esotericism, social science, irony and fiction, all three men wrestle with their own extreme bouts of “high weirdness” in ways that reflect critical mutations in American religious experience.
Memory as Concept and Design in Digital Recording Devices
(2013-09-16) Dib, Lina; Faubion, James D.; Boyer, Dominic C.; Wolfe, Cary
This thesis focuses on scientists and technologies brought together around the desire to improve fallible human memory. Based on extended ethnographic fieldwork, it considers interdisciplinary collaborations among experts who design recording and archiving technologies that seek to maintain, extend, and commemorate life. How are everyday experiences translated as information, and for what purpose? How are our habits of drinking tea, talking on the phone, driving to work, and reminiscing with old photographs, turned into something that can be stored, analyzed and acted upon? How might information be used in real time to supplement the living in a recursive feedback loop? By addressing these questions, I reveal how these memory banks are inherently tied to logics of capital, of stock and storage, and to logics of the technological where, when it comes to memory, more is more. The first sections that make up this dissertation shift in scale from the micro to the macro: from historical national endeavors that turned ordinary citizens into a sensors and collectors of the mundane, to contemporary computational projects designed to store, organize and retrieve vast amounts of information. The second half of this dissertation focuses on two extreme cases of lifelogging that make use of prototypical recording technologies: Gordon Bell, who is on a quest to record his life for the sake of increased objectivity, productivity, and digital posterity, and Mrs. B, a woman who suffers from amnesia and records her life in the hopes of leading a normal life in which she can share the past with loved ones. Through these case studies, I show how new recording technologies are both a symptom of, and a cure for, anxieties about time. By focusing on the design of new objects and by addressing contemporary debates on the intentions that govern the making of recording machines, I examine how technologies take shape, and how they inform understandings of memory and the self as well as notions of human disability and enhancement. In short, I show that the past, as well as the present and the future, are always discursively, practically, and technologically informed.
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, Melissa
Modernism 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.
Reconsidering a Politicized Erotic: Lesbian Feminism, Mis/recognition, and Identity Practices
(2014-10-03) Slattery, Molly; Roof, Judith; Wolfe, Cary; Howe, Cymene
This 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.”
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.
Toxic Media: Poison and Pollution in the Modernist Imaginary, 1915–1965
(2021-04-26) Wilson, Clint; Roof, Judith; Wolfe, Cary
Toxic 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.
Unsettling Artifacts: Biopolitics, Cultural Memory, and the Public Sphere in a (Post)Settler Colony
(2013-06-05) Griffiths, Michael; Wolfe, Cary; Joseph, Betty; Faubion, James D.
My dissertation employed intellectual historian Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics—which can be most broadly parsed as the political organization of life—to examine the way the lives of Aboriginal people were regulated and surveilled in relation to settler European norms. The study is a focused investigation into a topic with global ramifications: the governance of race and sexuality and the effect of such governance on the production of apparently inclusive cultural productions within the public spheres. I argue that the way in which subaltern peoples have been governed in the past and the way their cultures have been appropriated continue to be in the present is not extraneous to but rather formative of what is often misleadingly called “the” public sphere of dominant societies. In the second part, I analyze the legacies of this biopolitical moment and emphasize, particularly, the cultural politics of affect and trauma in relation to this (not quite) past. Authors addressed include: Xavier Herbert, P. R. Stephensen, Rex Ingamells, Kim Scott, Alexis Wright, and others. I also examine Australian Aboriginal policy texts througout the twentieth century up to the "Bringing Them Home" Report (1997).
Weirding Feminist Ecology: American Literature in the Age of Climate Change
(2023-06-20) McKisson, Kelly A; Comer, Krista; Wolfe, Cary
Weirding Feminist Ecology analyzes twenty-first century American novels and novellas to make an argument for how this body of literature not only represents changing environments but also produces new conceptual understandings of ecology via more-than-representational weird literary figurations. I bring to the fields of literary and environmental studies the insights of ecofeminism and feminist social reproduction theory to develop my sense of a feminist ecological framework, which understands environments as more strangely interconnected with human bodies and communities. The project addresses issues of climate change and the challenges raised by Anthropocene discourse through this feminist ecological framework in order to rearticulate environmental problems as also social and political, structured by large-scale forces of capitalism and colonialism. Across chapters which take off from different weird literary figurations—unhomely, untimely, unsettling, uncountable—I develop feminist analyses that refigure approaches to sustainability, to linear temporal models of progress, to structures of power that become infrastructures of environment, and to quantifying mass extinction. Ultimately, I address the question of literature’s response-ability in the contemporary context of climate change, when variable environmental conditions and unprecedented climate events defy the predictive patterns and models that the Western world has traditionally used to observe, measure, and understand our ecologies. A feminist ecological framework forwards accountability as one way to address the insufficiencies of current models and the difficulty of navigating the uneven distribution of and responsibility to climate impacts.
What Mystics May Come: Forming More Perfect Unions from Pragmatism to Posthumanism
(2013-12-05) Pevateaux, Chad; Kripal, Jeffrey J.; Bongmba, Elias K.; Wolfe, Cary
At the turn of the twentieth century, after the American Civil War but before the World Wars, William James and others drew on the wisdom of the World’s religious traditions, especially the “mystical languages of unsaying,” to construct the modern category of mysticism in part to provide a common core around which divided peoples might rally in the hopes of forming a more perfect union both religiously and politically. Over one hundred years later, postmodern theorists turn to unknowingness at the heart of our most cherished knowledge of ourselves and our world as a resource rather than a threat to aid in our efforts to honor others. My dissertation examines such recent appropriations of ancient unsaying, but moves beyond the merely linguistic and logical to analyze the embodied and emplaced through comparing what I call mystical and mundane modes of undoing, such as Jamesian pragmatic participation in a pluralistic universe (Chapter 1); orthodox and heterodox, Eastern and Western embodiments of cosmic vibrations from ancient gnosis, through Christian mystical theology, to Allen Ginsberg’s poetry (Chapter 2); the yearning for more life meaning in African American religiosity represented by Howard Thurman, Langston Hughes, and Sojourner Truth (Chapter 3); and democratic theorizing from feminists to posthumanists (Chapter 4). With creative collisions of apparently disparate thinkers who nevertheless share similar dynamics of embracing “spiritual but not religious” practices, I seek to move discussions of the mystical forward through developing resources for understanding and transforming dynamics of oppression such as gender, race, class, species, and other issues of embodied difference. Using Jacques Derrida as a bridge figure, I counter what I call the linguistic misread of deconstruction to advocate for more aware participation in an embodied mode of experiencing a generative vulnerability that is absolutely universal. Understood anew, embodied finitude may provide resources for promoting justice by uniting around a different kind of common core—a common core of no common core. Indeterminateness, then, may mean daring to unknow ourselves and our others through participation in a mystery beyond clear cut divisions—immanent and transcendent, material and immaterial, male and female, human and animal.

Browsing by Author "Wolfe, Cary"

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