Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Comparative Studies

This dissertation follows Jameson's “Antinomies of Utopia” as a discursive model for thinking through the conceptual displacement from utopia to speculation and what happens with their attendant theories and ideologies in cultural critique when such a displacement is followed through. As a figure of the dynamic relation between form and content, Jameson's text advances by turns practically and theoretically, at one moment treating matters separately and in the next leaping toward ever provisional systematization. The three main chapters that follow each foreground textual reception. However, where chapters three and four examine the critical reception of a novel and a film, respectively, in the way of case studies, chapter two examines the broader conceptual reception of utopia and speculation, primarily in the Marxist tradition. The second chapter of this dissertation follows Jameson's text as it attempts to set a framework for the subsequent case studies. As a series of “Theses on Utopia and Speculation,” it develops an understanding of the two concepts progressing from relative isolation to greater complexity, interference, and incoherence. Across the contexts of literary genre, etymology and rhetoric, Marxism, theory, technology, and social life as such, the chapter endeavors to show how speculation displaces utopia in the historical present. The third chapter, “Climates of Speculation,” turns to contemporary literary fiction to see this displacement in action. Jenny Offill's 2020 Weather provides its case study for the intersection of climate fiction and autofiction, two “genres” which, when combined, problematize what Juha Raipola refers to as the “utopian propensity of speculative fiction.” Through a close reading of Offill's novel as well as its critical reception, the chapter argues that the very distinction between the speculative and the so-called realistic mobilized to assert the powers of the former actually conceals what may be most utopian about it. T (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Philip Armstrong (Advisor); Kris Paulsen (Committee Member); Melissa Curley (Committee Member); David Horn (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Climate Change; Comparative; Film Studies; Literature; Social Research

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, English

As a topic of study, utopia is often broken into three aspects: utopian social theory, intentional communities, and literature. Thus, a study of utopia best suits an interdisciplinary approach. While utopian scholars have often accepted the invitation for diverse approaches, there is one unifying aspect of the three aspects of utopia yet considered. In this dissertation, I posit a theory of utopian and dystopian rhetoric which explains the affective, persuasive dimension of each of utopia's aspects. Although I propose a wider application of utopian and dystopian rhetoric, I narrow my focus in this dissertation to investigate the connections between utopianism and eugenics. I analyze how nineteenth-century eugenicists leverage utopian and dystopian rhetoric to promote eugenic practices and beliefs. I argue that the hierarchy of eugenics and utopia – the privileging of certain populations and rejection of others as being suited for the future – are assured and enforced through ideological and repressive state apparatuses.

Committee: Amanpal Garcha (Advisor); Elizabeth Hewitt (Committee Member); James Phelan (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; British and Irish Literature; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2024, Theatre

Over the past decade, especially in the United States, there has been a significant increase in what has commonly come to be known as athlete activism. Examples of this phenomenon include such moments as Colin Kaepernick's anthem protest in the National Football League (NFL) and the campaign for pay equality undertaken by the United States Women's National Team (USWNT). Though these examples, and many others like them, have affected important and tangible social change, there are many in the United States who claim that the practice of sport activism only serves to unnecessarily politicize the realm of sport. Opponents of sport activism often argue that sport should be kept separated from more serious matters such as pressing social and political issues. However, this argument is predicated on the assumption that sport is inherently apolitical or that it somehow exists independently of societal structures, which is demonstrably false. In “Finding Hope at the Arena: A Performance Studies Approach to Sport,” I make use of performance studies frameworks to investigate sport as a meaning-making mode of live performance with utopian potentiality. Using performance scholar Jill Dolan's theorization of the utopian performative as a theoretical framework, I examine several key moments and eras in United States sport history to interrogate the notion that sport is, or ever has been, separate from social and political issues. Through archival and performance analysis methods of research, I interrogate the ways in which sport, as a genre of live performance, produces myriad utopian visions of the country that often serve to uphold or critique the dominant social order. Moreover, I imagine this study as a step towards what I call a model of utopian sport spectatorship. Utopian sport spectatorship facilitates a form of engagement with sport similar to that of a theatrical production. In this model of spectatorship, participants, both those involved in the aspects of athletic c (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Angela Ahlgren (Committee Chair); Heidi Nees (Committee Member); Jonathan Chambers (Committee Member); Amilcar Challu (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; Performing Arts; Social Structure; Sociology; Theater

Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Bowling Green State University, 2023, Creative Writing

The Frailty of Fruit is a young adult post-apocalyptic thriller, set in a far future subterranean farming community. The novel follows protagonist Qari Hofler, a reluctant tomato farmer, who must develop a hybrid tomato to earn her family's stewardship or be banished to the Deep Dark. Her 33rd great-grandfather's tomato strain cured violence. But because their cultural understanding of violence didn't include sexual violence, Qari develops an asexually reproductive strain with the naive hope of curing gender. Little does she know, she's not the only one with the seeds of that idea. Told in intertwining narratives, a second protagonist Iona also must race against time to beat Qari at her own hybrid game. But once the two of them find each other, with the help of a humanoid sexbot-turned-scientist named Misty, Qari and Iona realize that finding a place where they could grow together was the point all along. Told in the dystopian tradition of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Frailty of Fruit draws upon themes of reproductive justice, hegemony, posthumanism, and the subaltern. Written in a traditional narrative structure, the novel invents an accessible story with textured social imaginings. It posits a poetic truth that utopias will always become dystopias, that will then become utopias, and so on. Like nature, human social conditions have birth and death cycles. In this way, the novel employs contemporary feminist methodologies which utilize post-structural theories to challenge the notions of stable concepts. The ground, literally and conceptually, is always shifting.

Committee: Reema Rajbanshi Ph.D. (Committee Member); Lawrence Coates Ph.D. (Committee Chair) Subjects: Literature; Modern Literature

Master of Fine Arts, Miami University, 2022, English

Withering is a collection of seven stories rooted in an exploration of humanity's relationship with the natural world and with itself. Spanning geographies and time periods, these stories are connected in their primary impulse to reconsider passivity in the face of environmental degradation. Other prominent themes in the collection are dynamic social identities and the performative quality of those identities. The stories that comprise Withering are situated primarily in the eco-fabulist tradition, with other inspirations found in the New Weird movement and horror, as well as traditional realism. By blending genre, Withering seeks to decenter readers' understanding of reality. The uneasy and shifting reality through related but distinct genres serves to underscore themes of calamity and worlds that have been broken and reassembled in new ways. Withering challenges popular notions of crisis, environmental and otherwise, as being a purely distinct event, having a clear “before” and “after;” rather, my thesis considers crisis a degenerative process, much in the way a plant slowly withers away over time, leaf after leaf shriveling up and falling.

Committee: Joseph Bates (Committee Chair); Daisy Hernandez (Committee Member); Margaret Luongo (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts

MFA, Kent State University, 2019, College of the Arts / School of Art

My work and research delves into the chaos of objects that humanity creates. My research is steeped in perspectives of speculative futures found in Science Fiction, technoscience, eco-feminism, post-humanism, and new materialism, I question what life will look like and what perspectives lie in wait for the future of our postindustrial age. I have created wearable suits to reflect absurd tasks that might be asked of humanity in this speculative future.These suits are created with discarded objects and re-purposed into something useful to be able to live in this speculative reality. These suits will have usefulness, but still are burdensome on the wearer, giving a feeling of guilt when thinking of a time when these fashions were unnecessary.

Committee: Andrew Kuebeck (Advisor) Subjects: Fine Arts

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2015, Interdisciplinary Arts (Fine Arts)

This study investigates the use of mobility as a creative style used by writers and filmmakers to represent the deterioration in the socio-economic and political circumstances of post-independence Africa. It makes a scholarly contribution to the field of postcolonial studies by introducing mobility as a new method for understanding film and literature. Increasingly, scholars in the social sciences are finding it important to examine mobility and its relationship with power and powerlessness among groups of people. This dissertation expands on the current study by applying it to the arts. It demonstrates how filmmakers and writers use mobility as a creative style to address issues such as economic globalization, international migration, and underdevelopment. Another significant contribution of this dissertation is that it introduces a new perspective to the debate on African migration. The current trend is for migrants to be seen in the light of vulnerability and powerlessness. This project presents the position that migration is also empowering in the sense that people sometimes can revolt against an unfavorable situation by leaving. Theoretically, this study relies to a large extent on Cresswell's (2006) argument that motion can be regarded as mobility, if it occurs physically and has a meaning to it. Thus, the dissertation seeks to find answers to two principal questions. First, how does mobility fit in with the creative styles commonly used by postcolonial artists? Since mobility ensures fluidity in bodily displacement, its use in the creative arts offers a sense of narrative omnipresence through which postcolonial artists can present their audiences with an intimate knowledge of the socio-economic and political realities of a place (Africa). Secondly, this study examines what the selected filmmakers and writers consider as the challenges to African development. In addition, this project assesses how these artists differ in their use of mobility to represent t (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Charles Buchanan (Committee Chair); Arthur Hughes (Committee Member); Michael Gillespie (Committee Member); Ghirmai Negash (Committee Member) Subjects: African Literature; African Studies; Film Studies

Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, 2015, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

In the modern critical environment, there has been a renewed interest in the role that proto-feminist and feminist satires have played in the development of cultural commentary and the modern novel. Lesser-studied works have seen several new approaches applied by critics such as Rachel Carnell, Rebecca Bullard, and Ruth Herman, who have focused on the role of the genre of “secret history” in the popular growth of the novel as a form for political dissent. Secret history, which can offer revelatory glimpses into the contemporary scandals and governance of the female authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is a field that, properly contextualized, can provide a new focus for previously under-appreciated works, themes, and literary strategies. In this study, these critics' contributions are applied to an interpretation of the works of Delarivier Manley (c. 1663 – 1724), and specifically to the proto-novel Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality, of Both Sexes. From the New Atalantis, vols. 1 and 2 (1709) as a turning point in the development of modern tropes and the utilization of utopian and dystopian spaces, especially those based upon or resembling the mythical lost nation of Atlantis. Extending Manley's semi-biographical secret history from the elements of cultural and political satire present in Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516) and Sir Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (1624), the study aims to demonstrate that Manley's text has dramatically influenced the modern interpretation of Atlantis specifically, and dystopias generally, in diverse cultural media including film, literature, comic books, and mythology. Examining the cataclysmic motifs of Atlantean utopias, anti-utopias, and dystopias, the study attempts to note the ways in which Manley's The New Atalantis has permanently revised the accepted causes and motivations for the destruction of the Atlantean continent and the rhetorical commentary that these cataclysmic representa (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Rachel Carnell PhD (Committee Chair); Adam Sonstegard PhD (Committee Member); James Marino PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Literature

MARCH, University of Cincinnati, 2015, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Architecture

The hutongs of Beijing have existed for centuries. A hutong is the street, lane, or alleyway located in Beijing's old city center, comprising the circulation space between the grid-based courtyard houses known as Siheyuan. A hutong street or lane separates two parallel rows of Siheyuan. A hutong alleyway is the space between two individual Siheyuan. The hutongs are more than just circulation pathways for the residents and visitors of these old neighborhoods; they also act as the social binding element which allows for the residents to become neighbors.

Committee: Aarati Kanekar Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Udo Greinacher M.Arch. (Committee Member) Subjects: Architecture

MFA, Kent State University, 2013, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

The novel Glow is a book about society, ownership, greed and corruption. The main character, Bo, lives in a world in which corporations and banks, and our own government, have unleashed nanobots that are supposed to track what people own. The nanobots are supposed to know whether a person bought something – i.e., a house or a car – on credit, or with a loan, or whether the person owns the thing outright. But the nanobots went haywire, and now they're causing everything we don't own – all the stuff we buy on credit – to glow. The glowing illuminates the night sky, and serves as a surreal backdrop against which the story unfolds. Bo is a woman who has grown up on her grandfather's (and then her father's) farm. Her father has died, leaving her the last 10 unsold acres. She's a gardener and a keeper of chickens. She cans and preserves food for the winter. She mends fences, and then, because she is alone and sometimes afraid, she walks the perimeter of her property at night with a loaded gun, patrolling – for what? She isn't sure. When the glowing happens, though, Bo becomes sure all her off-the-grid living and doomsday prepping will finally pay off. She redoubles her efforts and enlists friends and relatives to help her get ready for the collapse of society – something she's sure will happen because of the nanobots. Bo especially wants to convince her friend Amelia – for whom Bo has strong romantic feelings – to ride out the economic and societal collapse with her, on the farm. Bo doesn't realize, though, that society is about to uncouple itself from the toxic debt-controlled economy. Society – with the help of credit-happy Amelia and others like her – is about to re-invent itself. The banks, the corporations, the nanos – these all will become irrelevant as ordinary people finally join together to create a new currency, a new way of doing business and living in America. This new worl (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Christopher Barzak (Committee Chair); Catherine Wing (Committee Member); Eric Wasserman (Committee Member) Subjects: Language Arts; Literature; Modern Literature

Bachelor of Arts, Miami University, 2005, College of Arts and Sciences - English

This thesis is an examination of the historical contexts behind eight twentieth-century dystopian novels and one dystopian film derived from one of those novels. Dystopian fiction is inextricably linked to the context (that is to say, the time and place, as well as the circumstances of its author) in which it was written. A judicious reading of a piece of dystopian literature must include an examination of this context, since dystopian works are written by at particular historical moments and have particular messages that are being sent to particular audiences. This thesis will examine the moments, messages, and audiences behind these novels and show how a better understanding of the work is achieved through examining the art in its own context.

Committee: Laura Mandell (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, General

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2006, Theatre and Film

With the end of the Hollywood studio era, big budget blockbuster musicals had to find ways to compete in the economic and cultural marketplace. Historical events such as the rise of television, the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the Watergate scandal influenced the way American audiences saw, and continue to see, the world. Film, theatre, and other artistic disciplines helped audiences understand, cope, and criticize societal changes. As audience perceptions changed, the film musical faced a crisis. In an attempt to maximize profits, Hollywood business practices forced an evolutionary branch in the development of the musical. One fork took the genre towards the embodiment of capitalistic and cultural excess as pointed to by Altman, Dyer, and others. These film musicals attempt to present Utopia. Film musicals such as Grease (1978), Beauty and the Beast (1991), and Evita (1996) are large spectacles that utilize the high concept business model, as outlined by Justin Wyatt, to please audience expectations by managing conflict at the expense of presenting the story world as a utopia. The other branch of film musical exemplified in the films of Cabaret (1972) and All That Jazz (1979) criticize the price paid by an individual in pursuit of ideals that lie beyond dominant social values. The dystopic film musical connects with audiences and critics by drawing on the cynicism and skepticism of contemporary historic and cultural events to forward a clearly dystopic view of society. This study utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to analyze the connection between selected film musicals and the American culture for which they were produced. The study shows that from 1970-2002 film musicals promoted and marketed visions of Utopia that were reflective of specific historical moments rather than ahistorical utopia ideals. While a film like Grease shows that Utopia is the ideal high school experience, later films like Moulin Rouge! (2001) and Chicago (2002) depict i (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Cynthia Baron (Advisor) Subjects: