Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, English

An apparent rift exists between the anti-aesthetic emphasis in postmodern and contemporary literary theory, on the one hand, and readerly appreciations of and engagements with the aesthetic, on the other. This tension between anti-aesthetic critical paradigms and aesthetic experiences of fiction is the central problem I examine in my dissertation. By putting philosophical, aesthetical, narrative, and literary traditions in conversation with each other, I propose a new framework for understanding aesthetic impulses at work in twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction by revising Immanuel Kant's and Friedrich Schiller's heuristic tools and categories—which I argue remain pertinent to understanding twentieth and twenty-first century fiction. Drawing on these and other contributions to aesthetic theory, I suggest that post-war fiction is dominantly concerned with the harmonies, engagements, and tensions between what I term the form-drive, the moral-drive, and the sense-drive, in relation to readerly roles and responses. Part I includes two chapters devoted to play, which I characterize as the dominant aesthetic energy that characterizes postmodernist fiction (McHale). My analysis of Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) and Alasdair Gray's Lanark (1981) relates to readers' inhabitation and orientation of the playful, complex ontological worlds of postmodern fiction. I use the tension/conflict between the form- and sense-drives to characterize the aesthetic category of play, and suggest that Marie-Laure Ryan's possible-worlds theory provides a useful critical apparatus for explicating how the form-drive functions as a system of ordering in readers' navigations of these ontologically-complex fictional worlds. Part II deals with the ways in which twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction has reinvigorated traditional aesthetic categories. In chapter three, I use Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman (1939-40/1967) and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (1985) to demon (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Brian McHale (Advisor); David Herman (Committee Member); James Phelan (Committee Member) Subjects: Aesthetics; American Literature; British and Irish Literature; Ethics; Literature

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2013, English/Literature

Science fiction has always been a genre that explores unimaginable worlds and possibilities. Jeanette Winterson does just this in her novel The Stone Gods. In this project, I suggest that Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods is a narrative metaphor for how acts that oppose social norms may disrupt the repetition of norms and allow for queer, alternative identities and cultures. I offer this argument as one approach to how queer politics can continue its endeavors to recognize alternative identities, including blended identities in gender and sexuality, as well as alternative communities, including queer groups that encompass multiple identity categories. I first examine the android, Spike, and posit that Winterson uses Spike to demystify gender binaries and present a possibility of a blended identity. This blended identity is ultimately a fusion of a binary. Furthermore, Spike demonstrates Butler's theory that subjects form an identity because of the social norms acting on the subject. Next, I posit that the novel also demystifies the romantic, subversive couple and instead explores how a queer collective might be more effective in subverting dominant society and norms. Here, Winterson presents a queer collective that aspires towards a queer utopia. As a result, the collective is able to imagine endless alternative communities for all identity categories. Ultimately, Winterson's The Stone Gods explores possible queer, alternative identities and communities and supports the value of the continued imaginings of these alternatives.

Committee: Bill Albertini Ph. D (Advisor); Jolie Sheffer Ph. D (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Comparative Literature; Gender Studies; Literature; Robots; Womens Studies

Master of Arts in English, Youngstown State University, 2010, Department of Languages

Through an analysis of Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body, Mary Fallon's Working Hot, and Monique Wittig's The Lesbian Body, we can gain an understanding of the connection between language and desire, and how it relates to sexuality, female desire, and lesbian representation. In these texts, bodies have been explored, critiqued, and dismembered by language. The deconstruction and reconstruction of lesbian bodies, the re-appropriation of social and cultural paradigms, and the re-working of language and narrative are tools that enable Fallon, Winterson, and Wittig to create a lesbian space that disrupts and subverts conventional ideologies. The writers use different literary strategies to construct lesbian desire, and if we consider how these strategies work together and complicate each other, the role that language plays in lesbian representation becomes clearer.

Committee: Sherry Linkon PhD (Advisor); Linda Strom PhD (Committee Member); Philip Brady PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Gender; Language; Literature; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2010, English

This dissertation examines novels for spatial and temporal practices, what I call “tactics of trespassing,” used by twentieth- and twenty-first-century women writers Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Penelope Fitzgerald, Margaret Drabble, Hilary Mantel, and Jeanette Winterson to re-imagine established constructions of national and gender identity and its relation to property. I focus on property's ability to enable or to prevent particular identity formations and chart the responses of modern British women writers to the ways that legal, political, and economic treatises have historically rendered property ownership in terms of the masculine. As a result, these discourses have defined feminine propriety through property's inaccessibility for women. In novels by these writers, I discern a preoccupation with “looking back,” a process through which authors revisit narratives of national and gender identity – narratives that did not account for or represent particular sections of the British public – for the goal of redefining what, as a result of this absence, was defined as properly “British” for a woman. The specific sites through which these works look back are incarnations of property. By enacting new narratives of identity that challenge the propriety of traditional accounts, contemporary women writers aim to stake a claim for a place within the current British body politic. Through their tactics of trespassing upon grounds of property and propriety defined by masculine society, in other words, these writers show how traditional constructions of national and gender identity are essential but insufficient for marginalized groups to understand their relationship to and position within Britain. By showing how these writers establish a degree of plurality and creativity in their intellectual heritage, this dissertation disputes the claims of British property discourses that assert to represent the whole of British society. My approach investigates contemporary novels that cu (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Kurt Koenigsberger (Committee Chair); Mary Grimm (Committee Member); Gary Stonum (Committee Member); Joseph Fagan (Committee Member) Subjects: English literature; Gender; Law; Literature; Womens Studies