Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, English

Didacticism in Contemporary Illness Narratives: Dialogue, Subjectivity, Justice arises from my observation of a surprising discrepancy: some of the most powerful contemporary illness narratives have didactic purposes (that is, they seek to impart moral lessons), yet the dominant theoretical approaches to illness narratives denigrate didacticism. In response to this gap between practice and theory, my dissertation emphasizes practice as it explores how authors from Audre Lorde to Philip Roth have made their didactic purposes integral to the power of their narratives. More specifically, my response to the gap provides an interpretive and a theoretical intervention. At the interpretive level, the dissertation offers readings of several didactic illness narratives across genres demonstrating how these texts offer valuable perspectives on illness. I then build on these readings to call for a pluralization of methods used to understand illness narratives in general and didactic illness narratives in particular. In other words, I address how conversations about the nature and functions of illness narratives must change so as to account for the appeal and effects of didactic ones. Each chapter explores narratives that illuminate the titular themes: dialogue, subjectivity, and justice. I read the narratives through the lens of rhetorical narrative theory, which asks how authors mobilize resources to represent specific illness experiences and to engage audiences affectively and ethically as their narratives elaborate and communicate a moral lesson. For example, my chapter on justice focuses on The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde examining how she complicates the traditional authority of the cancer writer by imparting moral lessons that require readers to understand cancer diagnoses as simultaneously an individual experience and communal crises. ii My interventions have multiple purposes: they analyze a popular and evolving corpus; they examine the inter (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: James Phelan (Advisor) Subjects: Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2020, English

This dissertation describes an alternative to an especially influential understanding of how literature promotes social justice. According to this dominant paradigm, literature heightens our empathy through vivid depictions of suffering. Where this mode emphasizes stylistic vividness, I turn to works of fiction and autobiography from the years just before the Civil War to identify a wholly different didactic tradition—one that advances by means of what eighteenth-century critics derisively called vacuity or imaginative vacancy. Vacancy, I argue, is a tool for revealing networks of solidarity, distributed in time and space, and inaccessible by means of vivid description. Harriet Jacobs's offers an example of this dynamic in her treatment of violence in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Many other famous ex-slave narrators, such as Frederick Douglass and Solomon Northrup, foreground scenes in which a master beats a slave until his whip drips with blood. Such scenes heighten the reader's empathy through their excruciating level of detail, particularizing the narrated violence until it seems almost present. When Jacobs incorporates the trope, though, she transforms it through generalization, describing how in the aftermath of Nat Turner's Rebellion “everywhere men, women, and children were whipped till the blood stood in puddles at their feet” and “the consternation was universal” (58). This scene is typical of Jacobs's treatment of violence elsewhere in her narrative where punishments are not meted out to particular slaves but to groups. Because her writing frustrates visualization and the free play of empathy, Jacobs is able to prevent identification at the individual level and to depict slavery instead at the level of systems and groups. Like Jacobs, the other writers I examine in this dissertation—Rebecca Harding Davis, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne—use vacancy to create alternative didactic forms capable of imagining and promoting solidarity.

Committee: Michael Clune (Committee Chair); Gary Stonum (Committee Member); Athena Vrettos (Committee Member); Timothy Beal (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Political Science

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, English

Drawing on New Historicism, Marxist criticism, and rhetorical theory, Books Are Weapons argues for the significance of didacticism throughout the American literary tradition. Marxist critics have long discussed the possibilities that art offers for enacting social change, and rhetoricians have long studied the ways in which texts communicate persuasively. Books Are Weapons brings together these two parallel, but rarely intersecting, forms of inquiry. Books Are Weapons examines an archive of American literary production from the early twentieth century, primarily focusing on novels, but extending to include political pamphlets, autobiographies, poems, and sermons. This diverse set of cultural products allows this project to consider the multitude of ways that artists use their work for instructional purposes. These purposes are similarly diverse, including political persuasion, ethical instruction, and religious conversion. While these functions of literature are infrequently connected, it is my purpose in this project to demonstrate how they share a common didactic impulse, a quality found throughout American literary history. Examining the novels of Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright's non-fiction work, Jessie Redmon Fauset's novels, the poetry of James Weldon Johnson, and the novels of Zora Neale Hurston, this project examines the multitude of ways that literary texts can teach, inform, and persuade their readers. In this project, works that seek to persuade their readers are not understood as manipulative, as is often the critique of didactic literature or protest literature. The focus of this project remains on the techniques and strategies of persuasion deployed by each author. When this project describes a work as didactic, it does so without the implication of simplicity or condescension that some have come to associate with the term. Instead, the goal of this work is to begin an excavation of the American literary tradition that will uncover artifacts of inst (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jared Gardner (Advisor); Elizabeth Hewitt (Committee Member); Thomas Davis (Committee Member); Jesse Schotter (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; American Studies; Literature