Author(s): Popescu, Irina | Advisor(s): Masiello, Francine; Tarica, Estelle | Abstract: This dissertation examines how a set of postmodern contemporary novels by women, queer, and writers of color in North and South America reframe the parameters of narrative empathy in order to revise what constitutes as an ethical human rights novel. This project is part of a growing scholarly discourse connecting the evolution of the novel in the Americas with changing conceptions of human rights as connected to racial, ethnic, and gender identity in the Americas. The writers discussed reconfigure the relationship between reader and victim within the human rights narrative genre. This reconfiguration is founded on a critical reconstruction of the problematic use of sentimental empathy in the nineteenth-century rights novel. Since this former brand of sympathy joined the burgeoning discourse of rights in the Americas to the representation of racialized or gendered corporeal suffering, the reader’s understanding of personhood in the nineteenth century was ethically misguided and predicated on the victim’s indignity. Chapter One details how Octavia Butler’s Kindred critically rewrites nineteenth-century foundational nation-building texts. This chapter exposes the dangers of narrative voyeurism masking itself as empathy and instead points to an empathy devoid of identification through bodily suffering. Chapter Two looks at Sylvia Iparraguirre’s Tierra del Fuego in order to deconstruct and revise both the colonial travel narrative and the South American nation-building genre. This chapter maps an alternative foundation for narrative empathy by fostering legal and temporal visibility for the indigenous subject and land. Chapter Three examines how Manuel Puig’s El beso de la mujer arana engages with nineteenth-century melodrama to define empathy as abject corporeality. This chapter defines empathy through psychological proximity and touch, demonstrating how the novel reforms political and gender identity at the cusp of Argentina’s Dirty War. Chapter Four turns to an examination of Louise Erdrich’s Tracks. Here empathy is defined through the reader’s understanding of how nineteenth- century legal practices devastatingly defined land, voice, bodies, and citizenship in the United States. Chapter Five discusses Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Insensatez through its documentation of hemispheric genocide. This chapter shows how aesthetics can ethically capture empathy through silences and voids, documenting indigenous historical and bodily trauma. Human rights law and legal policy shapes and is shaped by the formal qualities of the novel and other art forms. The hemispheric human rights novel (1970-2009) uses narrative empathy to develop a closely interconnected relationship between law and literature. This, in turn, revises the relationship between the reader, the victim and national history by teaching readers how to ethically engage with the bodies and minds of the victims presented. First, the revision of the nineteenth-century melodrama and sentimentalism particular to the hemispheric context enables readers to witness the formal construction of an aesthetic model which uses absence and corporeal abjection in order to represent human rights abuses. And secondly, the use of legal documents and national history formally within the novelistic space allows readers to access literature vis-a-vis the national-legal space. Ultimately, as the reader beings participating in this process of decoding, their new responsibilities for the ethical reading practices demanded by the human rights novel are laid out, transforming the reader into an ethical witness.

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The Empathy Archive: History, Empathy and the Human Rights Novel in the Americas

The thesis explores whether Los Angeles could be regarded as an Arrival City for the Mexican-American protagonists in The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez (John Rechy, 2006 [1991]), Their Dogs Came with Them (Helena Maria Viramontes, 2007), and The Barbarian Nurseries (Hector Tobar, 2012).
The study focuses especially on the depiction of city space within these contemporary LA novels and examines to which extent the protagonists are able to navigate and appropriate these spaces. Arrival is understood here not as a fixed, static goal, but an ongoing process of entries and openings that the protagonists can use to insert themselves into city space. Arrival means a creative usage of city space through the creation of third spaces, borderlands, transculturality, and liminality. Successful arrival processes do not only require these fluid and mobile liminal spaces, but also a sense of emplacement to allow for the chance of participation in actively shape city space.
A close reading of the novels suggests that it remains difficult for the protagonists to create a sense of arrival. In The Miraculous Day, city space remains inaccessible behind a maze of stereotypes that hinder an appropriation of space. In Their Dogs, city space itself remains so hostile due to quarantine roadblocks and freeway construction that deconstructions of colonial binaries are only possible on a metatextual level through myth, metaphor, and story. In Nurseries, city space is depicted as a fiction that hinders the protagonists’ arrival at the American Dream, although in the end, there is the possibility of accessing the metaphysical aspect of the Dream, not through city space appropriation, but through the belief in the equality of opportunities.

Los Angeles as an arrival city? : Mexican-American spaces in contemporary literature

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In the Wake of the Sun: Navigating the Southern Works of Cormac McCarthy

This thesis focuses on the culture and literature of Cold War America and seeks to challenge accepted notions and assumptions about this era and its culture, pointing ultimately to the possibilities for transgression or escape from enforced homogeneity. Using feminist theories, urban theory, and a cultural materialist approach, this thesis employs the work of Judith Butler (1993, 1999), Elizabeth Grosz (1994, 1995, 2001, 2008) and Beatriz Colomina (1992, 2004), and draws on the ideas of Gilles Deleuze, to undertake an examination of subjectivity and its relation to built and landscape environments of the Cold War, enabling an investigation that includes literary texts and criticism, visual and media culture, and cultural, architectural and technological discourses. This study of identity examines the way in which bodies react to and are shaped by their surroundings engaging with sights (Disneyland, The Monsanto House of the Future & the Playboy Mansion), places (New York City, Southern American states and suburbia) texts, and objects (television & cook books). Racial, sexual and youth identities are examined in chapter one, through the street spaces of Ralph Ellisonʼs Invisible Man (1952), the works of the Beats, Hubert Selby Jrʼs Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964), and Salingerʼs The Catcher in the Rye (1951) illustrating how street identities manage to complicate the purported containment of the era, and blurring the distinction between public display and private spectacle where transgressive personae can find authenticity of selfhood from within their urban location. Chapter two considers suburban gender identities and their manufactured proscription through architecture and technology as presented in Richard Yatesʼ Revolutionary Road (1961), John Cheeverʼs short stories, Vladimir Nabakovʼs Lolita (1958), John Updikeʼs Rabbit, Run (1960) and Sloan Wilsonʼs The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), each examined in order to question containment, surveillance and gender proscription in this space. Finally, I examine the tensions between traditionally conformist selves and racial and sexual Others in the landscapes of Southern states, in the works of Tennessee Williamsʼ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1948) and Flannery OʼConnorʼs Wise Blood (1952). Using imagined spaces and landscapes this section considers a different form of spatially-determined identity, identity formed in an essentially hyperreal space – and exposes the contradictions of conformity and transgression. This thesisʼ original contribution to knowledge is based in the application of a theoretical feminist framework to established Cold War cultural criticism. In bridging the gap between existing theories of feminist corporeality and cultural criticism, my work will extend and challenge accepted notions of Fifties conformity and homogeneity in new and dynamic ways.

https://radar.brookes.ac.uk/radar/file/c32e0892-d70c-4288-a6a2-189783590838/1/mackay2013citysuburban.pdf

City, suburban and pastoral spaces and the formation of identity in Cold War America (1945-1965)

A revised version of this thesis has subsequently been published, with major changes primarily to the "Literature" section, as Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern: The (Hi) Story of a Difficult Relationship (Routledge, 2006) ISBN: 0415975298

Postmodern nihilism : theory and literature

Giles (English, Northern Illinois U.) surveys the early examples of inner-city naturalism, then examines in detail six 20th- century novels. He finds that the earlier novels by Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Jack London mined American ghettos for exotic and sensational characters; but that the lat

The Naturalistic Inner-City Novel in America: Encounters With the Fat Man

A study of violence in eight contemporary American urban novels, including William Kennedy's Quinn's Book. James R. Giles shows how these works, published between 1968 and 1994, convey a sense of violence as an epidemic, threatening to extinguish the aspirations of American citizens.

Violence in the Contemporary American Novel: An End to Innocence

This volume seeks to enrich teachers' and students' understanding of the fictional world Louise Erdrich creates and to address the challenges of teaching her novels and poetry. The first part of the book provides background readings that establish a context for teaching Erdrich and acquaint teachers with Native American traditions, history, customs, and culture--especially those of the Ojibwe, or Chippewa. In the second section, experienced teachers of Erdrich discuss the strategies they use to engage students in a sometimes unfamiliar world. Essays provide information on Erdrich's tribe, the Turtle Mountain Chippewa of North Dakota, and an overview of tribal history for the past 150 years; sort through Erdrich's large cast of fictional characters, with their complicated family ties and clan relationships; examine her collaborative relationship with her late husband, Michael Dorris; and offer analysis, cultural references, and approaches to teaching Erdrich's most widely anthologized poems.

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Louise Erdrich

Since the publication in 1964 of his novel "Last Exit to Brooklyn", which arguably achieved the status of a cult classic, Hubert Selby, Jr., has held a place as one of the foremost exponents of American underground literature. His work has yet to receive extensive critical attention, in part because of its deliberately shocking subject matter and its resistance to precise classification. In "Understanding Hubert Selby, Jr.", James R. Giles examines the writer's four novels and one collection of short stories to make the case that the full complexity of his fiction has not previously been understood. Giles contends that Selby's writings, which are usually labelled as either "naturalistic" or "surrealistic", represent an innovative merger of both narrative modes. In addition to "Last Exit to Brooklyn", Giles provides close readings of "The Room", "The Demon", "Requiem for a Dream", and Selby's little-known collection of short stories, "Song of the Silent Snow".

James Richard Giles

Papers

The Naturalistic Inner-City Novel in America: Encounters With the Fat Man

Violence in the Contemporary American Novel: An End to Innocence

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Louise Erdrich

Understanding Hubert Selby, Jr

American Novelists since World War II