Department of English

The three novels of Henry James’s “major phase” have alienated many readers in James’s own time and today. I draw on the philosophical school of phenomenology, in particular the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and a recent extension by the philosopher Richard Kearney, to suggest that a lack of self-touch by characters in these novels has contributed in a significant but previously unnoticed way to many readers’ sense that these novels feel frustratingly intangible. I make a comparison to the instances of self-touch in other Edwardian novels to underline the difference. I suggest that James is putting forward a model of “middle-distance intimacy” in which intimates orbit each other at a fixed distance, neither coming closer nor moving further away. This kind of intimacy, for James, privileges the eye that sees from across the room over the hand that touches from up close. While this model of intimacy perplexed many readers in James’s time and later, it is a valuable exploration of a different yet—for some—no less satisfactory kind of emotional life.

This thesis is a collection of essays related to place, including meditations on different landscapes, examinations of historic place-based research, and an exploration of environmental and cultural issues.

The commodification of the female body is a vital concern that can be seen throughout history from the rhetoric consumed by societies. This thesis will give a rhetorical analysis of the websites of the milk banks of Prolacta Bioscience, Medolac, and The Human Milk Banking Association of North America. This will demonstrate how commodification, erasure, and disembodiment occurs to the mothers who donate their milk. I will examine how each organization offers up mothers, their milk, and infants as complete separate entities. My argument will propose a new metaphor I will define as the unfiltered raw public. I will demonstrate how this metaphor might better serve to restructure rhetoric to tether the mothers back to their bodies more sustainably for a cyborg future. The unfiltered raw public seeks to shift future discourse to reflect one more inclusive to difference rather than a future that commodifies the female body.

This thesis serves as an exploration of the environment in James Joyce’s Ulysses which holds accountable the violent material politics of England against Ireland and the acts of consumption committed against human and nonhuman bodies, which is a radical critique of the patriarchal discourse and action that decimated a once sovereign nation and its landscape. I argue through an eco-critical lens that intersects the human body, a once impenetrable landscape, and the elision of Brehon Gaelic law as a victim of colonial usurpation. There is a deep focus geared towards masculinity and its imposition upon the female body, but also an important look at the relationship between man and nature. While sexuality and nature co-exist in Ulysses, we can envision this novel as an “epic of living with animals" and their human predecessors.

This creative thesis is a collection of poems and lyric forms that explore queer identity and difference through the fraught navigation of heteronormative spaces and institutions such as the American school system, the Catholic Church, and marriage. Included are letters-as-poems, journal fragments, and extended lyrical sequences that serve to highlight the significance of community and chosen family to queer identity. When they aren’t addressed to an imagined recipient, they are dedicated to or in conversation with friends, family, lovers, strangers, past selves, and other writers. Although the three sections (LETTERS, FIRE, and HEARTH) that demarcate this work chart a thematic chronology that organizes stages of a queer life, memory isn’t cleanly linear. Poems pour into and echo each other, signifying embodied history in the present and the past’s bearings on queer (re)imaginings of the future.

In 1890 The Picture of Dorian Gray was published in Lippincott’s Magazine, and the fate of late-nineteenth century Victorian Britain was forever changed. While over a century's worth of studies have been conducted on aestheticism, the novel’s moral story, and whether or not Dorian Gray and Oscar Wilde are both gay figures, this thesis examines the possible intentions behind the writing of Wilde’s novel. Wilde lived during the time of the 1885 Labouchere Amendment, –under which he himself would be prosecuted for “gross indecency”– making the novel's contents risky. Alongside this amendment, there were already existing instances of criminalized homosexuality such as the Cleveland Street Scandal, making the novel’s publication all the more dangerous for Wilde. After publication, Wilde received numerous negative reviews attacking his novel and himself; even today, reviewers and critics have not fully understood why Wilde produced a novel with such an apparent and perilous homoerotic theme.

Self-Gardening seeks to explore the oftentime selfish rationale behind seemingly selfless decisions. In dissecting my motivation, I found insecurity. I don't garden for the joy of it, I garden to feel valuable. Beneath my desire for children, lives the terrifying hesitation of putting more bad into the world. While this thesis does look to shine a light on uncomfortability and insecurity, it has no interest in poking or prodding them. Acknowledgement and awareness are enough.

The stories in Nameless in Z take place in the fictional city of Z, located on the northwestern coast of the US. The throughline of this collection tracks alternate versions of the same male narrator as he subconsciously pursues relationships in an attempt to supplant his own destructive addictions. The first half of this book dwells more in the relationship aspect, while the second half owns up to the consequences of the first half.
Each story involves the titular city tormenting the narrator in a way that physically and/or spiritually manifests his specific addiction. Speculative fiction elements hang around the fringes of each of these stories, typically through different forms of the supernatural. The purpose of this work is to give a voice to underrepresented aspects of addiction and to disentangle my own demons; the ones I’ve inherited as well as the ones I’ve created as a direct result.

This thesis is composed of a collection of essays on the themes of motherhood, loss, and grief. Through the use of innovative form, these essays thread together personal narratives and research to find language for complicated manifestations of loss. These essays experiment with structure and form to grapple with the illusive nature of memory, loss, and healing. The essays in this collection attempt to find healing and meaning through language and meditation. This collection is also an attempt at categorizing grief when normative societal ideas are challenged by complicated loss. This work serves as a call to action that there should be better recognition of uncommonly recognized manifestations of grief.

Transgender identity and the concept of artificial intelligence are constructed and understood through dichotomies such as natural/unnatural and real/artificial, with each dichotomy informing the other; what is “unnatural” is often deemed to be a mimicry of the “natural,” therefore a false representation of what is “real.” By surveying various classic SF texts and their portrayal of AI characters through the lens of transgender studies—drawing upon scholars including Susan Stryker, Sandy Stone, and Florence Ashley—I assert that artificiality itself is a construction formed by cisnormative ideals and standards to exclude certain others (namely, transgender people) that requires reframing. I examine how these representations in works such as Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2 reveal and articulate the constructed dichotomies and cultural narratives which surround transgender identity, as well as how contemporary, trans-authored works such as Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous can offer tools for responding to and reconfiguring those dichotomies.