Unbecoming Characters
Christine, Anna.
2020
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2020.
Submitted to the Dept. of English.
Advisor: Lee Edelman.
Committee: Nathan Wolff, John Lurz, and Kathryn Stockton.
Keywords: American literature, LGBTQ studies, and Film studies.
Unbecoming Characters traces a central term, unbecoming, in order to provide a conceptual space to explore turns away from the subject ... read moreand its subservience to narrative teleology and epistemology. Skepticism toward the value of that subject is indebted to the scholarship of Michel Foucault, D.A. Miller, Barbara Johnson, Saidiya Hartman, and Eunjung Kim, which reveals how the attainment of subject status excludes those with non-intelligible identities and desires and can even enact further oppression and harm. Instead of seeking to make more subject positions legible within the normative narrative, unbecoming, derived from the work of queer theorists and scholars such as Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, Eric Michaels, and Mel Y. Chen, provides an alternative to the false universality of this subject and to narrative's drive toward heterosexual adulthood, charting a path away from maturity, intelligibility, and sovereignty. Focusing on how form and language intersect with sexuality and subjectivity to undo epistemology and meaning, unbecoming seeks alternatives to, to use Miller's phrase, "becoming a Person" in twentieth and twenty-first century American texts. The first chapter, "From text machine to sex machine: Language, Sex, and the Subject," establishes two central theoretical paradigms of the dissertation through de Man's concept of irony and Edelman, Berlant, and Bersani's theories of sex. A reading of Delany's Babel-17 probes fault lines in the subject, revealing the affective range of unbecoming, from self-shattering to pleasure. My second chapter, "Unbecoming Characters: Alternatives to Identification and Agency in Comics Form," embraces the combination of "kid's stuff" and pornography negatively associated with comics in order to challenge interpretations of cuteness, abjection, and identification. "Showing some 'Clivage': Unbecoming Narrative and Visual Pleasure/Jouissance" takes up the previous chapter's concerns with pleasure, narrative, and identification and applies them to film and film theory. "'Bad Mimesis': Cuteness, Toxicity, and Unlikely Subjects" concludes the dissertation with a reading of Barnes's Nightwood through the lenses of Ngai's cuteness and Chen's toxicity. By cultivating a perverse alternative to sovereign subjects, Nightwood's characters "go down" rather than "grow up," opposing a narrative teleology of growth.read less - ID:
- 8s45qq09d
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