Enumerology: Accountability and the Culture of Enumeration
Leonard, James.
2017
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Abstract: My project examines the power of written, spoken, and visual modes of enumeration to shape culture, politics, and sociality. It begins with the assertion that enumeration is paradoxically constituted by imagined states of inclusiveness, wholeness, and objectivity. Though such an objective, documentary form carries forward Enlightenment fixations on rational mastery, enumeration's precisi... read moreon remains a fantasy of both interlocutor and audience—disguising the necessary elisions or remainders that will always plague the compilation. I term the cultural faith in such inclusiveness "enumerology"—a term whose link to "numerology" evokes occult fascinations with the quantitative; and the project explores literary and historical figures ("enumerologists") who deploy enumeration as a mechanism for eliding cultures, groups, and beliefs that fall outside the ideological spectra propping up American conceptions of nationhood and the nationalized citizen. Though my chapters are grounded in 19th- and 20th-century American literature, I consider the referenced literary texts within a deeper historical and geographical continuum, whose strategies are then adapted to the language of American nation-building at critical junctures. The project is anchored by chapters on Mark Twain, Djuna Barnes, Cormac McCarthy, and Leslie Marmon Silko; and for each, I develop my analysis of his/her literary response to enumerology through the lens of a specific genre of enumeration. In Mark Twain, we see a fin de siècle critique of the enumerologist from the perspective of an author simultaneously critical of and implicated in national narratives surrounding exceptional individualism and an intrinsically American brand of domestic imperialism. In Djuna Barnes, a Modernist's perverse enumerations illuminate queer temporalities which speak out against the almanac genre's historical role in propagating masculinized temporal economics. Cormac McCarthy takes Judge Holden's ledgerbook as synecdochic of broader national and cultural conceptions of "accountability" and thought itself—ultimately undoing the stability of those orders by figuring an "unaccountable" or "unreckonable" world beyond comprehension. Finally, Leslie Marmon Silko offers new ways of approaching enumeration (specifically almanacs and Linnaean taxonomies) which foreground enumerative instability via the palimpsest—a multivocality that forecloses structures of monologic authority necessary to the enumerological.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2017.
Submitted to the Dept. of English.
Advisor: Lisa Lowe.
Committee: Jess Keiser, Nathan Wolff, and Susan Gillmann.
Keywords: American literature, American studies, and American history.read less - ID:
- mk61rv26n
- Component ID:
- tufts:23094
- To Cite:
- DCA Citation Guide EndNote
