Department of Literature

This project looks at how athletic movements borrowed from exercise translate into performance and social media settings mediated through trans bodies, affects, and politics. Trans artists turn to exercise for personal transformation of the body and bring those movements and their accompanying affects on stage in order to perform trans bodies as agentive and generative. The pleasure of personal transformation shifts into a desire to critique the ways trans bodies are regulated, to build community with audiences, and to encourage audiences to become participants. Trans athletic movements can be categorized into three main types: violent, cyclical, and magnetic clusters. In their two performance art pieces, Cassils takes the violent movements of Muay Thai and fight choreography and directs them towards moulding other bodies-clay and an invisible opponent. For Cassils, the violence of the movements represents a simultaneous creation and destruction, a desire to defeat the regulatory powers that shape trans bodies and create new ways to shape and to memorialize those who have been regulated into non-existence. For Nina Arsenault and Lynn Breedlove, the athletic movements of choice are the cyclical movements of the bike pedals. Focusing more on the potential of repetition and speed to trigger a transcendental experience of connection with the world and with one's emotions, the artists oriented towards bikes harness the cyclicality of movement as form of self-exploration of trans bodies not related to dysphoria but to euphoria. In the move from stage to social media, micha cárdenas, Chase Ross, and Alexandria Gutierrez perform athletic movements of CrossFit, running, and BeachBody, respectively, through Instagram images or YouTube videos. While cárdenas and Gutierrez frame their fitness in accordance within the category of #fitspo, cárdenas troubles that framework by juxtaposing fitness images with captions iii advocating trans activism through physical fitness. Ross, on the other hand, presents his running stories as ways of maintaining mental well-being in the trans community. I offer heartfelt appreciation to my supervisor, Julie Rak, for providing support and direction, for pushing me to expand beyond print, and for reading the many versions of this dissertation countless times. Thank you to Nat Hurley for her critical eye, for steering my work towards movement, and for challenging me to ask difficult questions. To my other reader, Donia Mounsef, thank you for pointing me in the direction of Nina Arsenault and suggesting important theory that helped shaped my arguments. I appreciate the input of the members of my candidacy committee, Cressida Heyes and Katherine Binhammer, who helped me articulate the direction my arguments should take. Thank you to Judy Davidson for taking the time to discuss and read my work, and to Jennifer Doyle, for taking the time to attend my defense, and for her inspirational work in sports performance. I would also like to thank professors in the department who provided support in many ways:

In Nina Arsenault's Silicone Diaries and Cassils's Becoming an Image, the artists perform trans embodiment through engaging with the animacy of silicone and clay. Arsenault and Cassils work toward defining trans embodiment as affective entanglements with (in)animate objects and foreground trans agency, creation, and movement. In trans memoir, embodiment has been represented and discussed primarily through the medicalized lens of hormonal or surgical changes; however, many writers and artists challenge the medical model as the dominant way of representing trans bodies. 1 Two such performances, Nina Arsenault's Silicone Diaries and Cassils's Becoming an Image, perform trans embodiment in ways that follow and subvert established narratives about trans bodies. Arsenault creates an experience of trans embodiment through a love-affair with silicone, while Cassils displaces the transitioning body onto a block of clay. Arsenault and Cassils foreground trans agency and desire through autobirths: acts not contained in the body producing another body but intra-actions between human and nonhuman that trigger transformative experiences. In their emphasis on connectivity and affect, Arsenault's and Cassils's autobirths rely on the animacy of objects, silicone and clay, to challenge the interiority and fixity of trans embodiment. Intra-Actions and Entanglements with Affective Objects As my framework for the analysis of affective objects, I will follow Karen Barad's idea of agential realism, an approach that "takes account of the fact that the forces at work in the materialization of bodies are not only social"

Trans is “hot right now” (Winterson 1226). But who gets to write about trans issues? Winterson’s and Fu’s books follow in the upsurge of trans visibility in the mainstream media referred to as the “transgender tipping point” and marked by Laverne Cox’s appearance on the cover of Time Magazine and prominent trans celebrity interviews on the Piers Morgan and Katie Couric shows in 2014. However, visibility can also be a “trap”, as Gossett et al. have argued, in that they “accommodat[e] trans bodies, histories, and culture only insofar as they can be forced to hew to hegemonic modalities” (xxiii). Mia Fischer explains that “the popular assumption that the increased visibility of trans individuals in public discourse automatically translates into improvement in transgender people’s daily lives” needs to be challenged (5). In addition to the disparity between visibility and real-life problems, the question of how trans people are represented is also problematic. As Brynn Tannehill put it,...

Shinoda Masahiro’s Kawaita hana/Pale Flower, a key film of the Japanese ‘New Wave’ of the 1960s, is poised between the conventional ‘genre’ cinema of the Japanese studios and two prominent strains of international narrative cinema: the European art film and the American film noir. Released in 1964, Shinoda’s film is at once a contribution to, and a unique hybridization of, these several distinct, and culturally specific, traditions. This article addresses the multivalent influences of European art cinema and film noir on Pale Flower, addressing, in particular, on what grounds we might convincingly speak of this film as a Japanese ‘film noir’. Through formal analysis, and discussion of the film’s representation of character and subjectivity, Pale Flower is shown to be a recognizable and self-conscious exercise in noir stylization as a translation of the American model, while also incorporating formal innovations of the European art cinema.

This article is intended as a differential contribution to the study of Melville, still the central
novelist of American literature in his complex, meditative negotiations of the various and
often contradictory strands of the history of ideas that have impacted the United States since
its founding generations: Calvinism, democratic ethics, Emersonian self-reliance, and even the
skeptical mode of vision of American modernism (as characterized by writers of immigrant
or Southern provenance such as O’Neill, or Faulkner), which Melville tellingly associates
with Shakespeare and Hawthorne. Indeed, I take as a starting point Deleuze’s assertion that
Melville stands as the precursor to a crucial line of nihilistic thinking continuing in Nietzsche
and culminating in literary modernism, and I explore the ramifications of this claim with
reference to Melville’s disastrous and often derided novel Pierre (1852), a bitter and digressive
rumination on American life and letters following the critical and commercial failure of Moby-
Dick. A still controversial semi-narrative account of disavowed incest and class intolerance
in the privileged, Northeastern milieu of Melville’s early years, Pierre is also his most
philosophical work up to that point, abundant in stylistic and structural experiment, most
particularly in regard to what might connect fiction and literary language to contemporary
philosophical discourses of idealism, metaphysics, and democratic ethics. Melville ultimately
finds the crux of this connection in metaphor as that which links sensual, aesthetic, and
cognitive experience to the abstract ideological commitments that govern our moral choices.
Crucially, that link is neither simplistically causal nor necessarily positive.
I argue that Melville slyly associates the incongruent literary styles that he deploys in
Pierre with the differing, contesting philosophical world-views that the novel explicitly evokes
(most notably the so-called “Transcendentalism” of Emerson). The vehicle for this experiment
appears to be a rather surface-oriented view of literary style characterized by an extravagance
of metaphoric density. It is this quality that, I argue, seems to divide Pierre into two distinct
conceptual and stylistic parts: the first is characterized by an exalted, ecstatic literary rhetoric...

This article offers a preliminary analysis of the language of certain varieties of American
comedy that arose out of the Vaudeville theater (from roughly 90 – 930) and, later, out of
the culture of popular magazine from (roughly) the 920s to the 950s. The focus is on the
exemplary and highly original comic language of S. J. Perelman (904 – 979), the Jewish
prose humorist, and Perelman’s quasi-mentor, the legendary stage and screen comedian Groucho
Marx (890 – 979), who was renowned for his improvisational wit. The article’s purpose is to
explicate, with reference to important developments in 20th century linguistics and semiotics,
some aspects of these highly original, self-conscious and indeed modernist verbal practices. It
also tentatively explores the significance of these unconventional linguistic intuitions in regards
to broader questions concerning the possibility of effective communication and, thus, the links
between discourse and social ideology in a mid-century American context. The theoretical
perspectives brought to bear on this subject include Grice’s theory of conversational implicature
and Austin’s Speech Act Theory—both cornerstones of linguistic pragmatics—as well as
Deleuze’s concept of a ‘minor literature,’ a theory of modernist literary practice substantially
determined by earlier developments in semiotic theory and philosophical pragmatism

The past two decades have seen an exposure of the colonialist and sometimes frankly racist representations of Native Americans in classical cinema, and in many ways John Ford has appeared to present an easy target, particularly with John Wayne in the starring role. Frequently, however, this perspective is grounded less in detailed analyses of films like Stagecoach and The Searchers as audio-visual and ideological wholes than in relatively isolated responses to images and sequences. There is still a clear need for a more accurate examination of Ford’s treatment of Native American peoples throughout the entire body of his Western films, and this article attempts to outline some key aspects of such an approach. At the outset, we must ask why it is Ford who has been so regularly the subject of criticism in this context, rather than other prominent directors of Westerns such as Anthony Mann or John Sturges? Why Ford, rather than his creative predecessors Owen Wister, Frederic Remington, D. W...

Literature 7/11/02 The 'Awkwardness' of Táin Bó Fraích Although the tradition of scholarship regarding Táin Bó Fraích (TBF) is marked by deep controversy, there is one major point upon which many scholars agree: TBF (or the extant text handed down to us under that name) is 'awkward' or 'clumsy' in its construction. Sometimes it is referred to by the same scholars as 'badly' constructed. I intend to examine each statement of this kind made by Carney, Murphy, Meid, and Donald Meek, who have been the most important investigators of TBF.

The aim of this article is to reread Ford’s My Darling Clementine, produced for Fox in 1946, with a focus on its cultural representations and ideologies. (I specify this as ‘Ford’s’ film, not Darryl F. Zanuck’s, for reasons explained in situ). The article concerns itself with the constellation of topics mentioned in the title above and centers on an analysis of the central characters of Wyatt Earp (as played by Henry Fonda) and the saloon girl Chihuahua (Linda Darnell) as Ford chose to represent them. The purpose of advancing this ‘reinterpretation’, apart from the perennial interest of the film itself, which was once widely hailed as the epitome of Hollywood Westerns, is to break what I view as an academic ‘path dependency’ (to use a phrase from Robert D. Ray) that has dogged the interpretation of the film in nearly every critical and scholarly publication on it. What can justifiably be called an existing ‘critical consensus’ about My Darling Clementine emanates, ultimately, from a much-reprinted 1971 essay by Robin Wood, and has remained essentially unchallenged, and utterly conservative in its intellectual economy, ever since. The two intertwined poles of this consensus are, briefly, the symbolic ‘overvaluation’ of the character of Boston schoolmarm Clementine Carter (Cathy Downs) at the expense of Chihuahua, the picture’s female lead; and, secondly, the belief that the film is an unambiguous celebration of the ‘civilizing of the West’ viewed in racially exclusive and, indeed, white-supremacist terms.

The aim of this article is to reread Ford’s My Darling Clementine, produced for Fox in 1946, with a focus on its cultural representations and ideologies. (I specify this as ‘Ford’s’ film, not Darryl F. Zanuck’s, for reasons explained in situ). The article concerns itself with the constellation of topics mentioned in the title above and centers on an analysis of the central characters of Wyatt Earp (as played by Henry Fonda) and the saloon girl Chihuahua (Linda Darnell) as Ford chose to represent them. The purpose of advancing this ‘reinterpretation’, apart from the perennial interest of the film itself, which was once widely hailed as the epitome of Hollywood Westerns, is to break what I view as an academic ‘path dependency’ (to use a phrase from Robert D. Ray) that has dogged the interpretation of the film in nearly every critical and scholarly publication on it. What can justifiably be called an existing ‘critical consensus’ about My Darling Clementine emanates, ultimately, from a much-reprinted 1971 essay by Robin Wood, and has remained essentially unchallenged, and utterly conservative in its intellectual economy, ever since. The two intertwined poles of this consensus are, briefly, the symbolic ‘overvaluation’ of the character of Boston schoolmarm Clementine Carter (Cathy Downs) at the expense of Chihuahua, the picture’s female lead; and, secondly, the belief that the film is an unambiguous celebration of the ‘civilizing of the West’ viewed in racially exclusive and, indeed, white-supremacist terms.

In the late 1950s, Suzuki Seijun was an unknown, anxious low-ranking film director churning out so-called program pictures for Japan's most successful movie studio, Nikkatsu. In the early 1960s, he met with modest success in  directing popular movies about yakuza gangsters and mild exploitation films featuring prostitutes and teenage rebels. In this book, Peter A. Yacavone argues that Suzuki became an unlikely cinematic rebel and, with hindsight, one of the most important voices in the global cinema of the 1960s. Working from within the studio system, Suzuki almost single-handedly rejected the restrictive filmmaking norms of the postwar period and expanded the form and language of popular cinema. This artistic rebellion proved costly when Suzuki was fired in 1967 and virtually blacklisted by the studios, but Suzuki returned triumphantly to the scene of world cinema in the 1980s and 1990s with a series of critically celebrated, avant-garde tales of the supernatural and the uncanny. This book provides a well-informed, philosophically oriented analysis of Suzuki's 49 feature films.

This article offers a preliminary analysis of the language of certain varieties of American
comedy that arose out of the Vaudeville theater (from roughly 90 – 930) and, later, out of
the culture of popular magazine from (roughly) the 920s to the 950s. The focus is on the
exemplary and highly original comic language of S. J. Perelman (904 – 979), the Jewish
prose humorist, and Perelman’s quasi-mentor, the legendary stage and screen comedian Groucho
Marx (890 – 979), who was renowned for his improvisational wit. The article’s purpose is to
explicate, with reference to important developments in 20th century linguistics and semiotics,
some aspects of these highly original, self-conscious and indeed modernist verbal practices. It
also tentatively explores the significance of these unconventional linguistic intuitions in regards
to broader questions concerning the possibility of effective communication and, thus, the links
between discourse and social ideology in a mid-century American context. The theoretical
perspectives brought to bear on this subject include Grice’s theory of conversational implicature
and Austin’s Speech Act Theory—both cornerstones of linguistic pragmatics—as well as
Deleuze’s concept of a ‘minor literature,’ a theory of modernist literary practice substantially
determined by earlier developments in semiotic theory and philosophical pragmatism

A carefully negotiated rejoinder to and critique of the academic and critical consensus (c. 2003) relating to the the nature, composition, and indeed value of Recension I of the Táin Bó Cúailnge, including a qualified defense of its relative compositional and semantic integrity. This dissertation successfully submitted in partial fulfillment of the Degree of Masters of Philosophy at Oxford University (2003). Citation (MLA): Yacavone, Peter. The Táin, Recension I: Its Compositional and Artistic Unity. 2003. Oxford University, M. Phil. Dissertation.