Date of Award

1-1-2023

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

Department of English

Content Description

1 online resource (vi, 237 pages) : illustrations.

Dissertation/Thesis Chair

Jennifer Greiman

Committee Members

James D Lilley, Eric Keenaghan

Keywords

Nineteenth-century America, Print culture, Radical democracy, Reader figure, American literature, Books and reading, Empathy in literature

Subject Categories

American Literature

Abstract

This dissertation examines the ways in which print materials in nineteenth-century America constitute “a reader figure” as a political subject of democracy. Neither a purely historical entity nor a textual construct, this reader figure is understood as the process of subjectivation that emerges from the aesthetic modes of writing informed by the texts’ contemporaneous print culture. Focusing on the moments when expansionism and slavery reveal the antagonistic constitution of America as a “republic,” each chapter will examine a text that enmeshes the act of reading in unique spatiality: contiguous newspaper columns of untranslatable languages, a ship stowage that traps the reader within the text, a loophole that invokes a silent reader, and the blurred boundary of the Union and Confederate states that causes sensory disturbance. My argument associates these spaces with Claude Lefort’s democratic theory, which envisions an “empty place” that cannot be taken by anyone amid the constant distribution of power under the principle of popular sovereignty. I will examine the ways in which Elias Boudinot, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Jacobs, and Herman Melville respectively invoke a reader figure constituted at the moment of encountering the vacancy that challenges the expectations of readers’ collective identity, fixed positionality, sentimental intimacy, and sensory integrity. This study ultimately argues that these texts provide an aesthetic and political mode of engagement by creating a reading experience that deracinates the agent of reading from the fixed position and disturbs the dominant discourse’s interpellation of collective readers that inflicts the violence on Native Americans, slaves, and potentially any citizen of the republic.

Download

Share

COinS