English Theses and Dissertations

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https://hdl.handle.net/1794/2042

This collection contains some of the theses and dissertations produced by students in the University of Oregon English Graduate Program. Paper copies of these and other dissertations and theses are available through the UO Libraries.

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Browsing English Theses and Dissertations by Subject "Affect Theory"

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    Affect, Abuse, Transgression: Orienting Ambiguity in Early Modern Texts
    (University of Oregon, 2016-11-21) Myers, Katie; Saunders, Benjamin
    This dissertation seeks to articulate how early modern texts formalize their affective qualities in instances of ambiguity. Positioned within the recent turn away from humoral theories of the passions and toward the rhetorical underpinnings of affect in early modern criticism, my project offers an interpretive strategy that privileges the perspective of the text by attending to the vulnerabilities of first-person perspectives in ambiguous rhetorical structures and figures. I argue that these forms signal more than sites of critical debate encoded in the text, as Shoshanna Feldman has suggested; they also privilege textual perspective and reveal affect to be a feature of form. I argue that textual ambivalence may be approached through the logic of catachresis in order to examine how these instances may be read in ways that maintain the strangeness of their didactic and disruptive capability. Reorienting how one approaches ambiguity, I suggest, exposes the potential of often ignored textual elements and suggests that early modern literature models an interpretive agenda dependent upon vulnerable perspectives. Reconceiving the interpretive strategies solicited by each text, I argue that early modern literature embraces the benefits of individual and collective vulnerability. I examine how Marlowe’s Edward II disrupts the binary structure of the king’s two bodies in order to turn an accusation of weakness against authority itself. I turn to Donne’s poetry and prose to argue that it models a hospitable interpretive method that uses form to manage ambiguity from the perspectives of his textual voices while orienting readers to welcome the strangeness of his contradictions. I then pursue an analysis of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I that reorients Falstaff’s function in the play as its unlikely focal perspective, a position that stages a resistance to the play’s power structures. Finally, I briefly consider how my analysis bears on familial and rhetorical conventions in Shakespeare’s Tempest and Webster’s Duchess of Malfi. Attending to the formal practices that construct literary affect, this project reconsiders the ways in which early modern English literature navigates the intersections of vulnerability that articulate a text’s orientation to the cultural networks in which it was produced.
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    Feelings as Heraldic Devices in Late Middle English Chivalric Romance
    (University of Oregon, 2022-10-04) Odell, Ross; Laskaya, Anne
    This project argues that we can read feelings in medieval chivalric romance the same way one reads conventional heraldic imagery, and doing so shows us how feelings are a site for identity construction in ways that align with our understanding of identity today. The project finds clear evidence that late medieval romance writers thought of feelings as functioning similar to more conventional elements of heraldry, like a knight’s coat of arms, his device, his colors, or his battle cries, in the sense that feelings typically attach to specific knights but are also shared by knights within the same chivalric community. The dual nature of the chivalric device—both a stable, abstracted indication of allegiance and malleable ornament of individual identity—is what makes it productive for understanding how social selfhood is constructed in romance, and the project proposes the term ‘feeling-emblem’ to describe the highly public way in which emotional expressions are used to communicate different aspects of that selfhood. The project mainly tracks a category of weak negative emotions which Sianne Ngai calls “ugly feelings,” and it does so for two reasons: (1) these kinds of emotions are well-represented in the battlefield romances of late medieval Britain which I study most closely, and (2) emotions like irritation, anxiety, envy, and disgust are historically stable in a way that other emotions of medieval romance are not, meaning that focusing on ugly feelings helps us find lines of continuity between medieval and modern identity constructions. By focusing on feeling-emblems of weak negativity, then, the project aims both to better understand how medieval audiences imagined themselves through their period’s most popular literary genre and to explore how our own discourses around identity today are shaped and challenged by that process.
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    The Texture of Affect: Catastrophic Violence and the Matter of Knowing in Late Twentieth Century U.S. Literature
    (University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Ecklund, Ashley; Wood, Mary
    DISSERTATION ABSTRACTAshley Ecklund Doctor of Philosophy in English The Texture of Affect: Catastrophic Violence and the Matter of Knowing in Late Twentieth Century U.S. Literature This project addresses affectivity as an epistemological resource and affects as im/material phenomena that are expressed in certain works of literature as accumulating climates pertaining to specific bio-political events of violence. The texts discussed in this project are Charles Johnson’s work of short fiction “Exchange Value” (1981), Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir Maus II (1986-1991), and Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel Tropic of Orange (1997). Through both allusion and explicit content, these works address the allegedly distant catastrophes of the Middle Passage, the Holocaust, and Japanese American internment along with countless other entangled violences through grotesque imageries in the everyday late-capitalist settings of Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. These earth-shattering and world-bending events are linked to the capitalist system-sustaining structures of our familiar daily routines such as buying a jacket at the mall, going to a country club for bingo, or driving down the highway during rush hour. Putting multiple contexts for different global events together through three texts which are partially set and published in the 1980s-1990s United States has allowed me to show how narratives reach across time and place to spatialize catastrophically violent histories via resonant affective connections; though distinct in terms of context, narrative form, and genre, each text centers capitalism as constitutive for ongoing catastrophic conditions and develops images of affect through the texture of everyday material living conditions. For this project, texturing, in terms of “The Texture of Affect,” is an encapsulation of violent histories into the atmosphere of narrative frames, the syntax of drawn patterns, and prose imagery which work to inscribe affect as tangible, palpable, and mattering in a polysemic sense. With vivid sensory detail, and other text-specific choices in form, these works show the importance of situating global catastrophes outside the concept of one-off tragedy. This dissertation includes previously published material.