PhD thesis,
Self-Othering in American Literature and Culture from Melville to Moby
(2008)
Abstract
Abstract (Summary)
My dissertation explores the trope of "self-othering," the splintering or unfixing of the artist's imagined cohesive self and transformation into alternative personae, often achieved through the appropriation of a marginalized ethnicity or by passing as the other or as a hybridized amalgam of others. My framework chapter investigates the conflict in Melville's characters and plots between fanatical univocality and multivocal free-play, tracing Melville's multivocalism to his reading of the Bible and transnational cultural encounters. My chapter on L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, examines Baum's simultaneously radical and ambivalent reconfigurations of gendered and racialized identity. I read Baum as a conflicted practitioner of self-othering, arguing that his works display evidence of "womb-envy" and "margin-envy," but also profound anxieties about the perceived loss of white, male privilege. I pay particular attention to Baum's character of the Patchwork Girl of Oz, a black, female Harlequin figure, as well as a case of Baum practicing an envious form of blackface drag minstrelsy. In the chapter on beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Bob Kaufman, I argue that Ginsberg was conflicted about his Jewishness while Kaufman experienced an analogous tension about his Blackness, each poet dealing with his ambivalence to his "endowed" identity through "transpiritualism," the adoption of a marginalized spiritual identity as his own. The chapter on Lowell and other "confessional" poets shows those poets attempting to kill off their white, straight selves through the trope of suicide, in order to discover a more abject but desirable subject position out on the margins. The final chapter analyzes cultural ventriloquism in the works of Andy Kaufman, Laurie Anderson, Eminem and Melville's descendent, the rock star Moby, as well as at Museum of Jurassic Technology.
