UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations
UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Bad Seeds: Inhuman Poetics in Nineteenth-Century America Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0629g1j0 Author Osborne, Gillian Publication Date 2014 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Bad Seeds: Inhuman Poetics in Nineteenth-Century America By Gillian Kidd Osborne A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Samuel Otter, Chair Professor Anne-Lise François Professor Robert Kaufman Fall 2014 Copyright Gillian Kidd Osborne 2014 Abstract Bad Seeds: Inhuman Poetics in Nineteenth-Century America by Gillian Kidd Osborne Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Samuel Otter, Chair Plants sprout, vegetate, flower, and molder pervasively across nineteenth-century American literature and yet, like most roadside weeds today, are largely ignored. My dissertation demonstrates that, far from mere stylistic ornamentation, this profusion of vegetation was a means of imagining literature and humanness as inhuman: responsive to otherness outside of texts as well as at the core of a composing subject. Applied to aesthetic agents and objects, plant metaphor unsettled more rhetorical claims during the period for genius or formal convention as self-contained or individuated. The inhuman poetics I trace reveals ways in which poetry in nineteenth-century America was defined not only by genre and print conventions, but also by attempts to make literature responsive to what stands outside of texts: nature, history, and experience. I show how, by directing attention to literary texture and to the extra-literary, plant metaphors model ways of dialectically thinking through the relationship between humans and nature.
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