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UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Posthumous Afterlives: Ecstatic Readings of Post-1945 American Literature Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8tj190k6 Author Sherazi, Melanie Masterton Publication Date 2015 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Posthumous Afterlives: Ecstatic Readings of Post-1945 American Literature A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Melanie Masterton Sherazi June 2015 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Katherine Kinney, Chairperson Dr. Carole-Anne Tyler Dr. Traise Yamamoto Dr. Fred Moten Copyright by Melanie Masterton Sherazi 2015 The Dissertation of Melanie Masterton Sherazi is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project received fellowship support from UC Riverside’s Graduate Division; the UCR Department of Philosophy’s Immortality Project; and the Hayman Foundation, administered by the UC Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium. I also received grant support from the UCR Center for Ideas and Society, the Neumann Graduate Student Scholarship, and the Barricelli Memorial Grant for Graduate Research. Such generous funding support afforded me unique archival opportunities. I am grateful to the librarians at the Library of Congress, where I worked with the Ralph Ellison Papers, and to the archivists at the Columbus State University archive and the Carson McCullers Center, the site of McCullers’ childhood home, where I had the privilege of staying during my research trip to Georgia. My profound thanks go to James Demby at the Lucia Drudi Demby Cultural Association at the Villa di Podernovo in Tuscany. The experience of working with William Demby’s papers in this beautiful setting was a true honor and the unparalleled highlight of this dissertation research. My deepest thanks go to my esteemed dissertation chair Katherine Kinney for her rich insights and sage guidance throughout my doctoral program. Thank you for asking all of the right questions and for steering me back on course whenever I wandered too far afield. You gave so generously of your time regardless of how busy you were, and managed to make me feel both independent and supported throughout this process. I could not have asked to work with a more dynamic dissertation committee: Carole-Anne Tyler, Traise Yamamoto, and Fred Moten. Carole-Anne Tyler’s attention to detail and theoretical specificity has challenged me to push my work to the next level. I iv cherish our many conversations about critical theory. Traise Yamamoto’s encouragement buoyed my progress; her model of fearless scholarship and teaching has inspired me and shaped my critical perspective from the very start of the program. Fred Moten’s invaluable input helped me clarify my project’s relationship to biographical criticism; his philosophical influence on my thinking is myriad. The generosity of UCR English’s faculty and staff and its graduate students is truly remarkable. Thanks to Erica Edwards and Steven Axelrod for meeting with me and responding to my developing project with keen insights and suggestions. Many thanks to Tina Feldmann for guiding me through the various stages of the doctoral program with great kindness. I owe a debt of gratitude to my writing group members through the years: Kimberly Hall, who has been an unwavering source of support, Rochelle Gold, Regis Mann, Giulia Hoffmann, Eddie Eason and Chandra Howard. Your input and care propelled this project forward and gifted me with the pleasure of collaboration. Many professors outside of UCR were kind enough to support my work at various stages by offering crucial feedback. Many thanks to Adam Bradley, Carlos L. Dews, Winifred Fluck, Richard Godden, Jim Hall, Sharon Monteith, and Ugo Rubeo. Special thanks to Richard Yarborough for his exceptional mentorship and his continued support of my research as I head into the next stage of its development. All of my love and gratitude go to my beloved family and dear friends for accompanying me along this serendipitous journey. Your unconditional support has kept me going, and your faith in me encourages me to dream big and to press forward. v For Billy and Margaret, who first taught me the meaning of hard work, and who have supported me at every twist and turn. For Ben, whose artistic integrity inspires me to keep imagining, and who teaches me to hear the world differently. vi ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Posthumous Afterlives: Ecstatic Readings of Post-1945 American Literature by Melanie Masterton Sherazi Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English University of California, Riverside, June 2015 Dr. Katherine Kinney, Chairperson This dissertation explores mid-century literary texts drafted and set during the Civil Rights Movement, but which were edited and published posthumously, years and sometimes decades after their authors’ deaths. Written by such authors as Ralph Ellison, Sylvia Plath, Carson McCullers and William Demby, these texts make visible the fundamental instability of authorial intention as they are signed by an other, the editor or executor, then made available to readers. The imbricated temporal layers of their often protracted composition times and publication histories are elaborated by their innovative narrative strategies for engaging the paradoxes of desegregation. Rethinking poststructuralist debates regarding the death of the author as an originator figure through the context of posthumous publication reorients us toward the collaborative labor of the editor and reader in processes of writing, reading, and interpretation. Posthumous texts afford the opportunity for engaging in what I term “ecstatic readings,” whereby the past, loosened from an originary context, enters the present by way of the future. The “enigmatic excess,” as Foucault names it, of the text’s survival beyond its author’s lifespan, promotes a dismantling of masculinist notions of presence, progress, and vii closure. I draw upon Foucault’s theorization of the author function, which critiques our tendencies to shape our ideas about an author’s life and creative process from his or her textual remains and ideas about an era, race, gender, sexuality, and class—all of which tend to homogenize the authorial persona in order to yield a coherent portrait of the author. The author function, I contend, is at its most beguiling in the posthumous context, as it purports to stabilize the excess of unbound texts that are left unsigned by their authors. To complicate this biographical critical impulse, I call upon Barthes’ notion of the author’s “friendly return” as a plural figure, ever prone to dispersion, which I explore as an ecstatic dimension, rather than an anchor, of meaning. Ecstatic reading is a feminist critical practice that resists strict correspondences between an author’s life and work, and champions the posthumous text’s excess and relevance for engaging the complexities of postwar American life in the present. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Revisiting and Rethinking the ‘Death of the Author’ 9 Beyond Late Style: The Ecstatic Temporality of the Posthumous Text 12 Chapter Overview 19 Chapter One: Rethinking Literary Inheritance: The Play of Temporal Excess in Ralph Ellison’s Unbound Novel 24 The Ecstatic Text That Will Not Cohere 38 ‘The End is in the Beginning and Lies Far Ahead’: Subverting Historical Time 47 Resurrecting the Late Author 59 Postscript: These fragments I have shored against my ruins 70 Chapter Two: Signing the Other’s Signature: The Posthumous Circulation of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar 73 Reading The Bell Jar Against the Grain of the Author Function 86 The Abject Temporality of The Bell Jar: Coming Undone in the Metropolis 94 ‘The Motherly Breath of the Suburbs’: From the Suburbs to the Asylum 110 Conclusion 116 Chapter Three: The Social Subject of Life Writing in Juxtaposition with (An)other: Carson McCullers’ Posthumous Autobiography Illumination and Night Glare 122 ‘Our Flowering Dream’: McCullers and Mercer’s Dictaphone ‘Experiments’ 134 The Signature: Dialogic Sociality in Illumination and Night Glare 147 The Author’s Friendly Return: The Pleasures and Limits of the Biographemic 153 ‘The We of Me’: Storytelling as Sociality in The Member of the Wedding 161 Conclusion 168 Chapter Four: The Posthumous Archive: The Ecstatic Times of William Demby’s Postwar Writing 172 The Ecstatic Period Between and Beyond Beetlecreek and The Catacombs 182 A ‘Janus-time’: Filmic Strategies for Ecstatic Times in The Catacombs 193 Resisting the Gaze, Playing with the Mask: The Catacombs’ Doris as Black Female Spectator 203 The ‘Enigmatic Excess’ of King Comus 212 Conclusion 218 Conclusion: The Ecstatic Mid-Century 222 Bibliography 232 ix Introduction Posthumous Afterlives: Ecstatic Readings of Post-1945 American Literature Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. —William Faulkner Absalom, Absalom! The pleasure of the Text also includes the amicable return of the author. Of course, the author who returns is not the one identified by our institutions (history and courses in literature, philosophy, church discourse); he is not even the biographical hero. The author who leaves his text and comes into our life has no unity; he is a mere plural of ‘charms,’ the site of a few tenuous details, yet the source of vivid novelistic glimmerings, a discontinuous chant of amiabilities, in which we nevertheless read death more certainly than in the epic of a fate; he is not a (civil, moral) person, he is a body. —Roland Barthes Sade/Fourier/Loyola Numerous posthumous publications written by renowned authors have hit the literary marketplace in recent years. In certain cases, the late author leaves behind express wishes for her unpublished work, while in other instances, there is no such mandate in place. But authorial intentions are narratives too that can be interpreted and rewritten, or even ignored, in the author’s absence. One of the most oft-cited exemplars in favor of violating the late author’s wishes is Franz Kafka’s posthumous oeuvre.
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