Habitats of Abandonment: Subjectivity and the Aesthetics of Dispossession from the Industrial Revolution to the Great Depression by Clare Callahan Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Priscilla Wald, Supervisor ___________________________ Tom Ferraro ___________________________ Tsitsi Jaji ___________________________ Sarah Deutsch ___________________________ Joseph Entin Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2016 i v ABSTRACT Habitats of Abandonment: Subjectivity and the Aesthetics of Dispossession from the Industrial Revolution to the Great Depression by Clare Callahan Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Priscilla Wald, Supervisor ___________________________ Tom Ferraro ___________________________ Tsitsi Jaji ___________________________ Sarah Deutsch ___________________________ Joseph Entin An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2016 i v Copyright by Clare Callahan 2016 Abstract This dissertation draws on American literature from the Industrial Revolution to the Great Depression to fashion a theory of abandonment, a term that designates both a material reality and a conceptual framework; abandonment names what remains unincorporated into the governing economic, political, gender and racial logic. This study examines, therefore, literary representations of poverty, homelessness, forms of working-class labor, and the work that race and gender do within these conditions of existence. It arises from the intersection of the Marxist, feminist, poststructuralist, and queer theory that has sought not only to account for the inequitable economic distribution of goods but also to confront the deeper problem of injurious power structures and hierarchies. The literature of abandonment discounts the practice of seeking recognition within a dominant structure of power; rather, abandonment brings to light the spatial practice of the subject’s struggle for re-signification of such structures. Thus, one can begin to conceive of the abandoned subject by asking what one produces when one inhabits a space typically deemed uninhabitable—by discovering forms of being where one’s being is impossible or illicit—because it is in this act that subjectivity for the otherwise abject becomes possible. This study asks more specifically how literature as an iv aesthetic practice imagines the production of an abandoned subjectivity and, by extension, alternative social, economic and political structures. The driving question of this dissertation is, how can a concept such as abandonment allow one to address without interpellating its subject? That is, can one value the abandoned as such, without incorporating it into an injurious system of evaluation or the prevailing neoliberal discourse of recognition? This entails asking how these processes are represented as being deeply aesthetic and what the relationship is between literary form and “habitat.” That the fact of abandonment is not quite available for representation, at least not without recovering it from itself, but is available for inhabitation, is illustrated in each of the texts this dissertation examines. In bridging socioeconomic material and thematic readings with a study of literary form, this dissertation argues that literature itself performs the very calling into being and inhabitation of this spectral space; which is to say, literary form lays bare the spatial underpinnings of narrative, allowing one to enter into the currents of dispossession rather than their fixed social positions. v Dedication I dedicate this dissertation to my father, Joseph Callahan, for encouraging me to pursue the things that I love. vi Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... ix 1. Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1 1.1. The Dark Bedroom ........................................................................................................... 1 1.2 Chapter Summary ........................................................................................................... 15 2. Abandoned Publics ................................................................................................................. 19 2.1 To Be (It) Through the Other ......................................................................................... 19 2.1.1 The Crisis of Being ..................................................................................................... 19 2.1.2 The Bodies of Others .................................................................................................. 29 2.1.3 Illegible Subjects ......................................................................................................... 41 2.1.4 Aesthetic Subjectivity ................................................................................................ 47 2.2 Abandoned Publics ......................................................................................................... 51 2.2.1 Lapsed Market Space ................................................................................................. 51 2.2.2 Abandoned Publics .................................................................................................... 59 2.2.3 Failed Worlds .............................................................................................................. 65 2.2.4 Testimony .................................................................................................................... 71 2.2.5 The Poïesis of Habitat ................................................................................................. 75 2.2.6 The Crisis of Unbeing ................................................................................................ 79 3. Fugitive Ecologies .................................................................................................................... 84 3.1 The Promise of Becoming .............................................................................................. 84 vii 3.1.1 Fugitive Ecologies ...................................................................................................... 84 3.1.2 Becoming-Geographical .......................................................................................... 101 3.1.3 Wasted Land ............................................................................................................. 113 3.1.4 Archival Failure ........................................................................................................ 117 3.2 The Promise of Being .................................................................................................... 126 3.2.1 A Swamp in Name Only ......................................................................................... 126 3.2.2 Occupying the Farm, or, Inverse Fugitivity ......................................................... 134 3.2.3 Clothes ....................................................................................................................... 146 3.2.4 Afraid of the Dark .................................................................................................... 155 4. The Foreclosing of the Frontier ............................................................................................ 158 4.1 Specters of Debt ............................................................................................................. 158 4.2 Buried in Debt ................................................................................................................ 168 4.3 Inheritance ...................................................................................................................... 183 4.4 Reproduction ................................................................................................................. 201 4.5 Debt Forgiveness ........................................................................................................... 210 5. Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 215 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 221 Biography .................................................................................................................................... 225 viii Acknowledgements I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my dissertation supervisor, Priscilla Wald, for challenging me to ask difficult questions in my research and giving me the freedom to experiment and take risks in my writing. I would also like to thank the members of my dissertation committee, Tom Ferraro, Tsitsi Jaji, Sarah Deutsch, and Joseph Entin, for their generous attention to and thorough engagement with my work. This dissertation would not have been possible