Political feelings: objects-in-process in the American novel (1963-2013)
Date
2022
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This dissertation, Political Feelings: Objects-in-Process in the American Novel (1963-2013), explores how literary representations of objects convey particular affects and imagines what uses those affects have. Borrowing from material culture scholars and affect studies scholars, this dissertation works to bring these two distinct fields together in order to revisit canonical American novels published in the last sixty years. This dissertation focuses on objects as they are narrated throughout their life cycles—from creation through use and destruction—putting pressure on why recent American novels tend to dramatize objects with such intensity. In exploring various object sketches, this dissertation argues that studying objects-in-process has the potential to unveil particular affects that are political because they are responsive to social structures, often demanding resistance, recognition of complicity, or the need for historical recovery. ☐ This dissertation is divided into four chapters, each of which concerns a particular decade. Canonical works from well-known American authors are featured. These include Kurt Vonnegut and Philip K. Dick (the 1960s), Thomas Pynchon and E.L. Doctorow (the 1970s), Don DeLillo and Toni Morrison (the 1980s), Tim O’Brien and Philip Roth (the 1990s). The objects focused on range widely—fictionalized atomic warfare and knockoff Americana in the sixties, V-2 rockets and a custom Model T Ford in the seventies, generic grocery store items and household goods in the eighties, military rations and gloves in the nineties. While each chapter is distinct in its focus, all explore the ways in which these objects convey affect. Taken as a whole, Political Feelings: Objects-in-Process in the American Novel contemplates how affective lessons and material ones can coexist, and more broadly, how reading literature can impart these important lessons.
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Keywords
Affect studies, Material culture, Vonnegut, Kurt, Dick, Philip K.