Embodied Politics: Crowds in Late Nineteenth Century American Fiction
Item
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Title
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Embodied Politics: Crowds in Late Nineteenth Century American Fiction
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:20948b41bfeb:11100
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identifier
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11440
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Creator
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Rogers-Cooper, Justin,
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Contributor
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Peter Hitchcock
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Date
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2011
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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American literature | affect | bodies | crowds | Spinoza
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Abstract
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In this dissertation I examine descriptions and representations of politically excited crowds in selected nineteenth century American fiction from the Civil War to the turn of the century. I argue that these depictions of crowds provide new opportunities for addressing theoretical concerns about collective agency and political action in contemporary accounts of Marxist informed literary scholarship. In particular, the dissertation turns to the political and ethical philosophies of Benedict de Spinoza to emphasize the importance of thinking collective agency through embodied politics. With Spinoza's concept of affect in mind, I assert that we can best understand the collective cognition of crowd behavior in the selected fiction by reframing our interpretative strategies toward theories that develop models of bodily intelligence. To this end, the dissertation offers a new genealogy for the study of crowds that primarily attends to the fiction of Martin R. Delany, Charles Chesnutt, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Frank Norris. It also introduces new theoretical perspectives through intensive readings of texts on group psychology, animal behavior, religious ecstasy, financial crisis, and social emotions. I imagine here a radical ambiguity about the potential for crowd behavior to become a sovereign force for collective action, but I contend that crowd sovereignty is powerful because assemblages of bodies have the capacity to act in the name of life and death through excited expressions of synchronized gestures and symbolic production.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
