Other possible identities: Three essays on minor American literatures

John Charles Goshert, Purdue University

Abstract

Institutional fields of marginal literary study arose largely from related ethnic, gender, and sexual liberation movements in the 1960s and 1970s. Necessarily entrenched in liberatory identity politics at the time of their inception, those fields have remained committed to relatively stable formulations of disciplinary identity in their public self-portrayals, despite the ongoing internal conflicts over the nature of marginal identity formation. This dissertation engages with structures of disciplinary propriety, that have established the grounds for a replication of the insider-outsider, legitimacy-illegitimacy, canonical-noncanonical standards against which these fields initially formed themselves some decades ago. I trace through three marginal authors and their respective fields—Frank Chin and Asian American literature, Ishmael Reed and African American literature, Sarah Schulman and Gay-Lesbian literature—possibilities for a minor reading not only of the ambivalent academic treatments awarded the three individually, but more broadly, of the institutional formations of marginal literary studies themselves. Despite the significant differences between the three authors, I employ the formal and thematic resonances in the work of Frank Chin, Ishmael Reed, and Sarah Schulman to propose a means of rethinking the ways in which marginal fields of literary study have, following Deleuze and Guattari, resigned themselves to becoming “major” for the sake of institutional legitimacy. When Chin, Reed, and Schulman complicate any disciplinary efforts to stabilize the reception of their works through the coextensive use of essentialist discourses in their critical pieces and unstable—postmodernist or surrealist—discourses in their fiction, they rupture, by extension, dominant disciplinary efforts toward the stabilizing of the broader fields in which their work has been, at best, treated ambivalently. By bringing three such seemingly incompatible authors into conversation, I argue further that marginal American literatures may themselves enter into an active engagement with one another, rupturing the institutional containment to which they have been increasingly relegated since their inception.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Plotnitsky, Purdue University.

Subject Area

American literature|American studies

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