Susan Sechrist
Doctor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Studies (PhD)
Research Topic
Go Figure: Writing Numerate Literary Fiction
Adam Frank
Professor
Research Classification
Research Interests
American literature and media, affect theory, modernism, science and technology studies
Relevant Thesis-Based Degree Programs
Research Options
I am interested in and conduct interdisciplinary research.
Research Methodology
affect theory, unorhodox psychoanalytic approaches to literary criticism, radio interpretation
Recruitment
Master's students
Doctoral students
Any time / year round
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Graduate Student Supervision
Doctoral Student Supervision
Dissertations completed in 2010 or later are listed below. Please note that there is a 6-12 month delay to add the latest dissertations.
Performing memory: American poets theater and the poetics of the archive, 1945-1995 (2021)
This dissertation uses the methodological tools of archival research to interrogate the relationship between performance, community, and memory in an extended study of American poets theater, a quasi-genre or aesthetic tendency that aligns poetic practices with the conventions of theatre and site-specific performance. At the same time, archival theory provides a theoretical framework for thinking through poets theater’s coterie function. I trace a poetics of the archive across American poetry after 1945 to argue that poets theater creates an accessible record of past communities and community events. In keeping with this community-focused approach, each chapter of this dissertation addresses the origins of American poets theater in the social and aesthetic contexts from which it develops, including the New York School and second-generation New York School of poets, the San Francisco Renaissance, and the New Narrative Movement. Each community, I argue, contributes to the development of poets theater as we recognize it today. Building on these situated contexts, this dissertation also draws on the work of Rebecca Schneider to suggest that poets theater should be read as both a form of re-enactment and an archival-theatrical event. I argue that poets theater operates as a trans-historical tool of the coterie that, through the process of re-enactment, works to capture, recreate, create anew, or signal affective connections across spaces and times. This allows poets theater to extend the parameters of coterie to include both the original event and the re-performance of it, eliciting community membership to both audience members and performers alike across times and performances.
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Secondary authorship: Aesthetics and the idea of mass culture in the United States, 1835-1866 (2014)
My dissertation examines popular authorship in the antebellum United States. Following the print explosion of the 1830s, American authors found themselves participating in a slowly emerging mass print culture. While most scholars agree that massification proper did not characterize the production, circulation, and consumption of popular literature until after the Civil War, I argue that the idea of mass culture emerged in the antebellum decades. The idea that reading could be a mass-scale phenomenon provoked many antebellum authors to attend to the material effects of reading, while their relative freedom from institutional constraints enabled these same authors a degree of pre-culture industrial experimentation that was unique to the antebellum period. The title of my dissertation, “Secondary Authorship,” refers to a loss of confidence in the idea of authorship as origination; authorship in antebellum America, I argue, was a circular game of observing the effects of writing and experimenting in their causes. My first chapter analyzes Edgar Allan Poe’s recasting of Kantian disinterest in terms of mass interest in his short tale “Berenice.” In my second chapter, I extend Poe’s theory of interest to a consideration of antebellum city mysteries fiction, and, in particular, to the reformist poetics of George Lippard’s The Quaker City. My third chapter reads Herman Melville’s Pierre; or, the Ambiguities as ambivalent about its participation in mass reading. Finally, my fourth chapter examines the “minor” relation to Emersonian Transcendentalism that Louisa May Alcott constructs in her novel Moods. In the course of my analyses of antebellum fiction, I make literary critical use of systems theory, Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic theory, American Pragmatist philosophy, and the affect theories of Silvan Tomkins.
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Master's Student Supervision
Theses completed in 2010 or later are listed below. Please note that there is a 6-12 month delay to add the latest theses.
At an impasse: the possibilities of feminist resistance in Han Kang's Ch' aeshikjumija and Deborah Smith's The Vegetarian (2022)
In 2016, The Vegetarian—Deborah Smith’s English version of South Korean author Han Kang’s novel 채식주의자 (Ch’aeshikchuŭija)—won the International Booker Prize, resulting in heightened discourse among both Western and Korean reviewers and literary scholars on the novel’s dark and bizarrely surreal story of an ordinary woman whose vegetarianism spirals into psychosis when she begins to believe she is becoming a tree. The aim of this thesis is to examine the possibilities of radical feminist resistance through madness in The Vegetarian’s depiction of a burgeoning psychosis that takes place in a metamorphosis of the body that is readable both as a sublime transformation into the nonhuman and pathological insanity leading to starvation. The main body of this thesis is an examination of some feminist theory’s historical omission of biology from discussions of affect, leading, I shall argue, to a tendency in some feminist scholarship on female madness to prioritize symbolic depictions of the body over anatomical ones. This tendency is in turn then linked to scholarship on The Vegetarian that reads the novel symbolically, leading to discussions of its protagonist that focus on the possibilities or failures of her metamorphosis/psychosis as radical resistance. Using Silvan Tomkins’ theory of affects as “amplifiers” that motivate or suppress the fulfillment of biological drives, this thesis argues that the protagonist’s metamorphosis is catalyzed and motivated by an affective reaction to trauma that takes real anatomical form. Turning to Elizabeth Wilson’s theory of the psychic capabilities of the body, what she terms the “biological unconscious” this thesis then constructs a framework for reading The Vegetarian that centers the biological motivations for her metamorphosis. Seeing affect as a mechanism that has biological implications, and not just discursive ones, this thesis concludes that the protagonist’s entanglement of symbolic meaning and bodily destruction in her metamorphosis is not an expression of the possibilities of feminist resistance, but an elucidation of the impasse that results from being unable to escape or change a society in which one can no longer live.
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My face! give it back! : interrogating mask metaphors and identification in Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics (2011)
This thesis argues that one way to resolve some of the discrepancies in the theory ofidentification proposed by Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics, such as his mask metaphor, is to approach his theory via theatrical conceits. By thinking of identification in the terms of an actor playing a masked character, in which to read a comic and identify with a cartoon character means to put on a mask and imaginatively play the character, McCloud’s contention of cartoons matching our basic mind-pictures becomes readily resolved by virtue of the fact that the mask is serving as a dramatic signifier of the reader’s inner reality. That is, by imaginatively bringing to life the iconic cartoon form, the reader mimetically becomes the character, hence making it entirely plausible for anyone to enter the world of the cartoon and see themselves in the faces of the characters. The mask thus becomes a logo that transforms the reader’s body into logos, granting access to the realm of the symbolic by covering up a reader’s personal identity such that he or she becomes a cipher, at liberty to see whatever he or she wants in the cartoon image. However, regarding the comics panel as a kind of dramatic stage in which the identifying reader is intimately involved as both actor and initiator of theatrical communication, raises other problems. It not only problematises the distinction between reality and artifice in an imaginative performance context, but also ignores the fact that masks are frequently used for purposes of preventing rather than promoting audience identification. McCloud’s theory, in attempting to circumvent the issues surrounding the fraught relationship between self and other that are inherent in any discussion of identification by applying the mask as a structuring term, raises new issues of its own.
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Current Students & Alumni
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