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This dissertation identifies and theorizes “minor realism” as an understudied feature of many contemporary climate novels. While scholarly attention regarding the literary representation of climate change has grown significantly since the 1990s, realism—a style that depicts ordinary life through detailed description and psychological interiority—remains overlooked in most studies. Literary scholars tend to assume that realism, given its modest scale and focus on daily life, cannot encompass environmental disasters of unprecedented origin and magnitude. I offer “minor realism” as a term that emphasizes aesthetic and generic porosity, demonstrating that realism in fact valences a wide range of contemporary climate novels (including some that are typically read as nonrealist). Examining a broad contemporary archive of U.S. novels between 1991 and 2017, I track how minor realism represents climate change as an everyday experience. I offer sustained interpretations of six novels: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991), Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993), Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011), Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014), and Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017). These analyses primarily employ close reading methodologies as well as supplemental archival study. Beyond the environmental humanities, I apply insights from memory studies, Indigenous critical theory, Black studies, and disability studies to analyze narratives of climate disaster. Bringing together such theoretical interlocutors, I argue that minor realism offers a surprising aesthetic resource for representing climate change and its unevenly dispersed effects.

This thesis consists of a close reading of the representation of the Spanish Civil War in selected novels of Juan Marse (1933-) and Claude Simon (1913-). It explores how this representation, ultimately, reveals the traces of their different intellectual contexts. The initial comparison questions whether Marse's representation of the Spanish revolution in Barcelona implies, like Simon's account, a negative representation of the concept of political engagement and a similar historical pessimism. It goes on to discuss how this negative view is shaped by the writers' respective historical contexts and aesthetics. Secondly, since, to varying degrees, the novels studied make the reader critically aware of processes of narrativisation and representation, and of issues of narrative reliability and authority, the thesis explores the extent to which their representations of the Civil War are 'anti-realist'. In order to do so, it initially locates the question of 'realism' or 'anti-realism' in the texts within a wider theoretical framework: that of the critique of realism within poststructuralist French theory after Barthes. The latter debate over referentiality in literary realism also underpins ongoing critical debates over the status of history as a text. This thesis, thirdly, considers whether both writers' representations of the Civil War and of historical processes suggest a particular attitude towards the writing of history, namely whether and to what extent Simon's and Marse's representations of the war problematize the relationship between their historical referent - the events of the war and/or its aftermath - and its narration and interpretation. In particular, it asks whether Marse's texts involve the kind of rejection of progressive historical 'meta-narratives' which is implicit and explicit in Simon's representation of the Civil War, but also whether Simon's texts do, in fact, not simply undermine this model of historical causality but posit an alternative, anti-progressive historical telos.

Abstract: This dissertation examines the use of irony in Italo Svevo’s La coscienza di Zeno and Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. While both these novels can be said to be ironic, the manner in which the two writers choose to employ irony differs substantially. For the purposes of this study, Svevo’s tropological irony will be distinguished from Musil’s representational irony. Tropological irony consists in a series of dramatic reversals that the protagonist’s views of himself and of the world undergo in the course of the novel. The analysis of tropological irony exposes Svevo’s powerful critique of psychoanalysis, both as a theory of the psyche and more importantly, as a therapy designed to identify and treat various neuroses. I argue that this critique starts with Svevo’s ironic subversion of the two meanings of coscienza, “consciousness” and “conscience,” and constitutes the background against which Zeno’s most important reversal, from illness to health, unfolds. Unlike tropological irony, representational irony is primarily formal in nature. Dissatisfied with the illusory sense of order and cohesion that the narrative conventions governing the historical-realist novel of the nineteenth century create, but aware at the same time that no writer can completely step outside the existing patterns of narrations, Musil resorts to representational irony as a way out of this impasse. His strategy entails a double movement, of simultaneous affirmation and negation, which can be shown to replicate, on a larger scale, the same paradoxical dynamics present in the structure of irony as a trope. To illustrate how representational irony operates in Musil’s novel, my dissertation proves how the notion of narrative frame is concomitantly affirmed and undermined.

This dissertation proposes that British novelistic realism of the nineteenth century is not an authoritative form designed to represent a fixed reality and elicit readers' assent to it. Instead, realist novelists, including Walter Scott, George Meredith, George Eliot, and Rudyard Kipling, use formal practices I call "wise folly" to perform an ambivalent authority that invites disagreement. With a history that can be traced through such earlier sources as Plato's dialogues, Erasmus's writings, and Shakespeare's fools, wise folly unfixes standards of wisdom and folly in a work and complicates ethical judgments. Through close readings of forms of wise folly in realist novels, this dissertation revises conventional conceptions of the realist narrator as a rhetorically coercive voice and realism as a pretense to omniscience, proposing instead that realist novels, as formed objects apprehended by readers, are a means for negotiating diverse views of reality. The introductory chapter, "Wise Folly and Narrative Discourse," outlines the concept of wise folly and, through readings of Tristram Shandy and Vanity Fair, explains its role in the emergence of a specifically realist narrative discourse. The second chapter, "Narrative Authority and George Meredith's Gnomes," examines gnomic utterances such as aphorisms, maxims, and epigrams in Meredith's work, arguing that Meredith uses these utterances to construct an ambivalent narrative authority. The third chapter, "George Eliot's Pharmacy," explains the function of scapegoat figures who occupy the margins of Eliot's novels and who, from those margins, trace the limitations of the dominant ethics in the novels. The fourth chapter, "Learning We Are Fools," addresses the desultory status of literary quotation and allusion in the novels of Scott and Meredith, where the literary can be a source of folly and where education is an inherently intertextual process, fraught with error, through which one acquires means to understand the world. The fifth chapter, "If: Aesthetics and Ideology Revisited," situates play in Kipling's Kim within the context of wise folly and aesthetic theory, and describes Kipling's canny treatment of knowledge in Kim, which employs Orientalist and other modes of knowing even as it imagines the impossibility of sure knowledge.

Improbable Realism theorizes the relationship between literary realism and probability, arguing that improbable events such as coincidence frequently facilitate the representational aims of the realist project in the nineteenth century. Uniting historicist and formalist approaches to the novel, this dissertation examines how four important authors in the realist canon-Fielding, Scott, Dickens, and Hardy-harness coincidence as a narrative mechanism in their representation of particular social milieus. As statistically unlikely encounters that defy the reader's expectations of the everyday, coincidences have long been regarded by critics as antagonistic to realism. This critical disdain for coincidence, however, is unwarranted because it too readily applies Aristotelian aesthetic principles to narratives that work in fundamentally different ways from those Aristotle analyzes. Aristotle's exclusion of improbable events from well-constructed plots is grounded in his philosophical idea that accidental events are beyond knowledge, yet in modernity such events became important sites for the production of knowledge about life in the world. This importance is illustrated in the way that many early novels in the eighteenth century use coincidental events to think through problems of agency. Improbable Realism demonstrates that coincidence became an important narrative device for nineteenthcentury authors because improbable encounters generate opportunities for novels to represent complex relationships between the social base and individual agency. Chapter One uses Fielding's Tom Jones as a test case for examining the historical and theoretical issues surrounding coincidence, arguing that the narrator's rhetorical framing of coincidental events marks an important contribution to the emergence of the realist mode. Through readings of "The Two Drovers," Redgauntlet, and The Bride of Lammermoor, Chapter Two demonstrates that Scott frequently harnessed the competing interpretations that coincidences elicit in his representation of historical particularity. Chapter Three considers Dickens's treatment of coincidence, arguing that it enables him in Martin Chuzzlewit to represent and historicize selfishness as a product of the increasingly mediated nature of Victorian social relations. Chapter Four analyzes the importance of coincidence to the form of Hardy's novels, linking its function to Hardy's historicist habit of mind through readings of A Pair of Blue Eyes and The Return of the Native.

Examines the relationship between theology and literature with a goal of developing a starting point for a comprehensive theology of literature.

A number of arguments appeared in the late-nineteenth-century United States about “correctness” in language, arguments for and against enforcing a standard of correctness and arguments about what should count as correct in language. Insofar as knowledge about and facility with “correct” linguistic usage could affect one’s standing in the social structure, such knowledge and facility functioned as a form of capital—linguistic capital. This dissertation considers treatments of linguistic capital in a variety of contexts, including verbal criticism, linguistics, composition pedagogy, and novels. The subject of Chapter 1 is verbal criticism, popular writings that quibble over the “correct” meanings of words. Verbal critics’ goals and conclusions, however, were often full of contradictions. My first chapter offers an explanation for these contradictions based on their resonance within late-nineteenth-century capitalism’s social structure. Chapter 2 centers around William Dwight Whitney‘s efforts to establish what he called the “science of language” in America. Whitney’s potentially progressive principles sometimes appear conservative, capable of rationalizing a laissez-faire politics with regard to language and class—a politics this chapter considers in relation to Whitney’s attempt to craft an ethos for the discipline of linguistics. My third chapter examines the dominant composition pedagogy of this period, current-traditional rhetoric, at a time when universities increasingly admitted middle-class students. Chapter 3 considers what types of cultural capital current-traditional pedagogy assumed its students possessed and what effects its assumptions imply. Chapter 4 focuses on William Dean Howells, whose realist novels represented the language of various characters as precisely as possible in an effort to encourage readers to accept speakers of non-prestige dialects. This chapter explores the possibilities and the limits of Howells’s efforts, and what those possibilities and limits imply for any progressive language policy. The Conclusion analyzes the most famous attempt by a professional organization to adopt such a progressive language policy, the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s “Students’ Right to Their Own Language.” Deliberation over this policy deeply divided teachers in the language arts. My conclusion considers why both sides may be right—and wrong—to think their preferred means can achieve what turns out to be an agreed-upon end.

If one were to write a history of the United States through an extended reading of its literatures, business would loom large as a powerful force in the deep structures of people's imaginations. If one were to write the same history through an extended reading of literary criticism, business would seem to lightly brush the surface of American experience, a begrudging footnote or oft-ignored appendix to more gripping dramas. No form of American business has been more influential than the corporation. The corporate form started the nineteenth century as one of many forms organizing economic activity, limited in scope, scale, duration, and purpose; it closed the same century as the preeminent expression of business, national in scope, unlimited in scale, effectively immortal, and malleable of purpose. This dissertation traces the influence of an economic form of collective action on American culture, through a study of the American novel. The novel served as the preeminent form of storytelling during the moments when the cultural revolution of the corporate form was still conspicuously incomplete. The assumptions of literary realism---that the author has a responsibility to reflect the social world accurately; that this world should be crafted through a myriad of concrete and factual details established under a significant order; that these details should be perceived and revealed through psychologically coherent characters---made it an irresistible fit for writers grappling with the new social experiences presented by the corporation after the Civil War. In tracing the ways in which writers imagined business in this time period, my purpose in this dissertation is two-fold: to understand better the interplay between business and literary history in the United States, and to use this interplay to interrogate how the corporation as content influenced the form of the novel.

El autor contrapone la recepción que los textos de ambos autores tuvieron en su momento de producción –fines del siglo pasado–, a las lecturas que hoy se hacen de sus novelas. Parte del reencanto de los críticos se debe a que estos textos resisten métodos de análisis narrativo de corte estructuralista, desconstructivo o posmoderno. El lector contemporáneo, a diferencia del decimonónico, tiene plena conciencia del realismo como una forma de ficción, y por tanto su lectura implica un deliberado placer estético. El artículo destaca la dimensión humana de los personajes de novelas como "La Regenta" o "Fortunata y Jacinta", los que siguen apareciendo, a ojos del lector de hoy, como verosímiles y entrañables. The author contrasts the reception that the texts of both authors had in their moment of production—the end of the last century—with the readings that are done today of his novels. Part of the new charm of the criticisms is owed to the fact that these texts resist methods of narrative analysis of a structuralist, deconstructionist, or postmodern type. The contemporary reader, in contrast to that of the 19th century, is plainly aware of realism as a form of fiction, and therefore his/her reading implies a deliberate aestethic. The article highlights the human dimension of the characters of novels such as "The Professor’s Wife" and "Fortunata and Jacinta", those which apparently continue to be, in the eyes of the reader today, truthful and likeable.