Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Abstract

This dissertation is composed of two parts: literary criticism and a collection of fiction and lyric essays. Across both sections, it examines the problem of description: how persons make experience, action, and suffering intelligible in language, and what happens when that intelligibility breaks down under historical, social, and familial pressure. The critical essay, “Failed Descriptions and Neoliberal Talk in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist,” argues that DeLillo represents a crisis of intentional speech under neoliberal modernity, in which public language is narrowed to private affect and meaningful social description becomes increasingly difficult. Reading the novel through philosophers of language and history—Elizabeth Anscombe and Alasdair MacIntyre—and debates about DeLillo’s social poetics, the essay contends that The Body Artist does not abandon critique, but revises it by locating the recovery of meaningful language in embodied practice and renewed temporal intelligibility. The creative manuscript, “Out There: Notes and Stories,” explores related questions in fictional and autobiographical forms. Set largely in the Pacific Northwest and the American West, these stories and essays follow boys and men shaped by instability, religious desire, labor, violence, shame, and regional myth. Throughout the collection, narrators struggle to interpret fathers, inherit fragmented social stories, and discover how explanation can fail in the face of grief, moral confusion, class experience, and violence. Yet the manuscript also treats storytelling as a mode of judgment, testing false narratives, recovering intention, and bringing obscured experience into view. Taken together, the two parts of the dissertation investigate how literary form can register damaged social realities while still making possible recognition, interpretation, and renewed acts of description.

Date

2-6-2026

DOI

https://proquest.com/docview/3347816587

First Committee Chair

John McNally

First Committee Member

David Squires

Second Committee Member

Yung-Hsing Wu

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