The study of disability has long been a matter left to medical interpretation. In fact, disability has often been and continues to be viewed as a personal misfortune, individual defect, and genetic failure. Disability in the medical model has thus been seen as something to eradicate or at least prevent. This approach to disability then, means correcting, normalizing, and or eliminating the pathological individual from society in which there are standards of what bodies and lives are considered normal and healthy (i.e., eugenics). Western society has long acted on the belief that disability presents as a threat to the future. Much of that has since changed when disability studies programs and activism emerged to addresses disability in its full complexity. In considering the work of Mike Oliver (1983), Lennard Davis (1995), Rosemarie Garland Thomson (1997; 2009), David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder (2000), Lee Edelman (2004), Ato Quayson (2007), Tobin Siebers (2008), and Alison Kafer (2013), and I build my argument of reimagining terms of ability and disability in fundamentally different ways.In my dissertation, “Surviving Dystopia: Desiring Disability and Deliberate Cripping in Apocalyptic Film," I offer alternative disability narratives in three apocalyptic films, A Quiet Place (2018), Bird Box (2018), and The Silence (2019). In these films, desiring disability is a future-oriented approach that offers viable ways forward. I argue that dystopian worlds carved out in post-apocalyptic scenarios offer critiques and expand worlds that had previously cast disability aside or expunged it. The films examined in this dissertation serve as a new understanding of how disability is used as a metaphor or plot point (Mitchell and Snyder, 2000) or the way disability causes visceral reactions between disabled characters and nondisabled readers (Quayson, 2007). Specifically, this dissertation focuses, perhaps counter-intuitively, on the advantages of considering disability in moments of catastrophe and chaos.

In this dissertation, I argue that adaptations studies can intersect with more traditional forms of literary theory, and that transformative adaptations are themselves a form of literary criticism. Using a revolutionary approach that interweaves different literary theories – African-American, psychoanalytic, queer, postcolonial, and postmodern – I make an intervention in contemporary scholarship (headed by Linda Hutcheon, Thomas Leitch, Julie Sanders, Cristina Bacchilega, Jack Zipes, and others) about adaptations studies to demonstrate its unlimited intertextual potentialities. Adaptations disrupt canonical hierarchies and create new forms of subjectivity that make possible different forms of empowerment and mastery than is present in their source texts. The transformative process takes place when an author changes a text by adapting it; however, it also occurs between texts, and from author to reader. Transformative indicates the ongoing process of these adaptations. Through revisionism, they affect the fundamental nature of their source text(s) and open authoritative narratives to questioning. The texts addressed in this dissertation are Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone; Jorge Luis Borges’ “The House of Asterion”; John Gardner’s Grendel; Malinda Lo’s Ash; Aime Cesaire’s A Tempest; Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea; Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John; and an assortment of parallel novels. These texts enact the transformative process through the rhetorical tools of collaborative originality, intertextual queering, and perspective plurality. They demonstrate the significance of intertextuality and the capabilities of literature as a form of empowerment. Reading the shifting meanings of these texts as adaptations shows the ideological transformations each undergoes and how they encourage an interactive readership. Adaptations that rewrite their source texts in a transformative way create a discursive web that allows for revolutionary approaches to literature and literary analysis.

The following dissertation takes faggotry as an analytic for thinking about queer freedom. By queer freedom, I mean both the freedom to be queer and a queer relation to freedom. Faggotry is a phenomenon of mixing that swirls together people, performances, things, and so on along queer lines. In particular, faggotry is a mixing of racial, gender, and sexual performances that produces one as an Other (being queer) and also that allows one to experience the world queerly (relation to freedom). Alongside queer theories, such as José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, schizoanalysis serves as my guiding methodology. I draw on various schizoanalytic concepts and critiques from Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia books Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus.In each chapter, I study a twentieth-century American novel that is relevant to the phenomenon I describe as faggotry. The chapters are arranged in the order of their movement toward queer freedom, from Burroughs’s impossibility of queer freedom to Carson’s manifestation of queer freedom. My analysis begins with William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, in which freedom is not possible for a faggot. Burroughs’s faggot, I contend, is socially produced with no possibility of escape, yet Burroughs’s text performs the destructive task of schizoanalysis by deterritorializing sexuality. Next, I turn to James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. In Baldwin’s novel, escape repeatedly appears on the horizon of the protagonist’s consciousness, but, in my reading, he fails to follow the lines of escape to find queer freedom despite having the conditions for a schizoid breakthrough. After Baldwin, I analyze Richard Bruce Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade: A Novel.” Nugent’s text produces a ground on which queer freedom becomes possible. I argue that this ground is best understood as what Deleuze and Guattari call a “Body without Organs”—the basis for desire. Finally, Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse presents a red monster who learns to love himself, becoming free, despite a history of abuse and “wrong love.” I contend that Carson’s red monster learns to quasi-cause himself, thereby effecting the positive tasks of schizoanalysis.

This dissertation argues that the Armed Services Editions (1942-1947) as an inherently middlebrow project, together with the post- WWII GI bill education and housing benefits, cohered and solidified an enduring fiction of the American Dream as one in which hard work can yield the success and comfort of suburban middle-class life. The middlebrow nature of the American Dream is intimately connected to the concept of military masculinity, a particular conception of gender presentation and formation which was perceived as essential to winning the War. Discussing conceptions of American identity, the middlebrow, and the military masculine together brings us closer to an understanding of the American Dream—and thus, of the fiction of American identity—as innately middlebrow and intimately connected to the fiction of the inherent masculinity of the military, which in its democratizing and homogenizing education is itself a kind of middlebrow institution. I argue that the middlebrow is incredibly dependent on and entangled with print culture, which both dictates and reflects how one ought to act, what one ought to buy, and what one ought to aspire to—and thus the ASEs, as a recreational reading project, both complicated conceptions of the middlebrow as feminine and perpetuated ideas about the American Dream which middlebrow culture ascribes to. The American Dream is a dream of striving and invention, and the middlebrow aesthetic argues that the evolution-of-self that is involved can be bought— can be constructed out of an accumulation of objects, or images, or identities contrived through the purchase of books or commodities. Thus the American Dream and the middlebrow are inextricably linked and mutually constitutive. This discussion necessitates exploration of the literature itself as well as policy, economics, critical gender studies, and memory theory. Although perhaps seemingly disparate pools of data, these areas of information help create a full picture of “Middle(brow) America” as it came to be in the 1950s—a time still shrouded in nostalgia today.

This dissertation explores the impact of psychopharmacological discourses on Post-WWII American literature. I argue for a “pharmacentric” reading practice that foregrounds the role of pharmaceuticals in both the production and consumption of American literature across the period, tracing the rise of a new ontological construction in the cultural imagination I call the “neurochemical self.” This view of the self as an expression of chemical interactions in the brain emerges from the period’s scientific, medical, and advertising industries to become the dominant understanding of American selfhood by century’s end, and remains under-examined in existing literary scholarship. In making the case for the rise and importance of the neurochemical self, I identify and examine the development of literary language and techniques indebted to popular and scientific discourses around pharmaceuticals, a phenomenon I call “pharmaceutical literacy.”

In organizing this analysis of the neurochemical self and pharmaceutical literacy, I turn to three distinct eras in post-WWII American literature, identifying three signal pharmaceuticals within and the literary works they engaged with. I argue for the importance of amphetamines, specifically Benzedrine, to the work of the Beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg in the first decade after the war. Next, I look at America’s “Age of Anxiety,” identifying tranquilizers as the dominant psychopharmaceuticals from the late 1950s through the 1980s, reading the confessional poetry of Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton through the resulting pharmacentric perspective. Lastly, I argue for the importance of neurochemical selfhood and pharmaceutical literacy to the discourses provoked by the advent and run-away success of SSRI antidepressants, specifically within the work of 1990s depression memoirs by Elizabeth Wurtzel and Meri Nana-Ama Danquah. Finally, I argue for an extension of literary studies that accounts for these psychopharmaceutical developments and offers valuable perspective on the tensions between scientific and humanistic understandings of identity.

I trace the changing animal stereotypes imposed on Asian Americans and Asian immigrants throughout the history. I coin the term, racial atavism, to characterize the paradoxical temporality of Asian Americans who progress toward the model minority status while simultaneously reassume degraded animal stereotypes from the past. Acknowledging the anthropocentric and racist connotations embedded in this paradox, I call for an interspecies and interracial love as a remedy. I start with the misperception of Asian Americans and the resulting animal stereotypes imposed on them by the mainstream society. Yet I do not end with a cynical critique of the anthropocentric and racist status-quo. I contribute to the field of Asian American studies by introducing a possibility of interspecies and interracial love born out of misperception through Jakob von Uexkull’s elaboration on the “umwelt.” Defined as how different species perceive the world through their subjective sensory organs, “umwelt” not only deconstructs the domination of human/white perception but also provides a theoretical framework to envision companionship and coevolution through mutual misperception. I explore the minute tension and intimacy between Asian Americans/immigrants and people of various racial identities. Ranked according to a racial hierarchy which is modeled after the species hierarchy in Social Darwinism, Asian Americans find themselves occupying the liminal positions of pet animals who are essentially castrated in the name of being privileged as a family member in a human household /the model minority in a white dominated U.S. society. I deem the liminal status assigned to Asian Americans as a pivotal one through which people hierarchically ranked at different levels/evolution stages can find pathways to free their animal selves from the prison of humanization. I do not call for a naïve embrace of animals which is merely another kind of fantasy reinforcing the animal-human/white-color binaries. I interpret the Asian American protagonists and artists I analyzed as animal humans who fluctuate between castrated/subjugated model minority citizens and killable alien animals. From hate crimes to interracial queer love, I demonstrate that those who survive and thrive are precisely those caught between the species/racial lines and coevolving with the animal others beside and within themselves.