Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
6-2025
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
English
Advisor
Joan Richardson
Committee Members
David S. Reynolds
Alexander Schlutz
Subject Categories
African American Studies | American Studies | Arts and Humanities | Philosophy | Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies
Keywords
American Literature, Ontology, Nineteenth-Century, Philosophy, Henri Bergson, Affect Theory, New Materialism, Politics
Abstract
American Becomings argues that several major nineteenth-century American authors across the antebellum and postbellum United States turn to and enact modes of ontological thinking in their writing as a means of contesting, unsettling, and immanently transforming dominant cultural norms and sociopolitical doxa. The project advances the notion that ontology (the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of existence, its parts and their interrelations) constitutes not merely a scholastic and disinterested inquiry into the eternal and transcendent but, rather, a way of thinking about the power of difference and becoming that has distinctive social, historical, and political stakes. Additionally, the project offers the first sustained engagement with the relevance of French philosopher Henri Bergson’s ideas to American literature, effectively charting a prehistory in American literary thought of Bergson and Deleuze’s shared concept of the virtual.
Recommended Citation
Bailey, Austin J., "American Becomings: Ontology as Critique in the Nineteenth Century" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6312
