Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 79-11(E), Section: A.

Advisers: Amy Hungerford; Katie Trumpener.

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Antisocial attitudes are everywhere in the history of American literature: from Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and onwards, writers of all stripes have imagined characters who make themselves legible through memorable moments of reticence, rejection, repudiation, or renunciation. But what would it mean to imagine a nonsocial relation that is borne out by something other than opposition? With a focus on several contemporary writers---Marilynne Robinson, Edward P. Jones, Toni Morrison, William Gibson, Colson Whitehead, and Jennifer Moxley---this project explores the possibility of a point of view that is neither interpersonal nor adversarial in nature. By attending to the belief, so central to my writers, that social life is something like an offshoot of a more foundational form of relationality, I argue that the key to advancing a long-standing debate over the aesthetic uses of autonomy is not to produce new and better accounts of the social architecture of artistic practices, but to test out the strength of the idea, so prevalent in the humanities, that actions, objects, and experiences have to be in some sense "social"--- shareable, relatable---in order to be endowed with value.

Wondering about the significance of sociality can easily look like the beginning of a commitment to one of the most time-honored of aesthetic fantasies, namely the fantasy of being, if only for a moment, an entirely solitary mind in the world. The point of this dissertation, by contrast, is to highlight the role of literature as a source of new insight about the striking fact that a person's cognitive attitudes---their beliefs, desires, hopes, wishes, and worries---can be infinitely more powerful than all the hard evidence that might otherwise defeat the reasons behind them. Attuned in this way to puzzles that are aesthetic as well as epistemic in kind---can you account for thinking without accounting for language? what happens to interpersonal criteria for judgment and comparison in the absence of interpersonal relations? how do we define the general value of a singular point of view?---my dissertation illuminates the dimensions of experience that emerge once the desire for recognition is no longer a driving factor.