Rhizosphere: Gilles Deleuze and minor American literature and thought

This dissertation concerns, the philosophical work of the French thinker Gilles Deleuze and five American modern texts, four of which it reads as "minor". The body of this text considers Deleuze's affirmative remarks on American literature and thought, (which involve Deleuze's emphasis on the importance of American pragmatism): "We understand the novelty of American thought when we see pragmatism as an attempt to transform the world, to think a new world or new man insofar as they create themselves... Pragmatism is this double principle of archipelago and hope. (These themes are to be found throughout Pragmatism, and notably among William James's most beautiful pages: the world as "shot point blank with a pistol.") This is inseparable from the search for a new human community." The first chapter calls attention to the influential role two French thinkers played in inspiring this interest in American thought and literature during Deleuze's formative years as a student of philosophy. Deleuze names these two men, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Wahl, France's two most important philosophers. The second and third chapters read, W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, Gertrude Stein's Melanctha, Jean Toomer's Cane, and William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, as the kind of "pragmatic", "minor" literary texts that do indeed "think new worlds" or "transform old worlds" as they activate "minor languages", "minoritarian-becomings", and trace out lines of flight, to map out a deterritorialized cartography, which results in the activation of effective, although almost imperceptible, "micro-political weapons" that undermine the oppressive, organizational grids established and reinforced by the "Major Order" and its power structures. The text reads with Deleuze and a variety of thinkers that inspire him, to write with American "minor" fictional texts, likewise it reads with American pragmatic thought and art to write with Deleuze. In light of this constructivist activity of reading to write with, across the boundaries that separate art and philosophy, it qualifies itself as a double gesture whose movements back and forth intricately intertwine until the lines that usually separate art and "thought" wear thin and give way to the "rhizosphere".