Universes without selves: Cosmologies of the non-human in American literature

Focusing on texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Adams, Charles Chesnutt, and Zora Neale Hurston, "Universes without Selves: Cosmologies of the Non-Human in American Literature" examines heterodox American cosmologies that challenged nineteenth- and early twentieth-century attempts at ecstatically fusing self and universe. Though conceding to their optimistic counterparts (e.g., mesmerism, transcendentalism, evolutionary historiography, theosophy) that people are materially and spiritually united with the cosmos, the cosmologies that I consider refuse to see this union as an occasion for exultation. In fact, they contend that such unity is more fatal than desirable, canceling rather than confirming the anthropocentric mystifications that made the universe a mere extension of ontologically superior human selves. Thus, unlike the utopian impulses of both past subject/object syntheses and present post-humanisms (e.g., of Deleuze, Hayles, Haraway), all of which fantasize not the death of the self but only its self-gratifying transformation, the cosmologies of Poe, Adams, Chesnutt, and Hurston represent selflessness as a terminal reality rather than a salvific ideal.;Chapter one attributes Poe's apocalyptic collapses of panpsychic matter (from the early tales to the late Eureka) to a cosmology that borrowed from euphoric contemporary theories of the universe while defying their idealism. Chapter two argues for a similarly fraught dynamic between an author and the cosmological norms of his age: in key ways, all of Adams's texts revoke the optimism of teleological historiography by submitting humanity to the degrading laws of physics rather than the promised perfectibility of popular Darwinism; Adams's record of his own entropic degradation in The Education is thus best understood through reference to what he termed his "scientific histories." While my first two chapters focus on authors who expose the universal threat to selfhood that many Western cosmologies obscure, my final chapter turns to an African-diasporic conception of the cosmos that is equally corrosive of the Human Subject. The chapter contests recent attempts to read an Africanist critique of Enlightenment metaphysics into the autobiographies of ex-slaves; such a critique, I argue, is more accurately attributed to the anti-subjective world views of Chesnutt's conjure tales and Hurston's Voodoo ethnographies.