| My dissertation "Gasping for Breath:" The Language of Chora in the Poetics and Narrative Praxis of Emerson, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville and Dickinson conducts a psychoanalytic, feminist and semiotic re-reading of poetics and narrative strategy in Emerson's prose essays, Poe's gothic short stories, Hawthorne's romance novels, Melville's most debated novella and a selection of Dickinson's hand-written poetry. With a concern towards the absence of the feminine in the literary imagination of the American Renaissance, I track a pervasive anxiety of asphyxiation in both the content and form of these works, reading the concept dynamically and against a history of philosophical thought. Drawing from the Greeks through Kant and Heidegger to deconstruction and ecriture theory, I expose a denial and repression---a figurative silencing and choking off---of the feminine in the central texts and I chart its/her paradoxical and meddlesome return. Such a concept takes figuration in this study as Chora, Plato's undefined it/she I read at once as an absence and presence of the denied feminine, haunting both Western philosophy and the 19th-century American literary landscape as a form of winnowing semiotic movement. My methodology seeks to generate new points of intersection with these texts and their meeting with literary history, the history of popular and medical science in America, genetic analysis and textual studies. I enter into this discourse of Chora, both by analyzing the language of metaphor and metonymy, sonic and semiotic play, and by gesturing towards an interpretive language that engages with and explores this problem stylistically. The aim is to present an exposition of the murmuring choric presence and impulse to return---in the American literary imagination, in its defining expressions and forms, in the interstices of its grammar, poetics, and production, and even in the framing of the critical apparatus with which we approach these. |
