Railspace: A Geocritical Study of the Railroad through American Literature and Culture

<p>This dissertation uses geocriticism to argue that the American railroad is best understood as a set of discursively constructed railspaces formed through a variety of viewpoints, a polysensorial awareness of space, and stratified social relationships and power struggles. This study takes up four railspaces, the constituent texts of which demonstrate how intertextual discourse shapes and is shaped by the railroad. The observation car, charted through California Zephyr advertisements and Muriel Rukeyser’s “Campaign,” is an apparatus that produces perpetual spectacle. Three novels—<em>Sister Carrie </em>by Theodore Dreiser, <em>Double Indemnity</em> by James M. Cain, and <em>Strangers on a Train </em>by Patricia Highsmith—and their filmic adaptations work together to form the passenger car as a contested railspace of fear and unease. The mobile Hell on Wheels that stations itself at the terminus of construction in the American West along the transcontinental railroad becomes a profanatory and deterritorializing railspace through Zane Grey’s <em>The U.P. Trail</em>. The photography of Andrew J. Russell and the poetry of C.S. Giscombe in <em>Ohio Railroads </em>and <em>Prairie Style</em> develop a deep map of the railroad right-of-way in the style of William Least Heat-Moon’s <em>PraryErth: A Deep Map</em>. This map uncovers marginalized racial memory and locality along the tracks. This project concludes with an echo of the introduction, geocritically exploring Penn Station in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and how to move toward a geopraxis of public humanities work.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

PhD

Level thesis:degree_level

Immediate Access

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Year dc:date.available

2020

Author dc:creator

• Smith, Michael A

Contributors dc:contributor

• Linda A. Kinnahan
• Faith Barrett
• Thomas P. Kinnahan

• geocriticism
• railroad
• Pittsburgh
• train
• whistle stop tour
• spatiality
• noir
• observation car
• American West
• deep map
• American Literature
• Other American Studies

Language dc:language

English

Repository record dc:identifier

https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/1951

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dsc.duq.edu:etd-2951