Narratives of self-violence in twentieth-century US literature

In twentieth-century US literature, which is often marked by profound violence and modernist isolation, suicide is pervasive. Ernest Hemingway’s anger toward his father’s suicide bleeding into his characters’ ideological apathy, Anne Sexton’s suicidal ideation written into verse, Langston Hughes’s lamentations about wishing for death, and writers like Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and Joan Didion imagining suicide as a metaphorical act of protest against gender roles are but a few of the diverse literary representations of suicide that inhabit the long twentieth century. Critical discussion of suicide—or moments even suspected as being suicide-related—in literature has historically adopted frameworks of intention and applied categorizing language (Is it a suicide? Does the character intend to die? Do they exert some sort of agency in doing so?). This emphasis on categorizing suicidal acts leaves little room for discussions of their textual meanings and narrative functions and prevents the possibility of investigating the (dis)connections between literary suicide and lived experience. This work offers new critical approaches that recognize suicide in literature as both a literary device and a nonliterary experience. Focusing on patterns of interpretation in criticism on literary self-violence—a term that I use to eliminates the need for categorization, as it refers to any act of violence towards oneself regardless of purpose or motive—I highlight the potential for harm in such patterns. Discussing the role that self-violence plays in the conceptualizion of the southern gothic and illuminating trends in twentieth-century US literature that romanticize the self-violence of female characters, conflate queerness and violence, and read the self-violence of Black characters as fatalistic or even essential to Black life, I also suggest alternative critical frameworks that can minimize the potential for harm in both scholarship and classrooms.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2024

Author dc:creator

• Georgiou, Caitlyn

Contributors dc:contributor

• Parker, Robert D
• Jones, Jamie L
• Hunt, Irvin J
• Newcomb, John T

• Suicide
• 20th Century American Literature
• Violence

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2024 Caitlyn Georgiou

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/125750

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F125750