American Quarterly

The following is a bibliography of completed doctoral dissertations in American studies. It is based on responses to announcements appearing in the American Studies Association Newsletter and on requests to American studies programs for lists of doctoral dissertations completed between 1 July 1996 and 30 June 1997. The Report contains one hundred and ten entries whose abstracts suggest the broad range of topics and diverse methodologies that American Studies’ scholars are exploring.

Listings may be submitted at any time by writing Doctoral Dissertations in American Studies, Office of the Executive Director, American Studies Association, 1120 19th Street, N.W., Suite 301, Washington, D.C. 20036. Listings should provide the following information: Name, Title of Dissertation, Institutional Affiliation (Department or Program, University); Dissertation Supervisor; Date Completed; and a brief descriptive abstract (maximum 100 words). To facilitate follow-up for more complete information, please include a current address and telephone number.

Additional titles may be found in current volumes of other reference guides, including Dissertation Abstracts International (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microforms Services); American Historical Association, Doctoral Dissertations in History (Washington, D.C.: AHA Institutional Services Program); Modern Language Association, MLA International Bibliography of Books and Articles on the Modern Languages and Literature (New York: MLA); and Sociological Abstracts (San Diego, Calif.: Sociological Abstracts, Inc.)

Elizabeth S. Anderson. “Pirating Feminisms: Film and the Production of Post-War Canadian National Identity.” American Studies Program, University of Minnesota, September 1996.

This dissertation explores the problem of defining the culturally plural nation through a case study of the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), a state-funded agency formed in 1939. Focusing on Studio D, a feminists film unit formed at the NFB in 1974, I study the connection between Canadian national identity and cultural production, as well as interactions between gender identity and national identity. [End Page 447] Through a historical and cultural analysis of the discursive formation of Studio D, I argue that it has been both complicit in and potentially disruptive of discourses of nationhood, national identity, and national unity.

Bertram D. Ashe. “From Within the Frame: Storytelling in African-American Fiction.” American Studies Program, College of William and Mary, June 1997.

The purpose of this study is to explore the written representation of African-American spoken-voice storytelling in Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Toni Cade Bambara’s “My Man Bovanne,” and John Edgar Wideman’s “Doc’s Story.” This study examines the process whereby the narrative “frame” that historically “contained” and “mediated” the black spoken voice modulated and developed to the extent that by the late sixties African-American writers published stories and novels in an unmediated spoken-voice, effectively emerging “from within the frame.” The results of this study suggest that the African-American “discourse of distrust” was a factor from the earliest fictions and is still very much a factor today.

Thomas Augst. “Making Society Out of Books: Character, Self-Fashioning, and the Rhetoric of Market Culture in Nineteenth-Century America.” History of American Civilization Program, Harvard University, October 1996.

This dissertation analyzes the significance of reading for young businessmen in the antebellum, urban northeast from five distinct perspectives: the annual reports and policies of the New York Mercantile Library; the campaign waged in popular guide-books and periodicals to define business as a learned profession; Emerson’s later career on the commercial lecture circuit; habits of reading, writing, and conversation revealed in clerks’ diaries; and Melville’s story, “Bartleby the Scrivener.” Situating the intellectual practices of urban merchant clerks within a complex social context, the dissertation demonstrates how the concept of character became linked with a specific form of literacy, oriented to fiction reading and leisure, and it suggests why a distinctive kind of reading experience became integral, in liberal arts pedagogy, to ethical training for middle-class life.

Joe Austin. “Taking the Train: Youth Culture, Urban Crisis, and the “Graffiti Problem” in New York City, 1970–1990.” Program in American Studies, University of Minnesota, October 1996.

“Graffiti” writing emerged within Puerto Rican and African American neighborhoods during the late 1960s. Writing developed in dialogue...