Department of English

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The 20th and 21st century literary afterlives of Nathaniel Hawthorne
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2012) Kelly, Matthew; Beidler, Philip D.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
This project examines ways in which the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne has been appropriated, inscribed, and variously intertextualized in the writings of a collection of twentieth and twenty-first century authors. From William Faulkner's work in the 1920's to Jhumpa Lahiri in the new millennium, the project demonstrates Hawthorne's lasting impact on culture. Another thing this project demonstrates is that attempts to place Hawthorne at the center of a traditional "school" whose direction is unilateral are inherently limiting. This work examines Nathaniel Hawthorne's intertextual influence in the work of John Updike, William Faulkner, John Fowles, Maryse Condé, Suzan Lori-Parks, Jhumpa Lahiri and Bharati Mukherjee. By emphasizing an intertextual approach, this project demonstrates that once texts are placed in conversation, individually, those texts can never be read the same way again. Intertextualities move not just forward, but backward. They are not just Anglo-American but global. Finally, this project serves to remind us of the place of reading and writing about literature in our cultural lives. As a way to teach critical thinking, as a mode of understanding how we lived historically, how we live today, and how we may choose to live tomorrow, narrative matters.
After Mary Prince: navigating 'authenticity' in 20th-century diasporic women's migration narratives
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2009) Simmons, Kathryn Merinda; Beidler, Philip D.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
This project calls for a renewed consideration of Mary Prince's 1831 Caribbean slave narrative in critical readings of 20th-century women's migration novels. Specifically, I offer readings of how the signs "gender" and "labor" are strategically deployed and manipulated in contexts of migration. Such deployments and manipulations suggest that the notion of "authenticity," often used in feminist and postcolonial readings of women's narratives, is too narrow a construct to be as productive in literary scholarship as it has been assumed. To lend textual specificity to these elements, After Mary Prince examines the ways in which Prince's History establishes a precedent for 20th-century novels where migration shapes understandings of work and gender, effectively destabilizing labels of "authenticity." Published for the first time only two years before England put its 1833 Emancipation Bill into effect, Prince's narrative was both laden with the Anti-Slavery Society's editorial agenda and subjected to legal scrutiny that questioned the text's veracity as well as Prince's own "feminine" moral character. This series of textual and sociohistorical impediments is central to my consideration of agency and how it is simultaneously created and de-centered in 20th-century women's migration narratives. My focus lies within the Caribbean and the American South, where movement is cast in terms of escape and return, and where geographical context stages complicated formations of cultural expectation, memory, and identity. Specifically, in relation to Prince's History, the chapters focus on Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God; Gloria Naylor's Mama Day; Maryse Condé's I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem; and, as an epilogue, Edwidge Danticat's recent work The Dew Breaker. These texts perpetuate key questions of how gender and labor mutually construct, even as they struggle against, each other. This project contends that these narratives are useful counter-examples to current strands of race and gender theory that, even in the name of empowerment and liberation, maintain problematically singular tropes of "authentic" identity categories.
All about the Benjamins: the nineteenth century character assassination of Benjamin Franklin
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2011) Dixon, Charles Robert; Crowley, John William; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
Early in his Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin proclaims that the chief benefit of the autobiographical form is that it affords one the opportunity to replicate oneself. In his self-replication, Franklin creates an American mythos of success that shaped America's imagined nationalist identity. Franklin's construction of the American success hero was informed by his philosophy of tangible character-building via the traits we traditionally associate with Franklin, such as industry and frugality. Yet, one of the most evident, but perplexingly overlooked features of Franklin's Autobiography is his extensive use of irony as a rhetorical and literary device. Franklin's use of irony indicates an awareness that his hero was first and foremost a written creation, which infuses his narrative with a complexity that belied the matter-of-fact prescriptions for success lying on its surface. Over the course of the nineteenth century, autobiographical emulators of Franklin appropriated his narrative to suit their own purposes, ignoring or suppressing his irony in the process. These appropriations result in a fracturing of Franklin's original character into multiple Benjamins. Franklin becomes, then, not just his own creative project, but a national creative project. This dissertation presents a lineage of Franklins created by the multiple appropriations of his story over the nineteenth century, tracking how each replication of him participates in the reshaping of the Franklinian hero into a kind of synecdoche that denies the complexity and irony present in the original sources, thus "assassinating" the original Franklinian character and, in the process, the early American concept of "character" itself.
Beyond nostalgia: a walking guide to American small-town literature, 1940-1960
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2017) Booth, Nathanael T.; Whiting, Frederick; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
Typically, the small town in fiction is critiqued—or, at worst, ignored—as a form of nostalgia. Readers seem to go to small-town fiction as a means of seeking safety and escape from the pressures of Modernity. For some critics, such as Ryan Poll, this safety is dangerous, the small town an ideological construct which masks the workings of American imperialism. I argue that, to the contrary, the small town serves as a model in which authors examine the tensions inherent in American life. To say that a thing is a model is not to say that it is an ideal. Rather, as with scientific models, authors create arenas in which they can test American ideas and ideals. This dissertation focuses on the years during and following World War II, a time in which America found itself thrust decisively onto the world stage. At precisely the time when America was firmly established as a world power, authors writing about the small town used this national-imaginary model as a way of critiquing the strengths and weaknesses of the American experiment. My analysis is arranged spatially. Each location in the small town—Main Street, the church, the courthouse, the outskirts and the graveyard—are places of tension, places in which the ambiguities and anxieties of America at mid-century are played out. By examining the small town as such a model, the ways in which the small town functions as something beyond nostalgia become clear—nostalgia, in a redemptive sense, becomes a creative and interrogative force in American literature.
Black women as monuments in Nella Larsen's Quicksand
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2015) Barksdale, Nadia Ashae; Manora, Yolanda M.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
Given examples such as the Statue of Liberty and various Civil War monuments to the Confederate “Lost Cause,” it is clear that many monuments rooted in the American landscape take the form of the female body. I propose that this public prevalence translates into a rootedness in the American consciousness as well. With monuments, we honor the past and attempt to make permanent the ideologies that fit with and bolster our collective memory. This collective memory is, of course, a testament to the greater hegemonic forces that structure societies. Thus, marginalized bodies are often not inscribed within this narrative. Women’s bodies, however, are used to convey these hegemonic, masculine-centered ideologies in the form of monuments. Because this phenomenon is so present in the American (sub)conscious, I argue that such consciousness bleeds into the literary realm. This thesis attempts to make sense of the process of monumentalization and its deleterious effects on women, who, because they resemble such monuments, are subject to this process. As men construct physical monuments on the landscape in order to bolster their own masculine-centered power structures and ideologies, so do they attempt to construct femininity in such a way that achieves the same effect in every day life. I use Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel Quicksand as an example of how men and masculine-centered forces attempt and, ultimately fail, to monumentalize living women, specifically women of color, who face a unique set of constraints on their sexuality and identity within society. With Helga Crane as an example of a woman who undergoes attempted monumentalization in several different environments and by several different men or male-centered societal forces, I examine the deleterious effects that monumentalization has on the woman’s ability to self-fashion her own identity.
Broken English, broken morality: English as virtue in Equiano's interesting narrative
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2015) Caddis, Samantha Simmons; Smith, Cassander L.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written By Himself, is one of the earliest and most widely published slave narratives. It is an abolitionist text as well as a conversion narrative. Equiano, a cultural hybrid, has two major conversions that mirror each other in the text: his conversion to evangelical Christianity and his conversion to speaker and writer of English. In early transatlantic literature, non-native speakers of "proper" English are often portrayed as virtuous while speakers of "broken English" are portrayed as barbarous. I argue that English language acquisition in early transatlantic literature is a significant marker of whether the audience is meant to view a person of color as a "savage" or as a "noble savage." If a character can speak and write English fluently, then he or she is likely to have assimilated in other ways as well, thus furthering the probability that he or she can fit the European idea of "good." If a character continues to speak "broken English," it is a sign of resistance to English colonization and, thus, "bad" moral character. I also argue that Equiano uses his newfound religion and language to establish himself as a moral authority on slavery. By convincing his English readers of his conversion to both Christianity and English, he is able to situate himself in the sympathetic "noble savage" category, thus garnering sympathy for his abolitionist cause.
The constitutive relationship between race and disability in African American literature: a Black critical disabilities studies approach
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2017) Steverson, Delia; Harris, Trudier; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
In this project, I examine what disability scholars such as Ellen Samuels, Nirmala Erevelles, and Cynthia Wu label as the “constitutive relationship” between race and disability, meaning that race informs disability in the same way that disability informs race. The relationship between the two categories of difference is interconnected, yet seldom does black literary studies engage a disability studies praxis and rarely does disability studies engage with African American literature. I formulate a theory of reading race and disability as it pertains to the fiction, authors, and the larger African American and disability communities and strive to reconcile the overlooked, yet imperative, relationship between the two categories of difference. By using a Black Critical Disabilities Studies Approach, as I label it, my project breaks down the ways in which African American authors and scholars use disability as a metaphor for race, usually carrying a negative connotation. Not only do I engage the rhetorical strategies of disability in African American literature and scholarship, but I also employ a historical materialist lens to explore how, through the brutal system of slavery, the black body becomes the epitome of the disabled figure. Finally, I argue that using a Black Critical Disabilities Studies Approach allows for nuanced ways of reading African American literary texts, especially in terms of African American identity.
A Daoist perspective on George Oppen's poetry and poetics
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2016) Yang, Xiaosheng; Lazer, Hank; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
I use Daoist principles of ontological simplicity and the unmediated relationship between man and the ten thousand things to analyze George Oppen’s poems and poetics. First, I conduct a survey of the current state of American poetry studies and Oppen studies in China. Second, I examine Oppen’s poetics of “a language of silence.” Third, I seek the compatibility between the two Daoist principles and Oppen’s poetic philosophy of silence and clarity. Fourth, I interpret Oppen’s representative poems, particularly his only long poem, “Of Being Numerous” through a Daoist perspective. Finally, I analyze two Chinese scholars’ translations of the first section of “Route,” and I also give an account on how I translate “Of Being Numerous” into Chinese.
Disjunctive nationalisms: the creation of the literature of the United States
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2016) Crawford, Benjamin Darrell; Beidler, Philip D.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
Throughout the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the American Republic grew both in population and cultural productions in diverse efforts to answer the nation’s questions of self-identity and direction. Poets from across diverse political, gendered, theological, and racial perspectives sought to answer those questions in disjunctive ways by using both the imagined author and the text as an imagined community as the bases for building their respective visions of American national identity. With the text as an imagined community, authors constructed interconnected literary communities not only around specific texts, but also around particular ideas and visions for the American nation. The ability to use texts as the creations of the reading public’s imagination became avenues for communicating responses to, and visions for, the nation which became reality with the publication of each new work. The constructions of these poetic visions occurred simultaneously with use of the imagined past, the imagined present, and the imagined future as avenues for exploring and communicating a variety of alternative national paths as each poet sought to prioritize her or his own voice in the cacophony of a developing American literature. The evolution of American literature as an artifact of the development of the American nation demonstrates the use of chronotopic applications of disjunctive nationalisms across time periods ranging from the deeply ancient (almost timeless in The Anarchiad), into the contemporary swirl of the political and cultural troubles of the early republic, and on into the (occasionally Millennial) infinite future of the nation. These applications came as responses to the call for a national literature, as well as to a society in a constantly fluctuating sense of national identity through its struggles for independence and sustainability in the face of challenges from within and without. The imagined past was used by such poets as Joel Barlow and Timothy Dwight as they established a deeper past for the American nation that went beyond colonial histories, suggesting the nation’s roots were at least as deep as those of European nations. This work to use an imagined American past is itself a way of constructing an American literary tradition that, despite drawing on Old World genres and forms, allows for an expansion of what John Shields has termed translatio cultus. Through observing the use of the imagined past, present, and future, my dissertation expands on Shields’ idea to demonstrate that chronotopic applications were essential in the reworking of Old World stories in a New World context. Rather than simply providing re-articulations of Old World ideas as Shields suggests, chronotopic applications permitted early national American authors to respond to and expand visions of nationalism in the new nation. The imagined present provided authors with the ability to readily demonstrate their responsiveness to the currents of culture by implementing poetic responses to current events that both responded to, and reshaped, contemporary events in ways that allowed those poets to appropriate the imagined present in the construction of disjunctive nationalisms. Joel Barlow, Philip Freneau, John Trumbull, and Phillis Wheatley, among others, responded to current events to demonstrate the pliability of the present when left to a literary lens, suggesting to contemporary readers the relevancy not only of each author’s voice specifically, but of the importance of literature more generally to the national experience. The imagined future allowed authors to adopt the role of national seer and declare future glories for the American nation politically, economically, and socially. The bases for these nationalistic visions ranged from Christian eschatology to humanistic deism, but almost always held forth the hope that the American nation would progress beyond its struggles of the late 18th century into a peaceful and prosperous future that presented America, and its governmental structure, as models for the rest of the globe. Through the imagined past, imagined present, and the imagined future, poets of the early national period used their texts as imagined communities that created and responded to disjunctive nationalisms from diverse perspectives that reflected the disjunctive nature of the early American republic.
“Disorder in the woods, trees down, new paths needed”: the wild man and child of God
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2019) Grinbergs, Iain; Crank, James A.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
In criticism of Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God, there is a tendency to portray Lester Ballard as inevitably monstrous. While numerous critics have acknowledged Lester’s humanness, the moral ambiguity of Lester is greatly diminished after their discussions of his crimes. This essay differs from those essays in that I emphasize Lester’s moral ambiguity through utilizing the mythical Wild Man. To do this, I draw on Hayden White’s discussion of the Wild Man in his book The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism. The Wild Man is inextricable from his environment, the wilderness, and Lester, too, becomes inextricable from the wilderness after he devolves into a Wild Man-like figure. But Lester—importantly—retains his humanness, however diminished. He is therefore what I term a quasi-Wild Man. In highlighting Lester’s moral ambiguity, the ambiguity of Sevier County’s wilderness is evident; the wilderness can accommodate the desires of both man and monster.
Elsie Dinsmore revisited: the utility of an outcast series
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2013) Farris, Kimberly Paige; Beidler, Philip D.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
In this thesis, I argue that Martha Finley's Elsie Dinsmore series (1867-1905) deserves to be reconsidered for its potential utility in the broader arena of American literature. The series, popular during the latter half of the nineteenth century, is the special object of critical scorn amongst modern scholars despite having experienced a revival in popular circles. While other formerly-sidelined books, such as Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850) and Maria Susanna Cummins' The Lamplighter (1854), have been reclaimed through sustained feminist scholarship, the Elsie series remains largely blacklisted from academic conversations. Scholars such as Nina Baym and Jane Tompkins, who worked to bring respect to female writings from the 1850s and 1860s, drew a sharp distinction between fictions written for adult audiences, like The Wide, Wide World and those written for adolescents, like Elsie Dinsmore and Little Women (1867) - a distinction that has caused juvenile fiction to be largely omitted from canon expansions benefitting adult domestic fiction. I argue that the Elsie Dinsmore series has a value within the American canon by acting as the best example of transitional literature between adult domestic fiction and the girls' series books that dominated the end of the century. To develop this argument, I first examine the textual and cultural factors that have contributed to Elsie's omission from academic conversations. I then examine the extent to which the Elsie series participates in tropes of adult domestic fiction and in tropes of girls' fiction to situate the series within the progression of American female writing in the nineteenth century. I contend that the Elsie series can make a valuable addition to courses on the development of female writing in America by acting as prime examples of texts that participate in both adult and juvenile genres.
Evil men
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2009) Wennermark, Erik; Martone, Michael; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
A collection of short stories interested in the nature of evil as it relates to the formulation of masculine identity. As means of this exploration, the collection engages a multitude of forms and narrative styles, as well as endeavors to build a broad cultural framework for storytelling.
From architecture to archetype: space and self in suburban literature
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2017) Wells, Matthew; Whiting, Frederick; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
My project examines the complex correlations between architectural changes in the suburban home and representations of the suburban man. For years, these ideas have been discussed separately, but I forward a reading that presents architecture and archetype in concert. My project focuses on architectural changes to the suburban home and how those changes affect middle class anxieties of the midcentury. To further my argument, I rely on twentieth century suburban literature, starting with Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt and ending with John Cheever, Richard Yates, and John Updike. By comparing literature and architecture, I highlight the cracks in the monolithic image of the suburban man in media. To identify shifts in his character, I study the suburban man’s home. Material and architectural changes to the suburban home create specific zones within the house. For this project, I have designation the bedroom, office, living room, lawn, and kitchen as the key spaces to understanding the suburban man. The suburban man responds to the changing issues of his time, and the design modifications in the twentieth century work in tandem with the nuanced changes of the archetype. The suburban man performs a different identity dependent upon the room he is in, and as the rooms change, so does the suburban man. Despite his attempts to adapt, economic, social, and architectural changes leave him grasping for an identity that is no longer relevant to a world in which he lacks total control over his social and occupational life.
[from The technical manual of use]
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2010) Weinstein, Adam; Martone, Michael; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
This is a collection of short, surrealist fictional essays. They describe the world as it once was--or maybe as it once will be.
Head down eyes lowered mouth open
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2010) Wingard, John; Rawlings, Wendy; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
Matthew Mathers is an aging game show host for the local scholastic competition, In It to Win It. Faced with the prospect of being replaced by a younger host to boost ratings, Matthew loses both his public and personal personas that were dependent upon this professional identity. The story follows the deterioration of Matthew's self perception and connection to reality as he struggles to understand who he is in the absence of a societal definition. To combat this loss, Matthew relies upon constructing new ways of organizing, engaging with, and re-imagining the world. What he discovers is that his efforts to regain a strong sense of self through memory, experience, and story do not allow him to recapture knowable truths about either himself or the world he inhabits.
Hemingway and the textual struggle of paternity
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2012) Schuver, Allison Rose; Beidler, Philip D.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
Ernest Hemingway bears the legendary reputation of a hyper-masculine hunter, drinker, and womanizer, though much criticism has sought to complicate notions of gender in the author's life and fiction. This research project considers fatherhood in particular, one aspect of masculinity that was never easily-defined for Hemingway. Hemingway's fiction frequently has autobiographical roots, and his writing reflects his own obstacles with transferring from the role of a son to the role of a father. Writing as a way "to get rid of it," as Nick Adams does in "Fathers and Sons," Hemingway wrote again and again of his conflict with being a father and being a son, but never seemed to overcome his struggles or find his separate piece. Troubled by his father's suicide, the stunted rearing of his sons, and a tumultuous relationship with his youngest, cross-dressing son Gregory, Hemingway makes fatherhood remarkably present in several texts that span the decades of his career. He was known to his friends and even the public at large as "Papa," but this identity is constantly muddled and strained in his writing. This project pursues Papa Hemingway in four texts with particularly rich paternal content: "Fathers and Sons," major sections of Islands in the Stream, "I Guess Everything Reminds You of Something," and "Great News from the Mainland." Hemingway's real-life relationships with his father and his sons were filled with hardship, confusion, and self-doubt, but the repeated reworking of father-son relationships in these texts offers the potential for healing, even if this healing is simply fiction.
“How many more are there? How much longer is this going on?”: eugenic discourse and themes in Faulkner’s snopes trilogy
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2021) Wesley, Shelby Miranda; Crank, James A.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
William Faulkner’s Snopes trilogy (comprised of The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion) follows the rise of the Snopeses, an impoverished white family that moves into Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, and begins to replace the area’s aristocrats. It is remarkably easy to read the Snopes trilogy as an epic saga primarily revolved around social climbing and class anxieties, but a reading such as that must take into account how the socioeconomic themes in the trilogy are intersected and influenced by eugenic discourse. This thesis argues that, in all three novels, Faulkner engages in eugenic characterization, rhetoric, and language and portrays eugenic situations in order to capture the zeitgeist of the American eugenic era and expose eugenic discourse as illogical and potentially dangerous. While Jay Watson believes that eugenic discourse simply “represented a complex, ambiguous cultural legacy for Faulkner” and that Faulkner may have had complicated sentiments regarding the eugenics movement, this thesis will establish the idea that the Faulkner that appears in the Snopes trilogy is staunchly critical of eugenic ideology and continuously warns the reader of the folly and danger that lurks within it (J. Watson 53). A thesis of this sort is especially relevant today since the eugenic panic is just now reemerging into the public consciousness after years of being a distant memory avoided by history teachers who feel pressured to obscure one of America’s darkest moments.
Hybrid aesthetics: ambivalence, blues, and spirituals in African American novels
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2012) Jones, Donnie; Manora, Yolanda M.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
This dissertation, "Hybrid Aesthetics: Ambivalence, Blues, and Spirituals in African American Novels," examines the use of music in novels and its effect upon the lives of miscegenous and/or hybrid characters. The goals of my research are to theorize and understand hybrid music, interrogate psychic trauma, and explore the ambivalence of miscegenous and/or hybrid characters. This work explores the concepts of ambivalence, which is borne in hybrid and/or miscegenous characters and blues in four African American novels. The protagonists in the texts embody an ambivalence which is akin to Du Boisian double-consciousness which forces African Americans to view themselves through the eyes of others or as the world sees them. In other words, ambivalence is an intensified form of double consciousness because the protagonists are not just African and American, but they are part Anglo-American. I argue that the ambivalence of the protagonists hinders their development and move towards acceptance of their racial and sexual identity. Within in research, I demonstrate ways in which blues can be read as a metaphor for trauma and identity issues. I seek to provide a new approach to the use of music in novels. The foundational argument of my dissertation is that the ambivalence of miscegenous and/or hybrid characters is linked to the blues.
Imagining the South: the function of “Dixie” in the United States from 1960-2017
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2019) Murray, William P.; Harris, Trudier; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
This project takes an interdisciplinary approach and explores how the United States used the “South” to protect and project imagined white innocence from 1960-2017. The dissertation intersects with other Southern-focused monographs, such as Scott Romine’s Real South (2008), Leigh Anne Duck’s The Nation’s Region (2006), Trudier Harris’s The Scary Mason-Dixon Line (2009), and Zachary Lechner’s The South of the Mind (2018). I build on their foundation and explore how the United States employs ever-evolving strategies to preserve notions of its own goodness. My work also participates in larger discussions on critical race theory, postmodernism, and metamodernism – engaging books such as Carol Anderson’s White Rage (2016), Grace Elizabeth Hale’s Nation of Outsiders (2010), and Jeffrey Nealon’s Post-postmodernism (2012). The chapters, together, illustrate how the nation arrives in the twenty-first century at a crossroads, where it can either, once again, turn to narratives affirming white innocence or can try embracing a new kind of community – one that is built around accounting for the past and acknowledging still-present injustices.
Intoxicated pilgrims in America's early atomic age literature
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2021) Kline, Erik; Bilwakesh, Nikhil; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
This dissertation has three primary concerns. 1.) How did the military-industrial complex affect an alienation of religious or spiritual feeling in the United States during the early- to mid-Cold War? 2.) How did countercultural authors of this period seek to ameliorate this alienation through both metaphysical and narcotic pursuit? 3.) How do they represent their experiences and beliefs as an interaction with various literary traditions? I argue that in the wake of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, American cultural production experienced something like a spiritual malaise, and that some American writers responded to this ethos by pursuing religious experience through travel and chemical intoxication. In turn, they represent these visionary and ecstatic experiences through textual experimentation, including mythmaking, nonlinear sequencing, and incorporation of word-image. Looking primarily at the works of Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), William S. Burroughs (1914-1997), and Ram Dass (1931-2019), I argue that these writers represent an archetype I call the intoxicated pilgrim. While the archetype appears perennially across literatures, it experienced something like a renaissance in the early Cold War years, as new narcotics became more widely available, intra- and intercontinental travel more efficient, and social tastes more middlebrow. These writers worked to reshape religious experience and American identity, offering readers new avenues for spiritual meaning-making.

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