Masters Thesis

Literary subversions: the Enlightenment subject in Wheatley and Melville

In order to meet the requirements of the degree Master of English in Literature, this thesis discusses how the works of Phillis Wheatley and Herman Melville subvert Enlightenment tropes used in early American economic and political rhetoric to justify, naturalize, and perpetuate instrumentalization. Through analyzing how these subversions operate in relation to the tropes they deconstruct, the thesis advances a radically democratic aesthetic practice based on the production of polysemy and the wild proliferation of modalities of sameness and difference.

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