| This dissertation explores how the whole subject---purported to be a marker of normalcy, health, worthwhile humanity, and the goal to which all individuals have a right---is a notion with a troubled history. Examining the work of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Chester Himes, I trace the impossibility of maintaining a whole subject in the face of racial oppression. The concept of the whole subject is implicated too deeply in oppressive ideologies to remain useful as a goal in anti-oppression struggles. Drawing upon postmodern theories of subjectivity, feminist, queer, and anti-racist critiques of the subject, and current theories of cognition, I propose that the fragmented subject foregrounds the importance of negotiation as one of the processes of identity formation, both within a subject and between the subject and its social surroundings. Desire serves as the fulcrum for these processes, and articulates the relationship between negotiation and the performance of subjectivity. Having followed the thread of fragmented subjectivity as it conflicts with the whole subject in Wright, Ellison, and Himes, I then explore its use in the fiction of William Gibson and Octavia E. Butler, who suggest a different path to useful action. Gibson and Butler adopt fragmented subject positions in their fiction, demonstrating the importance of negotiation, desire, and fragmented subjectivity in finding paths to ethical action. |
