Figuring the political in nineteenth-century American literatures: A conceptual inquiry

This dissertation examines a tendency in contemporary American literary criticism to read nineteenth-century American literatures in terms of cultural belonging and agency. What goes under-remarked in such a tendency, this dissertation argues, is the exclusive, violent nature of "the political" as such, in particular its liberal-democratic variety. In order to return the political and its effects to the forefront of nineteenth-century literary studies, this dissertation has organized itself around four important politico-philosophical concepts: subject, citizen, sovereignty, and community. By interrogating these concepts, this dissertation shows how together they can be said to saturate today's understanding of what the political is. This interrogation is aided by close-readings of texts by key figures in nineteenth-century American literature---Nathanial Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, John C. Calhoun, and others---in tension with these concepts. The effect of these readings is the development of an alternative vocabulary and approach to thinking about the political in literature in general and nineteenth-century American literature in particular. Key terms to emerge as part of this alternative vocabulary include finitude, the unsacrificeable, political morality or the moral contract, immanence, and decision.