Aspects of the minor: Deleuzian approaches to Carolyn Chute, Peter Greenaway and Suzan-Lori Parks

This dissertation assesses and enacts potential effects that the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze might have upon literary and cultural theory. Chapter-length readings of the three diverse, contemporary artists listed in the title---a novelist who writes in the mode of social realism, a technologically inventive filmmaker and an experimental playwright---demonstrate that Deleuze's pluralist ontology complements actual artistic practice without exclusively sanctioning only certain styles. Chapter One provides a selective overview of Deleuze's philosophy and argues that a Deleuzian criticism encourages a return to style as a focus of criticism while retaining notions of "engaged" art. Deleuze's concept of the "minor" may be seen as the fulcrum of his philosophy in its practical mode. "Minority" writing (which may, but need not, refer to racial or ethnic minorities) operates outside established traditions and works against a common sense understanding of the world that posits a universal subject and perceives in terms of stability and identity rather than process and becoming. Chapter Two explicates Parks's deterritorializing use of language. An extended reading of Venus demonstrates how a Deleuzian approach can work in tandem with other critical approaches. Chapter Three reads Prospero's Books as a minorization of Shakespeare's The Tempest. The rest of the chapter focuses on the non-representational aspects of Greenaway's cinema. While acknowledging Greenaway's modernist and postmodernist affinities, I see his work as a radically textural cinema of ceaseless interrelationality and becomings. Chapter Four considers to what extent a Deleuzian criticism is compatible with social realism in general, and with the protest novel in particular. Chute's ambitious novel, one of contemporary literature's most powerful attacks on contemporary capitalism in the United States, both represents and embodies a potential "minority becoming." A close reading of Merry Men locates this "becoming" in both form---for example, the use of free indirect discourse and language that "stutters"---and content.