"Something which Abrogates": Eros, the Body, and the Problem of Liberation in Twentieth-century American Literature

My dissertation analyzes the intersection of Eros, the body, and racial and sexual violence in four major figures of twentieth-century American literature: William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, E. L. Doctorow, and Toni Morrison. I situate my argument within a psychoanalytic framework that politicizes Freud's account of the human body as a regulatory agent of Eros---the libidinal drive that encourages people to form loving bonds with others. The central questions I address are these: How do racist and misogynist social narratives thwart the human capacity to love? Can the body be a tool of resistance to these narratives, and if so, under what conditions is this achieved? Is liberation sustainable in a society still partially structured by racism and sexism? This project focuses on four novels---Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! , Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Doctorow's Ragtime, and Morrison's Beloved---that use America's racial and sexual political landscape as a backdrop for central episodes of murderous violence within familial or heterosexual love relationships. My analysis of the tension in these novels between violent manifestations of love's failure and utopian moments of physical and psychic liberation gestures toward a larger problematic of the racially charged matrix of love and violence in twentieth-century American modernism.