Date of Award

9-18-1998

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

English

First Advisor

Sandra Donaldson

Abstract

In the 1920s, a major paradigm shift occurred in the world of physics toward a more subjective view of the universe. Werner Heisenberg's 1927 Uncertainty Principle was especially important in this shift because he demonstrated that, in any experiment, the observer always has some kind of effect upon or "interference" with the thing being observed; thus, he complicated the boundaries that had been drawn between scientific objectivity and personal subjectivity, a position that has lead to a more uncertain knowledge of our world.This "uncertainty" has not gone unnoticed by literary critics and writers. Indeed, one of the more recent moves in criticism has been toward a more subjective approach to reading and writing about the literature one reads. In this dissertation, using Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle as justification and as focal point, I embrace the move away from a more "objective" and formal criticism toward this more subjective one.This choice has several consequences in the dissertation. First, I address it in my topics: the examination of some feminist claims about the uncertain (and, therefore, more open) "female style" of writing; uncertainty as moral principle in Melville's Moby Dick; the critical uncertainty in reading Dickinson's poetry; the instability of "the schizophrenic subject" in (some of) Woolf's novels; the sexual uncertainty (and sex role uncertainty) of some contemporary heterosexual women in works by Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Ntosake Shange.Besides my choice of topics, I also address this uncertainty in the experimental style I use in some pieces and in the very "critical-creative amalgam" structure of the dissertation as a whole. This structure includes critical literary essays, but also poems and autobiographical pieces, as well as pieces that combine elements of all of these as a purposeful way to blur genres and unsettle readers' expectations of them.By choosing uncertainty as both my theme and my style, I hope to leave readers with a more complicated understanding of the fluid relationship between text as object and reader as subject, a relationship that continues to change and shift, producing ever more possibilities of meaning(s).

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