Misfit minorities: resisting uplift in twentieth-century fiction

My dissertation develops the concept of the misfit minority, a literary sensibility emergent in the twentieth century, which enacts an ethos of resistance to collective uplift, bourgeois respectability, and liberal personhood. This sensibility is shaped by the experience of double exile: from majority culture and cultural identity. Such misfit outlooks represent a continuing yet under-acknowledged and under-theorized challenge to late-modern identity movements and liberal society. “Misfit Minorities” is devoted to making visible the diversity of political and ethical claims made by minoritized authors of modernist and postmodern literary fiction, and to rethinking the normal ranges of agency and political norms within a context of resistance to these norms. My interest in advocating for the literary-cultural narratives of misfit minorities is in service to a “queer” or non-normative vision of collectivity that allows for the ugly feelings, and the figures for such feelings, that are disowned by modern minoritarian norms of uplift and noble resistance to majority culture, rather than complicity with it. Misfit minorities are haunted by the false universals of social privilege: they remind us of those who remain in the shadows, whose tongues remain tied, which is why we should look for them, listen to them, and understand them.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Octavio Rafael Gonzale