The rapid development of the steamship, the railway, and everyday land vehicles in around 1900 in both Europe and the Malay world fueled the imagination of writers of British, Indonesian, and Malaysian fiction. With these vehicles incorporated into the narratives, characters experience mobilities that shape the discourse of self, empire, and nations. This dissertation considers such experience through a comparative study of British literature on one side, which consists of Joseph Conrad’s works and other adventure fiction, and Indonesian and Malaysian fiction on the other, which include first-generation novels, to gain a better understanding of their convergence and divergence. I argue that both British and Malay characters see the steamship as a tool to incorporate, to borrow from Edward Said, “abroad” into life at “home.” But while British characters use the steamship for the consolidation of the empire, Malay characters use it in the process of state formation that undermines the empire. Both British and Malay characters see the railway as an effective tool to modernize the Malay world especially through the discipline of time management. But while British characters move away from the railway tracks to push to the next frontier and expand the empire, Malay characters circulate, following railway routes to embrace, even though sometimes “mimic,” modernity and progress. Both British and Malay characters see everyday land transportation as a tool to measure civilizations through characters’ sense of speed. But while British characters use it to establish, to paraphrase from Homi Bhabha, “a fixity of identity” and separate European and Malay civilizations, Malay characters use it to imagine a hybrid world where different civilizations share a space. These converging and diverging ideas about mobilities in British, Indonesian, and Malaysian fiction are essentially the convergence and the divergence between colonial and postcolonial worlds.

Familial Narratives & Personal Heritage is a collection of four short biographies featuring my and my husband’s parents’ growing up in the 1970s and emphasizing the importance of personal ancestry. The project was completed in three phases. First, I interviewed each primary source and secondary sources to collect the necessary data. Second, I created outlines and wrote initial drafts for each parent. Third, I edited, polished, and added photographs to the individual stories and tied together the overall product with an introduction and conclusion that discusses the personal heritage aspect of the project. The overall message relates to the importance that our ancestry has to our own existence.

The archive has always been a central piece to William S. Burroughs’ generative legacy. I argue that the William S. Burroughs Papers accentuate the cut-up/fold-in as contingent on perception and a product of being-in-the-world, as described in The Third Mind and in interview. These experimentalist forms are noticeably replicated throughout the W.S.B Papers, and are a heuristic to his literary oeuvre: specifically, the relationship between word and image, and entering the “image” within his word. The cut-up/fold in methods are more than a literary device. They are captured throughout the archive as a rhetorical tool. As curator Robert Sobieszek observes that Burroughs introduced a new dimension into the field of writing (1996), this paper displays the visual overture of this new dimension accentuated via an interdisciplinary approach: Burroughs utilizes the fields of visual culture (with collaborator Brion Gysin) and photography to apply a replication of the cut-up (a literary form) to the image, illuminating newfound, semiotic pathways of visual communication. Through evidence of cut daily news, plural grids, and pantropic street photography, Burroughs’ new dimension germinates visually, and is a reflection of how and what Burroughs, one of the most profound authors of the 20th century, keeps in his field of view. In the W.S.B Papers at Arizona State University, the cut-up pattern, if cut and shot appropriately, is applicable to both word and image.

This thesis explores how to read the American experimental novel VAS: An Opera inFlatland, a collaboration between Steve Tomasula and graphic designer Stephen Farrell. VAS demonstrates how twenty-first-century tools and technology can construct a narrative that resembles the human experience shaped by contemporary tools and technology. VAS includes not only a conventional story line but also narrative elements outside the story line, such as collage material and a multimodality, all of which contribute to the novel’s emerging, posthuman narrative. The reading experience of the conventional novel is immersive; experiments with the novel disrupt the immersion of reading, and this disruption produces a presence: the reader becomes conscious of reading, of narrative structure, of the broken conventions, and even of the novel itself. Martin Heidegger’s analyses of tools and technology can elucidate how novels produce presence by breaking conventions, for conventions are like tools, and broken tools, such as a broken hammer, become present to the user that was a moment ago immersed in their use. The reading of VAS that results is two-fold: (1) a stylistic comparison of VAS and This Is Not a Novel by David Markson, two experimental novels that differ in the technology used and represented and, ultimately, the presence made, and (2) a reading of VAS that considers how the novel makes present its narrative dimensions, out of which emerges the novel’s narrative.