Dr. John Caughey, Chair

504 Pages·2006·17.29 MB·English

by  Matthew Hill

ABSTRACT

Title of Document: WHAT FALLS BETWEEN

Neela Vaswani, Doctor of Philosophy, 2006

Directed By: Dr. John Caughey, Chair
American Studies Department

This is an interdisciplinary dissertation--in construction and content.
It is an exploration of in-betweenness in text and selfhood. Increasingly, as craft,
pedagogy, and scholarship evolve and change, a wider space opens for the blurred
areas between genres and categories. From “pure” history texts, to highly subjective
examples of 'life-writing,” narratives cross borders, blurring lines (such as “true” and
“false”) that once appeared stark and rigid.
Ethnography, life-writing, and fiction all concern themselves with creating
meaningful representations of “self” and “other” through narrative. Language,
structure, and voice--aspects of craft frequently corralled with creative writing--are in
fact equally important to, and co-dependent on, the “objective” reasoning of “fact”-
based writing and scholarship.
In its widest definition, this dissertation is a self-reflexive ethnography,
inhabiting various genres, crossing borders both creative and scholarly, that consider
the author's own blurred identity, and the borders of culture negotiated as an
individual and writer. At the core of this thesis is the assumption that personal
experience is a form of valid research. The value of the "I" is an overarching,
organizing principle of this text.
Each chapter addresses particular aspects of categorization: identity, genre,
and their interrelations, while certain key themes and questions (gender, ethnicity,
place, identity, the politics of words, language, craft, pedagogy, and aesthetics)
resonate throughout.
WHAT FALLS BETWEEN

By

Neela A Vaswani

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the
University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
2006

Advisory Committee:
Professor John Caughey, Chair
Professor Myron Lounsbury
Professor Sheri Parks
Professor Maud Casey
Professor Jaimy Gordon
© Copyright by
Neela A Vaswani
2006
Preface

There is no pure dissertation

Humans categorize. Everything around us, everything we are and produce.
Categorization is the methodology of our minds. We are incapable of doing
otherwise. It is biological
We know the result of sulfur and carbon mixed in a test tube. We predict
earthquakes. We locate a book at the library using Dewey’s decimals. We belong to
the American Studies Department at the University of Maryland, College Park in the
United States of America in the Northern Hemisphere, latitude 38 ° 59’ 12.77” N,
longitude 76 ° 56’ 31.05” W.
Categorization breeds meaning, community, knowledge, systemics. It is also
hierarchical. It breeds power and despair.
One must believe and participate in a system in order for it to continue
functioning.
To question systems is to question reality. To question systems is to revolt.
I am investigating this most human of things: categorization. The desire to
impose order on the world, on language; to classify trees, rainclouds, butterflies,
behavior, ourselves. I am exploring the longing, impulse, necessity for categorization
in order to better understand my craft and pedagogy (Literature, Cultural Studies,
Creative Writing) and my own identity.

Michel Foucault had a laughter that shattered. I picture him on an exercise
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bike, reading Borges, in French. One slug of laugh, and the window behind him
(framing the limb of an oak tree), breaks into sharp cantles of glass that sparkle and
embed in a cropped, white carpet. Michel does not stop pedaling. He is used to such
occurrences because he abhors the sheen of Plexiglas and laughs frequently.
In the preface to The Order of Things, he begins:
"This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that
shattered as I read the passage..."1
What caused Michel to erupt--a fellow writer, Borges, describing, "a certain
Chinese encyclopedia," in which:
"Animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c)
tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in
the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very
fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher,
(n) that from a long way off look like flies."2
Words that shatter—this, the power of narrative.
What was shattered for Foucault?
Preconceived notions of order, meaning, language, and thought.
So, what does it mean to categorize a person?
Imagine if Borges had written; Human beings are divided into (a) age at
which one's mother died, (b) over 10,000 dollars in bank account, (c) neat, (d)
birthplace of great-grandfather on father's side, (e) month in which first tooth
appeared, (f) favorite song, (g) love a woman, (h) skin the shade of a wild cherry tree,
(i) once-a-month bleeders, (j) kneel when praying, (k) nail biters, (l) afraid of cats,
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(m) vaccinated against polio, (n) having a bellybutton.

Categories are always imperfect, mutable (and slightly absurd). The walls of
categories, seemingly solid, are as permeable as the membranes of cells. When
writing, one flows through walls of genre. When writing, whether consciously or not,
one enacts genre-osmosis. There is no “pure” ethnography, “pure” fiction, “pure”
autobiography, “pure” history, “pure” science, “pure” dissertation. The values and
methodologies of each genre mingle and mix, dodge and weave.
And so the notion of category is complicated and illusory. As Trinh Min-Ha
writes: "Despite our desperate, eternal attempt to separate, contain and mend,
categories always leak.”3
Within all disciplines, scientific or otherwise, categorization exists. It is
necessary and restrictive. Vital and reductive. The antithetical nature of
categorization creates a flexibility and elusiveness which can be most accurately
(comfortably?) described in the language of contradiction or the language of
metaphor.
Wendell Berry has described genre as “both enablement and constraint” 4
Madeline Kadar says:
“Like water, genres assume the shape of the vessel that contains them. Like
water, genres tend to exhibit certain properties. But if you empty the
containing vessels, the better to see what’s inside, you are bound to be tricked.
Like water, the shape of genres does not really exist, and their essence can
never really be captured.” 5
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This is an interdisciplinary dissertation--in construction and content. It is an
examination of genre-blurring. It is a self-portrait. It seeks, as its thesis, to wander
across borders of genre and personal identity. It is an exploration of in-betweenness
in terms of text and selfhood.

I am half-South Asian (Sindhi, refugee), half-Irish American (County Kerry to
Hell’s Kitchen, third generation). I entered a PhD program in American Studies at
the University of Maryland with an MFA in Creative Writing (fiction) from a
nontraditional program: Vermont College’s brief-residency MFA. After I had
finished my coursework and comprehensive exams, my collection of short stories was
published (Where the Long Grass Bends, Sarabande Books, 2004), and I began
teaching at Spalding University’s brief-residency MFA in Writing Program (fiction).
So, during the course of my PhD in American Cultural Studies, I was writing fiction
and thinking about how to teach it. These interwoven aspects of scholarship all came
to bear on my dissertation.
Because of my bicultural, bilingual, bi’racial’ identity, because I float between
creative and academic realms, because I write in numerous genres, this dissertation,
as a reflection of its author, is a creature in-between. In form and content, it straddles
genre categories: ethnography, memoir, photography, poetry, fiction, essay, lecture,
biography, literary criticism, and so on. The hybrid form of this dissertation mirrors
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my own experience of moving in-between cultural categories as an individual. The
hybrid form of this dissertation is the point.
Although each chapter is a stand-alone essay, certain themes and questions
resonate throughout. For example, gender, ethnicity, place, and identity are taken up
in the form of a “traditional ethnography” in Chapter I (“Six of One, Half Dozen of
the Other,”) while they are approached through an imagined (part fictional) literary
criticism in Chapter X (“What Hands Are These? (I)”). The politics of words,
language, and aesthetics are taken up pedagogically in the form of a craft lecture
(delivered to MFA in Writing students at Spalding University) in Chapter III
(“Words, Words, Words”), and these concepts are revisited in Chapter IV (“Political
Flappings”) in the form of a personal-research essay that includes mini-biographies,
interviews, poetry, and photographs. Throughout the dissertation, ideas explored in
one chapter (and one genre) are picked up and examined in a different chapter (in a
different genre).
The form of this dissertation, I hope and intend, serves as both map and
example of how aspects of our separate genre methodologies can intermingle, cross-
pollinate, and lead us to a more inclusive version of narrative. Life-writing
(autobiography, memoir), ethnography, and fiction are all concerned with
constructing meaningful representations of “the self” and “other” in narrative form.
This dissertation attempts to explore the possibilities of interconnection between these
genres (and others), through a self-reflexive, creative, critical thinking “I.” I have
attempted to lay the self upon the page, and to treat it as other.
Throughout the construction of the thesis I paid close attention to language,
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structure, and voice, “experimenting” with all and treating them as equal to the
content, ideas, and scholarship of the piece. This bears repeating, as it is both a
central theme and motif of the work: language, structure, voice--aspects of craft
frequently corralled with “art” and “creative writing”--are herein equal to and co-
dependent on “fact” and “scholarship” (a note—I believe craft and art to be
scholarship, and scholarship to be craft and art. I see no divide between them).
In thinking through the topic of categorization, I considered both how it is
taught (to me, to children, to adults), and how to teach it—in its contradictory
complexity. I considered categorization as a reader, writer, student, teacher, member
of a given academic department (Cultural Studies, English, Anthropology, Creative
Writing), and as an individual (through gender, class, race, sexuality, religion, and so
on). I considered the pedagogy of categorization. Chapters Four (“Words, Words,
Words),” Six (“Lassoing Time and Space”), Eight (“Magical Realism”), and Nine
(“Stepping Into Character”) are transcribed lectures on craft and methodology,
initially delivered at Spalding University for MFA in Writing students (cross-genre—
fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction). In my lectures, I enact a type of critical
thinking, political approach (that I learned, and was first exposed to, in my American
Studies courses at University of Maryland) to creative writing. Since I am
investigating genre, craft, and methodology, I thought it vital to include a discussion
of my main genre--fiction--and to consider its methods and how I, personally, teach
them. All of these lectures also stem from the premise and belief that fiction has a
methodology as rigorous and scholarly as any other academic pursuit—that fiction is
a scholarly pursuit.
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