Department of English; program in Latino/a Studies

(Spring Resident 2025)

My dissertation explores how twentieth-century writers and artists responded to the limitations of a positivist-materialist worldview during the years preceding and decades succeeding World War II. I argue that one of the cultural catalysts for this transatlantic critique of materialism was the work of psychologist Carl Jung, whose research helped popularize pre-modern western and eastern ontologies in which mind and matter exist in essential relation. Influenced by Jungian psychology, figures ranging from Spanish painter Remedios Varo to Argentine writer/physicist Ernesto Sabato and Chicana writer/activist Gloria Anzaldúa recognized how regional and international catastrophes may in-part result from overestimating the possibilities of technology, materialist-science and consciousness, to the detriment of subjects deemed “irrational”—spirituality, emotion, dreams and religions. What do we risk by imagining ourselves and the world exclusively as mechanistic matter? My project shows how these and other artists creatively responded to this question in epistemologically and socio-politically salient revisions of Cartesian dualism.