Date of Award
2026
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy in English
Department
English and Creative Writing
First Advisor
Ryan Trimm
Abstract
In an exploration of the dimensions of speculative fiction, which is a prominent cultural and academic apparatus wanting definition in the twenty-first century, this dissertation examines the speculative mode of the image in various transatlantic novels, ranging from J. G. Ballard’s Crash to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The image in itself is a multivalent term that warrants analysis. As a concept, the abstract nature of the image serves to destabilize reality. It is always in conversation with the notions of reality. Indeed, images inform our senses of reality. In part, they constitute our social forms. This relationship only becomes more intensified as we move forward in time. As such, thinking about the image broaches many conversations. For instance, as a central object of analysis guiding the eye of my close readings, I investigate how the appearance of the image broaches sociopolitical conversations regarding consumerism, race, gender, sexuality, and trauma. In the speculative novels at hand, images serve as symptoms that allow the diagnosis of issues related to these topics. Moreover, this critical lens revolving around the image is in itself speculative, as the rich etymology of the term suggests that speculation seeks to make meaning at the intersection of the visible and invisible, the concrete and abstract, or the empirical and philosophical.
In light of this, my investigations of the role of the image in the novels at hand also amount to a demonstration of speculative philosophy. Thus, in literary ways, the novels at hand perform speculative philosophy. Not only do they self-reflexively destabilize reality via non-mimetic devices characteristic of speculative fiction, but they offer sophisticated forms of speculative theory that destabilize certain social forms. J. G. Ballard’s Crash, for instance, offers a view of spectacular or consumer society that diagnoses the diabolical ways that images overlay the realities of gender and sexuality. They become tied to the logic of consumption. I extrapolate this notion of the image constituting reality in my second investigation of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, in which I consider how an imagistic mode of projection lies in part at the root of white racism toward African Americans in the United States. This form of dehumanization cast upon the unnamed narrator in Invisible Man, which he resists via his own speculative power of imagination, appears likewise in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In each case, this evil form of power becomes defamiliarized, and therefore diagnosed in its constitution’s reliance on the image. As a form of power, such racist dehumanization attempts to naturalize itself. It masquerades under the sign of the real. Sethe’s plight involves uncovering the way that she has been influenced by such a rhetoric, as it underlies her trauma. Something futurial beyond the destabilization of reality and its diagnosis emerges in Beloved as such in terms of the way that it speculates on the past to construct a sense of possibility via communal recuperation. Overall, therefore, while the speculative mode of the image veritably diagnoses the ills of society, it remains that the speculative also means to subvert dogmatic forms of power in doing so.
Recommended Citation
Connors, Steven, "THE SPECULATIVE MODE OF THE IMAGE: DESTABILIZING REALITY IN CRASH, INVISIBLE MAN, AND BELOVED" (2026). Open Access Dissertations. Paper 4577.
https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/oa_diss/4577