This bold new theoretical study explores dissident subjectivity, that is, the struggle for unique authorial identity in American literary discourse that has existed, according to David Jarraway, since the Romantics. From Emerson's Experience remarking upon the focal distance within the actual horizon of human life to Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize address sanctifying the artist's sophisticated privileged space, American literature has continuously recognized a necessary distance between culturally accepted ideas of selfhood and the intractable reality of the self's never-completed construction...