Type of Document	Thesis
Author	Yadon, Benjamin James
URN	etd-04062008-195737
Title	On Shaving: Barbershop Violence in American Literature
Degree	Master of Arts
Department	American and Florida Studies, Program in
Advisory Committee	Advisor Name Title Dennis Moore Committee Chair John Fenstermaker Committee Member Timothy Parrish Committee Member
Keywords	Martin Heidegger Razor Don Delillo Herman Melville Ernest Hemingway Babo Benito Cereno Barber Barbershop Shaving Shave Cheryl Herr
Date of Defense	2008-03-24
Availability	unrestricted
Abstract This thesis identifies and examines the trope of barbershop violence in American literature. Drawing on a wide range of literary, scholarly, and historical documents, I explore the way that certain authors subvert traditional ideas about barbershop discourse and use the quintessential American setting as a stage for failed nostalgia, tragic miscommunication, and outbursts of irrational violence in order to craft fictions that call on readers to strive for a more authentic and humanistic identification with their fellow man. In the first chapter I take a close look at Herman Melville’s tableau of barbering in the 1855 novella Benito Cereno within a socio-historic context and then trace allusions to this seminal barbering scene in a number of works to show how many authors depict barbershop miscommunication and violence in order to highlight the racial disparities at the heart of American society. In Chapter Two I borrow the sophisticated methodology of James Joyce scholar Cheryl Temple Herr to examine contemporary American novelist Don DeLillo’s numerous depictions of the barbershop through the prism of Heideggerian ontology.
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