@article{TheDisciplinesofDiplomacy:Ethics:1576,
      recid = {1576},
      author = {Chia, Darrel Kwong Yung},
      title = {The Disciplines of Diplomacy: Ethics, Publics, Economics  1899-1919},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2018-08},
      pages = {215},
      abstract = {This dissertation focuses on canonical literary and  political texts that thematize Euro-American diplomacy from  the turn of the 20th century up to the Versailles Treaty at  the end of the First World War. It situates these texts as  responses to their geopolitical moment, and the  transformations of the “new diplomacy” into a modern  discipline supposedly characterized by democratic  transparency, bureaucratic centralization, and the  institutions of liberal international consensus. My central  argument is that these texts outline an alternative  understanding of diplomacy that departs from its officially  mandated form as an emanation of raison d’etat, by turning  instead to reconfigure diplomacy and its subjects in terms  of ethics, publics, and economics. 

This argument extends  John Marx’s claim that fiction can pose experiments in  democratizing expertise in the project of administration,  by considering how memoir, ethnography, and political  pamphlets also draw on these resources of fiction. In  addition, it contributes to critical perspectives on how  literary fiction engages with assumptions about the binary  opposition between the state and the individual (the  subject for instance, of the volume Contemporary Literature  and the State edited by Matthew Hart and Jim Hansen).

In  Chapter One, I read The Education of Henry Adams alongside  Adams’s Tahitian Memoirs and his letters from the Pacific  as responses to the formulas of significant action and  civic character encoded in Euro-American imperial public  discourse. Chapter Two connects the delegation of  subjective agency in Henry James’s The Ambassadors to the  novel’s political edges, in large part, through an analysis  of its peculiar management of scenes of privacy and  publicness. Finally, Chapter Three considers the language  of John Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the  Peace, particularly the movement between its seemingly  paradoxical insistence on both occulted agency and black  letter literalism, through Keynes’s attention to the  mediating work of conventions - across genres, customs, and  value.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1576},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.1576},
}