Student Abstracts 2014-2015

A Half-Century of Unreliability: The Effects of Genre and Structure on “Bonding Unreliability” in The Turn of the Screw and Lolita

This study, a Formalist critique of James Phelan’s theories of bonding unreliability, a subtype of unreliable narration, centers on Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898) and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1958). Phelan posits that Lolita is a prime example of his bonding/estranging unreliability dichotomy, yet never considers James’ text, which mirrors Nabokov’s in many ways. In James’s novella a governess narrates her erotically-charged experience with her young charges in a Gothic landscape which leads to the murder of a child; in Nabokov’s novel Humbert Humbert writes a confession/testimony detailing his sexual assault of Dolores Haze and the subsequent murder of Clare Quilty. Both texts exhibit unreliable narrators who create atypical relationships with children, and whose ethics are questioned by literary critics.

Phelan states that by including certain techniques of unreliability, authors are able to shift reader sympathies and ethical inclinations towards the morals of the unreliable narrator. While Phelan outlines these techniques, he does not acknowledge other factors that can either enhance or detract from bonding unreliability, such as genre and structure.

While The Turn of the Screw’s and Lolita’s narrators are similar, the genre and structures of these texts change the effect of bonding unreliability. James writes in the tradition of the Gothic, which allows the reader to interpret the text in this same tradition. The world that the governess creates is connected to previous worlds that were established in texts like The Castle of Otranto; thus, the reader can turn to these texts as a map for how to read The Turn of the Screw, lessening the bond between unreliable narrator and audience. However, Lolita takes the genre of realism and combines it with confession/testimony. The world that Humbert creates appears to be a familiar one, but is actually constructed entirely from Humbert’s point of view. The world is essentially a Humbert-tinted 1950s America, and in order to navigate Humbert’s fantasy, the reader is forced to accept Humbert as a guide. Even when the genre disintegrates into a dime novel, the reader remains bonded to Humbert.

The structures of the two texts affect the unreliable narration too. The Turn of the Screw employs a pendulum-like structure in which the text oscillates from presenting the governess as unreliable to presenting her as a credible source. Such an oscillation implies that the main tension of the text is actually the governess’s unreliability, putting the bond between the governess and the reader into question. The structure of Lolita is based on duality and doubles, and this doubling exposes multiple narrators in the text whose boundaries Nabokov does not make explicit. With this structure, Phelan’s analysis holds less weight.

This study of James and Nabokov is helpful in considering that theories of unreliability must look directly within the texts rather than trying to impose taxonomy on literature; theories that depend upon schematization begin to ignore the intricacies of the texts. No narrator works alone; they require other elements of the text to support or undermine the unreliability, and reflection on such elements are imperative when attempting to broadly discuss unreliability in literature.

A King of Infinite Space: The Textual and Spatial Management of Henry VIII’s Legacy

My thesis centers around three examples of Henry VIII’s historical presentation: Polydore Vergil’s The Anglica Historia, William Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, or, All is True, and Hampton Court Palace, a historic palace and museum. The media in which he is represented as a historical figure further affect how he is remembered: text, play, and artifact all play a role in the massive space that Henry occupies in the public memory. The three historical media integrate materiality, representation, and imagination to capture history and play with it, affecting how our own past is changed in the present.

The history text that I work with is a history book commissioned by Henry VII and Henry VIII, The Anglica Historia by Polydore Vergil (1512-1555). The Tudor dynasty tasked Vergil to legitimize the Tudor claim to the throne through the manipulation of the historical narrative. Vergil relies not just on the conventions of history writing, which legitimates itself with argument and sources, but also the conventions of early modern performance. Henry becomes a trope in a larger morality play on history, with Vergil playing director.

While Vergil’s performance is heavily controlled by his authorship in which he controls the text, a play is blank, an empty page awaiting the audience’s interpretation. In 1613, William Shakespeare wrote Henry VIII, or, All Is True. Henry’s history becomes a kinetic storytelling onstage, with actors, objects, and divided scenes all working to make historical events and characters bend to a dramatic structure. Performance forces the audience to imagine history, and thus the events and people are affected by the conditions of audience interpretation, understanding, and decision making.

As Henry is even more removed from his actual life from 1491-1547, he becomes fractured, expanded, and popularized. Museums expand on single artifacts, using objects to tell broader stories. These artifacts become icons or even relics when telling the story of a monarch. At Hampton Court Palace, Henry’s story becomes one of decadence as they display a highlight of their collection: a recreated crown. The static museum artifact fetishizes information and relies on both the historic space and the audience’s imagination to invoke history, isolating Henry’s history and condensing it into a single symbol.

The process of presenting history through material media, representation, and imagination is a larger process than restating facts or telling historical narratives. The various media through which Henry’s history is told expose the contemporary conditions in which the history is being retold. Through changes, new media, and various curated iconographic decisions, Henry VIII is expanded, simplified, fictionalized, but also complicated, lost, and refound over and over by different groups and through different historical ideas and sources. The process of making Henry is ongoing; our understanding of history is only maintained through the consistency of its changes.

Uncanny Others: Hypermasculinity in the Early Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway and Junot Diaz

This thesis examines Hemingway’s Men Without Women and Diaz’s Drown, each author’s first collection of short stories. These authors resemble each other in many ways: they write post-catastrophe trans-Atlantic stories, their semi-autobiographical protagonists struggle with understated psychological problems, and their male characters consistently have bad relationships with women and gay men. I argue that traumatic world events of the twentieth century, namely World War I and the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, shape men into over-masculinized individuals, valuing dominance, independence, and violence. In embracing hypermasculine modalities, that is, in disregarding any value for anything stereotypically considered “feminine,” men in these social settings are susceptible to repressing their feminine values which leaves them unable to understand women or gay men, as they perceive femininity and homosexuality as uncanny.

In the first chapter, I discuss Hemingway and ritualistic violence. Returning from WWI injured and suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, Hemingway writes many of his most famous man-stories describing bull-fights, hunts, and boxing matches, all of which constitute acceptable forms of controlled violence where hypermasculine men feel most at home. In contrast, he writes several stories dealing with real-life “fights,” taking place between individuals in everyday settings. In these cases, hypermasculine men fail because they cannot understand anything they have repressed, that is, anything concerning femininity or homosexuality.

In the second chapter I turn to end of the twentieth century and Junot Diaz. Here I examine the impact of hypermasculine cultural and social environments, particularly of the Dominican Republic and the New Jersey neighborhoods many Dominicans immigrate to. While characters may recognize the problems inherent in a society built on such a value system, they ultimately perpetuate those values, sinking into hypermasculine contradictions within themselves.

In conclusion, I argue that the short stories of Hemingway and Diaz represent twentieth century hypermasculinity as the result of psychological repression of the self. Therefore, when hypermasculinity comes into conflict, the individual feels that anything else is uncanny; that is, traditionally feminine aspects of the self such as empathy, love, and emotional intimacy are familiar, but repressed, and thus frightening. This means that not only women and gay men become others, but even one’s own fractured self.

Some Versions of Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century

Shakespeare’s plays have been edited since their initial publication in the late sixteenth century, but scholarly consensus dates the birth of the modern Shakespearean editorial tradition to the publication of Nicholas Rowe’s Works of Mr. William Shakespear in 1709. Nevertheless, modern editors take care to distinguish their work from the labors undertaken by Rowe and his immediate successors in the eighteenth century. Whereas modern editors produce a readable version of the most authoritative edition of a given play, Shakespeare’s eighteenth-century editors are supposed to have attempted to reconstruct the lost manuscript behind such an edition. Rather than defer to the authority of the quartos and First Folio, the eighteenth-century editors tried to recreate Shakespeare’s plays as he completed them and intended them to stand forever.

Acknowledging these editors’ interest in authority, this thesis investigates the cognitive processes that determined the content of their editions. In particular, it explores the relationship between an editor’s reading of the texts of Shakespeare’s plays and his editing of them. Although their work may be inflected by personal convictions and social concerns, Shakespeare’s eighteenth-century editors do not attempt to present a version of his plays that promotes a particular ideology; they strive to restore his original texts by relying on their personal understandings of his style. To examine their work closely is pursue the personal engagements that sculpted them, and to parse these engagements is to refine one’s understanding of the act of editing.

This paper is a study in reception. It examines several editions of Shakespeare’s plays produced during the eighteenth century, and demonstrates that they present the plays as they are read by the editor. Invoking the work of Roman Ingarden, it adumbrates the complex intellectual processes involved in the act of editing and the intimate relationship between reading and editing. It asks: What is the relationship between the earliest extant editions of Shakespeare’s plays and their eighteenth-century counterparts? What do the differences between these editions reveal about the editing of the plays? Should these editions be regarded as “authoritative”? How do the editors of these editions determine “authority”? Is an “authoritative” text of Shakespeare’s plays an objective category, or is it defined by the editor alone? In pursuing these questions, it elucidates the extent to which eighteenth-century editions present personalized versions of Shakespeare’s plays, the relationship between the editor and the edited, and the possibility of producing an authoritative edition of a copy-text.

More Will Be Revealed: Empathy, Storytelling, and Postmodern Addiction Networks in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest

Many late 20th-century postmodern novels can be characterized by their desire to diagnose the increasing alienation and anhedonia of the modern individual, whose emotional detachment often manifests as a fixation on commercial culture and, often, substance abuse. Though David Foster Wallace frequently uses the experimental form, syntactical complexity, and self-conscious irony that characterize many postmodern novels, his fiction is ultimately concerned with the exploration of “plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in US life.” He achieves this in Infinite Jest through his depiction of the culture of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and the many recovering addicts who seek acceptance and redemption through the act of storytelling. Wallace contrasts the mindset of the “hip, cynical” modern individual with that of the recovering addict who has chosen to “Come In” and get help from his similarly-afflicted, painfully empathetic fellow members, thereby creating a more humanist postmodern novel that “ask[s] the reader to really feel something.”

Drawing on Wallace’s own interviews and Jean Baudrillard’s theory of postmodern simulation, I first examine the condition of the cynical, anhedonic modern individual and his perverse desire for both intense experience and emotional detachment through substance abuse. In Infinite Jest, addiction is presented as the universal and equalizing affliction of modern life, an illness whose varied forms indicate our widespread desire to give ourselves entirely to a pursuit. As Wallace’s addicted characters suggest, the postmodern world is characterized by an intense desire to ease psychological pain and gratify one’s basic instincts for pleasure and reward, both of which are superficially (and often disastrously) achieved through the use of addictive substances. Once Wallace has established, through the vast network of characters and story arcs that crisscross the novel, his vision of the emptily addicted modern world, he is able to establish the world of AA as a space of nourishing and redemptive human connection.

I then explore the crucial role of storytelling to the process of addiction recovery, and the ways in which this narrative strategy is affirmed and enhanced by the ideas expressed in Walter Benjamin’s critical essay “The Storyteller.” For Benjamin, the role of the storyteller is rapidly diminishing in modern life, and with it our ability to convey “actual experience” and benefit from the wisdom contained therein. The world of Alcoholics Anonymous, in which addicts each tell their story to an audience of empathetic listeners, is seemingly one of the few remaining outlets for the communication of lived experience, a place where every addict is encouraged to “Identify” rather than “Compare” his story to another’s. In an era of increasing emotional detachment, self-conscious irony, and vapid commercial culture, Wallace’s A.A. shows us a space of unrestrained sentimentality and catharsis where every addict’s story becomes part of a broader psychosocial network. The similarities across addiction networks and lifestyles therefore invite us to consider the nature of addiction itself – its causes, psychological effects, and its apparent significance to the way that life is lived in the United States.

Applying the Face: The Theatre of Drag

Drag is a performative mode that stands adjacent to and yet is distinct from what one tends to consider ‘traditional theatre’ in the modern world.  Existing both on its own as a theatrical mode and within more conventional pieces as a theatrical device, drag (specifically male-to-female drag) draws upon dramatic tradition while simultaneously challenging the transformative and representational aspects embraced by contemporary Western theatre as essential and intrinsic.  While a performer in drag may seem to enter into the sort of devised persona typical of an actor’s transformation into character on the mainstream Western stage, this alternate persona fundamentally draws upon and exists in perpetual association with the performer himself, whose true “selfness” is maintained, always apparent, forever present.  Rather than attempting to disappear into the representation of some fictitious “other,” the drag queen embraces the liminal, the duality inherent within simultaneously being oneself and projecting the exaggerated femininity that is drag’s prevailing characteristic.  While this liminality exists within representational theatre, it tends to be either more subtle, as in the modern mainstream tradition of transformation (where the actor’s work is to depict as realistically and genuinely ‘true’ as he can a character within a fictive narrative) or else nearly absent as in the rigid Brechtian distinction between actor and character (where the actor demonstrates and does not embody his character).  Although distinct in their manner of representation, these theatres each emphasize the difference between the real and the fictional.  Drag, conversely, rejects that division, establishing the liminal threshold as a space that can be occupied and suggesting that truth exists on the threshold rather than simply on either side of it.  It does not transform, but instead showcases and comments on that authentic, unstable disarray lying within the performer as an essential element of his human condition.

Through analysis of the drag elements within Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (including the Theatre of the Fabulous embodied therein) and within The Foundry Theatre’s 2013 production starring drag performer Taylor Mac in Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan, this thesis posits that drag draws upon and concurrently reveals the individual identity of the performer; explores androgyny to expose the performativity of gender and thereby subvert gendered social roles; embraces the in-between, the unclear, the indefinable as humanity’s essential elements.  Drag is not a transformation; an anti-transformative mode, it is a revelation, an expression of self and humanity, and therein provides a model for other theatres whose emphases lay outside the realm of embodying a fictive other.

At the End, Hope: The Future of the Story as Argued by the Comics of Grant Morrison

The universe began with a bang.  A flash of red and blue.  In June 1938, DC Comics published Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Action Comics #1, which featured the first appearance of Superman.  In so doing, a new genre and a new medium came into being.  While comics had existed before Action Comics #1, Superman’s entrance marked the first time that such stories entered the cultural zeitgeist.  In the decades since, the American superhero comic has grown from an appendage on the organism of pulp fiction texts into a form all its own, complete with an internal history and schools of criticism.  However, despite this, superhero comics are still definitively a fledgling genre in a developing medium, where change is fast and constant and the possibilities for the future appear to be endless.

In his comics, Scottish writer Grant Morrison draws liberally from the comics canon established in the decades since 1938.  Morrison’s Final Crisisbrings all the major heroes from the DC Universe, including Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and The Flash, together in a cataclysmic event referred to as “the end of all stories.”  Their struggle takes place inside the Orrery of Worlds, where 52 parallel worlds with their own Supermen come face to face.  Meanwhile, Monitors, beings that exist “the Heart of Stories,” survey the events that unfold within the Orrery, much like the real life readers of comic books consume the events that occur within the pages of comic books.

Through an in depth analysis of The Filth, Final Crisis¸ Flex Mentallo: Muscle Man of Mystery, and the comics that inform them, I explore the way that Grant Morrison creates miniature worlds, both figurative and literal, within the main world of his stories in order to represent the symbiotic relationship between readers and storytellers.    In The Filth, Morrison argues that fiction is a form of wish fulfillment, where writers express ideas in their stories that they wish to see reflected in the future.  These stories then influence real change in the world as readers consume the story and spread the idea like a virus.  In Flex Mentallo, Morrison then connects this theory to comics history.  His take on the lineage argues that comics once influenced positive change in the real world, but since the dawn of the Dark Age of Comics heralded by Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, have negatively impacted societal development.  Finally, in Final Crisis, Morrison returns to the mainstream DC Superhero tradition, casting Superman as a universal symbol for hope that saves the multiverse from “the end of all stories.” Thus, Morrison ultimately calls for future writers to return to a message of hope, changing the world of the story and the world of the reader for the better.

How to Make a Monster: Reading Romantic Monster Literature through the Lens of Aesthetic Theory

“I compassionated [the Creature], and sometimes felt a wish to console him; but when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened, and my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred”—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (121)

“His guardians insisted upon his leaving [Lord Ruthven], and urged, that his character was dreadfully vicious, for the possession of irresistible powers of seduction, rendered his licentious habits more dangerous to society”—John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (250)

In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley creates a monster who is terrifying yet sympathetic. Even Frankenstein, who abhors his monster, admits that his feelings of disgust are mingled with compassion for the Creature. In contrast, the vampire Lord Ruthven from John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” inspires terror and desire instead of sympathy. Although Frankenstein (1818) and “The Vampyre” (1819) were published only a year apart, these two texts present divergent depictions of monstrousness: the Creature is pitifully sympathetic while Lord Ruthven is dangerously seductive. What allows the Creature to be a sympathetic monster while Lord Ruthven is a desirable one? I suggest that these differences could be understood through Romantic aesthetic theory. Drawing on definitions from Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and Victor Hugo’s “Preface to Cromwell” (1827), I use the Romantic aesthetic categories of the sublime, the beautiful, and the grotesque as a lens for exploring the divergent characterizations of the Creature and Lord Ruthven.

When Shelley first introduces the Creature, her animalistic and hellish language is remarkably similar to that which Hugo employs to define the grotesque. However, as the narrative progresses, Shelley highlights the Creature’s potential for sociality, which Burke argues is an effect of the beautiful. For Hugo, the fusion of the grotesque and the beautiful characterized the human condition—consistently torn between the beautiful soul and the grotesque body. In this way, Shelley’s dualistic portrayal of the Creature as an object of disgust and sympathy corresponds with Hugo’s conception of humanity’s eternal struggle. I suggest that Creature’s similarities with humanity juxtaposed with his exclusion from human society elicits sympathy for the monster and that Romantic aesthetic theory illuminates this source of sympathetic identification.

“The Vampyre” explores an alternate conception of monstrousness and Polidori’s language resonates with a different progression of aesthetics. At the beginning of the tale, Lord Ruthven is a mysterious socialite whose combination of terror and allure correlates with Burke’s depiction of the sublime. However, Polidori counters this image by underscoring Ruthven’s despicable qualities in a way that mirrors Hugo’s definition of the grotesque. I propose that Polidori’s unfolding depiction of Ruthven parallels a transition from the desirable sublime to the despicable grotesque, thus creating the seductive monster. By using Romantic aesthetic theory as a lens for Frankenstein and “The Vampyre,” I suggest that diverging depictions of monstrousness could coincide with specific combinations of Romantic aesthetic categories and hypothesize that such structures could be useful for the creation for future embodiments of monstrosity.

The Truth Amidst the Myth: America’s Arsenal of Contemporary War Writing

This thesis uses the current “golden age” of American war writing to reckon with the human costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. My analysis centers on three novels and a short story collection that have become integral to this flourishing canon of contemporary war writing: Ben Fountain’sBilly Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2012), Lea Carpenter’s Eleven Days (2013), Kevin Powers’ Yellow Birds (2012), and Phil Klay’s Redeployment (2014). All of these works are deeply concerned with how myth, trauma, language, and questions of ethics coalesce to form substantial obstacles to knowledge that make the American home front’s relationship to war strikingly distanced. I further support my readings of these texts with reportage, memoirs, documentary films, and feature films that have engaged with similar obstacles. My primary texts not only diagnose these persistent problems of knowing, but also provide strategies to confront them. I separated these strategies into four distinct tools: playing with myth, exploring and disturbing affective responses to war, using diverse literary strategies, and confronting readers and the civilian population with their own ethical response to these wars. The cumulative effect of writers using these four strategies is a fuller knowledge of these wars— one that resists reductive mythic narratives, has an affective spectrum, challenges linguistic evasions, and demands citizens take responsibility for their ethical relationship to war.

Within my introduction, I explore the problems of knowledge that are inherent to any representations of warfare—the effects of trauma on memory, war’s resistance to easy coherence—and argue that the current American war culture has presented a number of unique epistemological obstacles: extensive censorship, the destruction of military archives, the vague telos of these endless wars, the lack of a draft and how it exacerbates the gulf between veterans and civilians.

In my first chapter, I use Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk to establish the centrality of soldiers’ desire for communication. The second chapter of my thesis looks at Lea Carpenter’s Eleven Days and how it subversively punctures the mythos of soldiers. My third chapter on Kevin Powers’Yellow Birds explores how the affect of melancholy becomes a powerful regenerative tool. The final chapter of my thesis argues that Phil Klay’sRedeployment destabilises the privileged voices’ of veterans, in order to explore the tensions involved in communicating experiences of warfare.

In my coda, I use veteran writers’ reflections on American Sniper (2014) to explore how the debates that the film has provoked opened up a critical space for both veterans and civilians to engage with the legacies of these wars, yet the binaristic responses to the movie, ultimately, seem to have stunted more nuanced conversations. Finally, I argue that my primary texts, and the documentary film The Tillman Story (2010), provide far more thoughtful and dynamic tools for conveying a fuller knowledge of these wars than American Sniper.

When Ladies Meet Gossip as Subversive Female Speech among American Literature’s Finest Social Cliques

“All literature is gossip.”

Truman Capote, Interview with Playboy Magazine

Broken telephone is a schoolyard game in which a message is transmitted via whispers from one person to the next, often becoming distorted in the process.  Like broken telephone, gossip too is a means of discreetly passing a story that is almost certainly obscured in transit, and such transformation of plot and description may elucidate how we are to judge the gossiper and the gender, class, race, etc. he or she represents.  My thesis focuses on fictional works of American literature written by women, about groups of women.  Specifically, how women in a group interact with each other and gain or lose power via communication.  As we see in texts like The Women by Clare Boothe Luce and The Ladies of the Corridor by Dorothy Parker, gossip often plays an integral role in how women negotiate relationships with not only other women of their social circle, but in the patriarchal world at large.   Though both plays confine their women to settings that are uniquely feminine—like beauty parlors, living rooms, and clothing boutiques, for example—I argue that such limitations of space both problematize the expectations of women in the modern world and accentuate the powerful femininity of their language patterns. As a result, gossip circulating within these women’s walls is a means of disseminating information and passing value judgments about other women in an era when women traditionally were not invited to do so.  Both Luce’s and Parker’s plays are satirical in tone and feature women who relay knowledge via exaggeration, exclusivity, and ultimately miscommunication, and my thesis explores what exactly makes gossip a particularly female form of communication. Applying the theories of Walter J. Ong and French post-structuralist feminists Helene Cixous and Julia Kristeva to each work’s chorus of female voices, I suggest that gossip, which lacks one clearly identified speaker and often involves nuance and multiple meanings, is a mode of communication that enables aggression against social oppression.  My thesis also brings the aforementioned works in conversation with George Cukor’s 1939 film adaptation of The Women, PSAs concerning gossip produced in the 1950s, Mark Waters’ 2004 comedy Mean Girls, and Lena Dunham’s HBO comedy Girls in order to trace my argument on multiple media fronts.  My work reveals that while a story passed through various storytellers is bound to inspire misinformation of traditional fact, it might also call how we are to understand our relationships to previously accepted societal norms into question and allow those oppressed to regain control of their identities.

The Institution of a New Art: Dramaturgy and the Ideal Shavian Spectator

George Bernard Shaw is a giant of literary history, renowned for his work as a playwright, critic, and essayist. His intellect is matched with sharp political sense and biting humor, meaning that his work is both entertaining and informative. Shaw, often studied across disciplines, presented radical political and social theories along with an intensely pessimistic attitude toward the theatre of his time. This paper intends to show that Shaw’s theory of drama is uniquely valuable, particularly regarding his opinions about the audience and the maintenance of an original script.

These concerns are shared in the world of modern day production dramaturgy, a slowly growing field within the theatre industry. Production dramaturgs are most visible through materials like program notes and pre- or post-show talks, all of which work to inform spectators about the performance in question. The dramaturg also participates in the rehearsal process, where she is responsible for observing and explaining any and all contextual clues in the script. The ultimate goal of production dramaturgy is to make sure that the audience gets a sense of the play’s original context, thus allowing them to engage more critically with the current performance.

This focus on audience enrichment ties in directly with Shaw’s worry that theatregoers could not fully appreciate the genius behind his body of work. He wrote censoriously of his peers, and I use selections from his essays and criticism to suggest that his disillusionment can be very productive for theatre professionals in the 21st century. Having worked as a dramaturg on a production of Shaw’s Pygmalion in 2014, I will describe my experience in using the playwright’s extensive commentary as a way to postulate a Shavian dramatic theory.

Dorian in the Paratext: A Material History of The Picture of Dorian Gray, from 1890 to 1940

This thesis centers on the paratextual materials of English-language editions of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray in its first fifty years of existence, from its first appearance in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890 to a version of the text published by Appleby & Company in 1939. Taking as axiomatic Gerard Genette’s notion of the paratext and the later elaborations by textual scholars like Jerome McGann and DF McKenzie on the importance of material form in determining the reader’s impression of a text, I argue that through a historically grounded analysis of Dorian Gray’svarious paratexts we can come to understand how readers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries experienced the text and what messages publishers hoped to capitalize on or obscure. I argue that the paratexts of different editions serve as areas through which key questions about Dorian Gray’s content and cultural status play out indirectly and come into conflict in the early years of the story’s “cultural afterlife,” to use Walter Benjamin’s term.

After beginning with an introduction in which I outline the background of my project and describe my research at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, where I encountered the dozens of editions of Dorian Gray that form the basis of my argument, I proceed by discussing both specific editions and general trends across the editions I saw. I explore how different presentations of the text, including an edition with covers designed by Charles Ricketts, a few in dime novel library series, and a few published as Modern Library editions, would have influenced the reader’s sense of its cultural or literary status and assumed readership; how publishers used prefaces and other paratextual devices to instruct readers on how and whether to read Wilde himself into the text; and how the images in various illustrated editions guided the reader’s focus to certain narrative details and moments in the plot, particularly as they relate to sexuality.

Beginning in the second half of the 20th Century, Oscar Wilde has become a key figure in English literature, and Dorian Gray has become both a popularly read work and a site of scholarly attention, with literary critics relating it to, among other things, questions of biography, gender, sexuality, class and genre. As I show over the course of this thesis, though, these questions of textual meaning and interpretation were already manifest from 1890 to 1940 in the paratexts, which existed as sites in which publishers and readers navigated the still-unsettled meaning, status and connotations of the story in its first fifty years of existence.

Highway Snapshots of the American Landscape: The Search for the Frontier Fantasy in the Fiction of Steinbeck and Kerouac

Although Frederick Jackson Turner definitively declared the western American frontier closed in 1893, American literature continued to evoke the mythology of the frontier fantasy late into the twentieth century. Using John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, I analyze the way that the frontier fantasy evolved in relation to the changing landscapes of the twentieth century and western settlement.

I begin with Annette Kolodny’s book The Lay of the Land (1975), which uses seventeenth‑, eighteenth‑, and nineteenth-century literary examples to show the contradictory image of the American landscape as both mother, nurturing and protecting the settlers, and virgin, vulnerable to exploitation and conquest. She connects the construction of the landscape as feminine with the idea of the “American pastoral,” a uniquely American advancement of British literature’s idyllic pastoral. I use Kolodny’s theories to connect colonial-imagined gendered landscapes with the fantasy foundation of the American frontier long after the frontier truly closed, in the tumultuous decades of the 1930s and 1940s.

The U.S. fantasy of the West underwent a shift in the twentieth century when the advent of the highway system and the family car made a previously mysterious wilderness accessible to all. Both of the seminal American works The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road exploit the scenic imagery of the physical geography of the West in their deployment of that fantasy, but they also perceptibly diverge from earlier literature. Unlike their predecessors, Steinbeck’s and Kerouac’s characters see the West through the windows of a car, from the confining limits of the road, during the disillusioning periods of the Great Depression and the postwar years of the late 1940s. Their revolutionized experiences with the West affect both the descriptions of setting within the novels and the significance of the landscape in twentieth-century literature and imagination.

In this thesis I test the applicability of Kolodny’s theories about landscape descriptions in early American literature to a more recent historical moment, considering in particular the changes brought to the western landscape by settlement, the highway system, the family car, and other developments of the twentieth century. I analyze the contradiction that exists between the feminine, domestic sphere of civilized spaces, like cities, and the simultaneous feminine portrayals of the wild frontier. Ultimately, I argue that the resolution to the paradox is the masculinity of the road, which escapes the domestic sphere only to conquer the feminine wild. I find the continuous operation of the frontier fantasy, and the gendered landscape it involves, rooted in the expanding network of highways that enable twentieth-century mobility.

No Living Man Am I: Cross Dressing in Shakespeare, Tolkien, and Martin

George R.R. Martin, author of the popular A Song of Ice and Fire series, has often stated that he thinks of his work as a response to the oversights and flaws of Tolkien. J.R.R. Tolkien in turn cited Shakespeare, and his disappointments in the bard’s plays, particularly Macbeth, as a source of inspiration. Though there are many common threads within these works, there is one that is particularly interesting—the use of women cross dressing. Each author presents cross dressing and, therefore, gender differently.

Shakespeare’s plays present Rosalind of As You Like It and Viola of Twelfth Night, both of whom take on male personas to survive dangerous circumstances. There is an additional layer of gender performance to consider in Shakespeare heroines as well—at the time, all parts were only played by men. Rosalind and Viola also, interestingly, interact with their future husbands while in these disguises—in Viola’s case, she only ever knows hers while she’s dressed as a man. Both characters carry a suggestion of sexual queerness, and their success in their male personas call into question the connection between biology and gender. They are able to change their presentation at will almost flawlessly.

Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series has Éowyn, the Lady of Rohan, who cross-dresses to go to war alongside her uncle, the king. For the majority of her narrative her presentation matches traditional womanhood, but she expresses displeasure with her role. When she takes up a male persona, the narrator notes a duality in her. However, when she faces the Nazgûl, who cannot be killed by a man, she takes up womanhood as a source of power. The narrative gives her space to determine her own gender.

A Song of Ice and Fire, Martin’s ongoing saga, present two characters who don masculine attire. Arya, like Shakespeare’s heroines, does so for safety.  Having been denied femininity all her life because of her appearance and masculine interests, she plays the role of a boy well but before and after her disguise she is quick to insist she is a girl. Brienne, on the other hand, rarely refers to herself as a woman, and in fact once begins to call herself a man. Her presentation is consistently masculine—she never wears feminine attire except when forced to by others—and she defines herself in uncertain terms. Together Arya and Brienne show a capacity for assertion and questioning.

These works, I will argue, show a progression not necessarily in queerness, but in the character’s ability to shape their presentation and to define their gender for themselves. Some of them wish to only subvert gender roles through cross dressing while other want to cross the gender divide or exist outside the binary. Their increased agency to do so and the growing complexity of how presentation and gender intersect within this literature reflects a growing societal understanding of gender.

Bringing Back the Dead: Conventions of Gothic Time in the Work of Stephen King

This project explores notions of time peculiar to works of Gothic fiction, and the ways in which those notions are revisited in the novels of Stephen King. King’s work incorporates and complicates the tropes of Gothic time, and this thesis explores the ways King reimagines those traditions for a modern audience. I will compare in each of my three chapters two works, one classic Gothic text and one King text, and highlight the specific temporal device at work in each pairing.

In Chapter One, I examine It through a psychoanalytical lens, emphasizing how repressed memories are brought back to the surface. This echoes themes found in The Mysteries of Udolpho, where actions are repeated and scenes restaged, giving the impression that the past is being continually lived in the present. Specific moments in this novel produce sensations of horror when they forcibly stop time, causing the past to collide directly with both present and future. Likewise, in King’s It the moment of remembrance is even more shocking than the horror itself. These blurred lines between past and present suggest that there can be no escape from the past because it is constantly pushing itself into the present moment.

Chapter Two further explores the importance of the past to Gothic novels by comparing two works concerned with the trope of the “haunted house.” In The Shining, the Overlook Hotel stands in for the traditional Gothic castle, bringing with it a history that is so ingrained in the physical place that the hotel itself becomes a willful character in the novel. In The Castle of Otranto, the castle similarly acts as an independent agent, driven by its past to reveal truths about the current inhabitants, uncovering issues of inheritance and genealogy which force the characters to reckon with their own pasts and histories. The subjects of both of these novels intentionally suppress their personal histories, but the relationship between place and past reveals that this is impossible when operating under the constraints of gothic time.

The final chapter examines two classic reanimation narratives, Frankenstein and Pet Sematary, which complicate conceptions of atypical temporality by incorporating an element that is denied to the characters of the other novels: informed choice. The protagonists here turn to reanimation as a means of controlling their own past. Their understanding of their own actions, however, forces them to reckon with the ethical consequences of the choices they make. In Pet Sematary, Louis Creed is unable to resist temptation, suggesting that to be stuck in the past is a gothic function that denies its subjects the ability to apply reason to break from narrative cycles of repeated tragedy. To reexamine Frankenstein with this understanding of inevitability is to suggest that the true tragedy of that novel is the false hope for the future it leaves with its reader in the form of the overarching narrator, Robert Walton. The fact that King returns to these three notions of atypical time, centuries after they first appear, suggests that in novels in the gothic mode, the past will continue to resurface and haunt the present, endlessly—and that, truly, is terrifying.

A Map to Utopia: The Death Drive and Futurity in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray

“A map that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at,” Oscar Wilde wrote in his essay “The Soul of Man under Socialism.” If Wilde considers a map that does not show how to get to Utopia worthless, then Wilde’s own writings must present utopian possibilities worth striving towards. This thesis will attempt to uncover the glimpses of a more perfect world present in Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Counterintuitively for a work interested in utopia, Dorian Gray is perhaps Wilde’s bleakest work. Wilde’s only novel narrates the story of a young man who engages in a series of self-destructive actions culminating in his own death. Dorian’s goal throughout the novel is self-perfection, which he believes can only be achieved through transgressing strict Victorian moral and social codes and living a life devoted to pleasure. The idea is strikingly similar to the Lacanian idea of jouissance – a self-destructive pleasure-beyond-pleasure rooted in breaking social taboos. Jouissance is particularly applicable to Wilde’s work as it has been taken up by queer theorists, some of whom champion it as an anti-future, anti-politics approach to queer identity and activism. But jouissance, related to the Freudian notion of the death drive, is not utopian. It does not look towards a future, but instead manifests in a self-shattering in the present, thereby obviating any better future. Jouissance is not a proper utopian praxis, though it does make for an interesting motivation for a character. Dorian Gray’s quest for self-fulfillment and failure therein, operates as a critique of both society and of notions of anti-futurity which sacrifice a better future for an enjoyable present.

Anti-futurism becomes particularly resonant with Wilde when one considers its applicability to queerness, and Decadence, yet if Wilde is a utopian he cannot also be an anti-futurist. Through the character of Dorian, Wilde seems to be critiquing notions of anti-futurity, in favor of a utopian approach to queerness and politics. Queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz offers a vision of queer utopianism, as a counter to queer ideas of jouissance. He argues that queerness is fundamentally utopian, and situates queerness both in the future and in the aesthetic. Engaging Oscar Wilde’s own aesthetic philosophy as well as Muñoz’s theories with The Picture of Dorian Gray reveal a utopianism at the core of the novel beneath its anti-futurist trappings.

Wilde is one of the progenitors of the modern queer identity in the West, and his voice deserves to be heard in the contemporary debate in queer circles concerning futurity.

Galactic (Post)Colonialism: Decoding Imperialism in Science Fiction Works through the Lens of Indigeneity

Here is what is happening now: As the global resource wars have pushed onto indigenous lands, the knowledge apparatuses sustaining economic globalization have had to bring indigenous peoples into representation in a manner that explains their exploitation as inevitable, natural, or fair… reductionism and essentalism must be guarded against (183).

-Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy

We must be allies. And we must be allies in this business because to be represented is to be humanized. And as long as anyone, anywhere is being made to feel less human, our very definition of humanity is at stake and we are all vulnerable.

-Kerry Washington, 26th Annual GLAAD Media Awards

Lauded as an enticing version of a dark and often neglected colonial history, James Cameron’s Avatar broke cinematic records and gained global attention in its production of an environmentally-guided social vision. Yet, this social vision is not very different from those of the colonists that Avatar allegorically condemns. Although seeming to critique imperialist influenced environmental and indigenous destruction, Avatar actually reifies a colonial logic, ultimately reinscribing harmful stereotypes regarding indigenous peoples. Through the discourse of evolutionary, linear time and geologic history, the film fails to imagine a future with native people who are contemporaneous and self-empowered. Instead, Avatar follows the literary tradition of British authors such as Jonathan Swift and Aphra Behn to represent indigenous peoples as prelapsarian, primitive, and dehumanized. While disempowering indigenous peoples in this prejudiced representation, Avatar employs scientific rationality embedded in a Christian ethos and anti-indigenous mestizaje in order to ultimately speak for the subaltern noble savages.

My work studies this thread of anti-indigenous discourse, turning to The Moons of Palmares to illustrate how science fiction works can speak and listen to the subaltern in order to most effectively create a discourse towards resolution and awareness. Ultimately, my work places Avatar in conversation with Zainab Amadahy’s The Moons of Palmares in order to exemplify a more effective treatment of  indigenous issues, including representation, colonial and postcolonial influences, and land rights. As opposed to Avatar’s quasi-anthropological, adventure story representation of indigenous populations as sub-human objects, The Moons of Palmares employs indigeneity as a lens for investigating environmental and societal issues in a (post)colonial world. It is this lens of indigeneity and an indigenous futurity that lends hope and insight to environmental issues and coalitional projects for change and awareness.

Despite the wide range of subjects covered in our English department, the curriculum often follows the tradition of separating social issues from literature. The aim of my work is to reunite the two in the realm of indigenous issues.

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Production and Reproduction: The Spectacle of the Writing Machine in Flann O’Brien’s At-Swim-Two-Birds

Scholarship on Flann O’Brien’s At-Swim-Two-Birds has commonly emerged bearing sword and shield, dividing its efforts to contribute compelling perspectives on this fascinating novel with the daunting task of defending it from its dismissive critics and rescuing it from marginalization as a regionalized Irish text largely disconnected from literary canon. In this thesis, I build on the work of Anne Clissmann, Kimberley Bohman-Kalaja, and Thomas Shea, which has been integral in unmasking At-Swim as a playfully complex linguistic and stylistic text, in order to reverse the prior model of understanding At-Swim by dividing it according to its frame narratives. Instead, I offer a complimentary method of viewing At-Swim according to the concept of producing. Most scholars agree that the act of writing and the role of the author are at the crux of At Swim. I argue that the concerns of At-Swim can best be grouped around the idea of producing spectacle, which arises in three incarnations. On one level, O’Brien presents the spectacle of a loosely structured ‘plot’ of various authors producing three literary texts, wherein he dramatizes the labor (and leisure) of the occupation of the author. On another level, O’Brien transforms metaphorical and literal reproduction into a spectacle as he reproduces parodies of famous texts and describes three births and one speculative conception in his novel. Finally on a third level, O’Brien evokes deus ex machina as spectacle of his writing machine. Using works by Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Michel Carrouges, I demonstrate how O’Brien’s At-Swim-Two-Birds anticipates and subverts the notion of the mechanical, thereby aligning O’Brien’s concerns with those of rough contemporaries like Raymond Roussel, Franz Kafka, and Marcel Duchamp. I hope in presenting the relevance of At-Swim-Two-Birds outside of its typically mentioned importance to Irish literary history, further scholarship of O’Brien will be made.

Daniel Deronda and the Visual Arts: The Potentially Meaningful

“I wonder whether one oftener learns to love real objects through their representation, or the representations through the real objects.” The author is George Eliot, presenting Daniel Deronda as a reflexive space in which to interrogate the pictures that enable, structure and complicate representation. Much has been written on Eliot and the visual arts, both on her love of painting—evident through the numerous, specific allusions to works of art and artists within her notebooks and her novels—and on her own ‘word-painting’. Most of this criticism offers a symbolic reading of the fine arts within Eliot’s novels having to do with typology, and the schools of Italian and English portraiture. While the fine arts within her novels can function metaphorically, I suggest more conceptual reading. I do not argue for works of art as a literary trope, nor do I aim to interpret them. Rather, my thesis considers the interactions of the visual and verbal in Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, specifically: Eliot’s use of pictoral practices and of actual pictures; the difference between her incorporation of specific, real pictures, and fictitious ones; and what these pictures do for the narrative.

Daniel Deronda is an example of a shift in nineteenth-century representational practice, a phenomenon that Jonathan Crary, in Techniques of the Observer, describes as “a sweeping reconfiguration of relations between an observing subject and modes of representation” (1). The novel manifests the influence of photographic technologies and practices on nineteenth-century literary realism, particularly the process of composition. In response to this wider cultural phenomenon, Eliot complicates traditional structures of vision and observation by dissolving the boundaries between objects and phenomenal appearances, and challenges established norms of representation by conceptualising reference. In doing so, Eliot considers her own creative process: the exchange between the conditions of the work and the work itself, the medium which facilitates the continuous interaction between the actual world as source of representation and the represented world, and the properties and implications of the visual and the verbal.