Student Abstracts 2015-2016

Explicit: Sherlock Holmes Fanfiction and Readerly Desire

Fanfiction is the largest literary genre about which there is virtually no scholarship. In an attempt to remedy this lack, my thesis project theorizes Sherlock Holmes fanfiction as an expression of readerly desire. Desire, in this case, connotes the sexual and the intellectual, the imaginative and the appropriative: ultimately, it is the urge, on the part of the reader, to get closer to the world and ideas of the source text. I argue that, in fanfiction, this project of proximity is executed through an examination of characters and their relationships using popular psychological and literary beliefs about selfhood and interiority as rooted in childhood and conceptualized as topographical space.

After a brief overview of the history of the Sherlock Holmes stories, their fans, and fan writing, I discuss adaptations, focusing on the popular BBC television show Sherlock, which caused a burst of creativity in the genre of Sherlock Holmes fanfiction by drawing attention to a romantic subtext between the two main characters.

I then discuss three fics (as individual works of fanfiction are called) that are exemplary of the genre. In Nature and Nurture by earlgreytea68, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson raise a baby together, bringing up the topic of Sherlock’s troubled childhood. Ultimately, John finds an explanation for Sherlock’s eccentricities through the lens of childhood neglect. Nature and Nurture demonstrates how fic writers explore characterization through an idea of selfhood, popularized by Freud and developmental psychology, that finds an explanation for adult behaviors in childhood experience.

The next fic, The Progress of Sherlock Holmes by Ivy Blossom, offers a study in perspective. While most Sherlock Holmes fanfiction is told in the third-person through John Watson, this story is told entirely in first-person from the perspective of Sherlock Holmes. The alternate absence and presence of personal pronouns demonstrates the way that fic writers engage Sherlock’s humanity as defined by emotional capacity. These grammatical shifts, along with the tight first-person perspective, make a subtle argument about the potential for a canonical romantic attraction between Sherlock and John within the BBC adaptation itself.

The third fic, “An April’s Journey” by Katie Forsythe, is based on the Arthur Conan Doyle canon. In the fic, Holmes’ brief canonical illness is explained to be cocaine withdrawal. I focus on the historical complications of writing about drug use in the nineteenth century from a late twentieth century perspective; I also discuss the structural similarities between fanfiction and the adventure story to advocate for an understanding of what Jacqueline Lichtenberg calls the “intimate adventure,” or the exploration of a character’s self as an unknown land.

Drawing on René Girard and Eve Sedgwick’s ideas of triangulated desire, Michael Saler’s discussion of readerly enchantment, Henry Jenkins’ writing on fandom and Janice Radway’s work on romance novels, this thesis demonstrates the rich possibilities for critical attention that exist in the genre of fanfiction.

Malaysia, Ma-Lai-Xi-Ya, Malaiyur: The Family Saga as Critique of Postcolonial Malaysian Nationhood in Tash Aw’s The Harmony Silk Factory and Rani Manicka’s The Rice Mother

The Harmony Silk Factory by Tash Aw and The Rice Mother by Rani Manicka follow narratives of family—specifically, families of Chinese and Tamil descent living in Malaysia, through its transition from colonialism to postcolonial Independence in the twentieth century. The relationship between family and nation has been a long noted one. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities used family as the framework for the nation’s emotional logic. Political scientist David Brown further connected these concepts in his analysis of the kinship myth.

Yet, in the novels of Aw and Manicka, family is shown to fail as a source of solidarity and security. I argue that Aw and Manicka use the family saga—i.e. the genre of a prolonged family narrative, often spanning over several generations—as a critique of the postcolonial Malaysian nation. If the family serves as the structural basis for imagining the nation, then Aw and Manicka present families that serve as poor models. The Harmony Silk Factory does this by identifying the family as a site of colonial capitalism, and The Rice Mother by identifying the family as a site of colonial trauma.

In The Harmony Silk Factory, all social interactions within the family are mediated through the colonial labor relations. Using the theories of Frederick Engels, I explore how capitalism rendered the family an unequal and divided space—complicated further in the unequal and divided reality of colonialism. My first chapter argues that the Lim family’s disintegration can be directly traced to the forces of labor that dictate it, and subsequently tracks how the family’s disintegration is allegorical for that of the nation.

In The Rice Mother, a family becomes defined by pain and despair following the death of a beloved child. This death, perpetrated by Japanese soldiers during WWII, thus transforms the family into a site of colonial trauma—where the repercussions of trauma become hereditary transmission. Using the theories of Fanon and Balaev, my second chapter argues that by narrating the family as a propagator of trauma, Manicka reveals Malaysia as beholden to the horrors of colonialism and war that created it, and indeed a nation that brings these horrors (e.g. ethnic division) into the present and future.

In my concluding chapter, I look at parallels between the concepts put forward in the novel and the lives of the authors themselves. My final point contemplates the role of authors in envisioning society, and the potential held by cultural works in changing the antiquated labor and social relations of postcolonial Malaysia that trace back to the colonial era.

“This is a Terrible War, Baby:” Trauma in Hemingway’s Early Novels

This thesis examines two of Ernest Hemingway’s first novels – The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, published in 1926 and 1929, respectively – with special attention paid to the experiences of trauma that they depict. By somewhat removing the veil of World War I from the discussion of the characters, I open the study of trauma to more than the physical manifestations that are typically explored in Hemingway’s works due to the frequency with which he writes of war injuries. The additional consideration of psychological traumas allows for entirely new interpretations of these novels, especially because it permits the inclusion and redemption of the oft-misinterpreted female characters. With a focus on the two main figures of each novel – Jake Barnes, Lady Brett Ashley, Catherine Barkley, and Frederic Henry – I examine the experiences and behavior of the characters through the lens of literary trauma theory and reinterpret these commonly explored novels in such a way that puts their trauma at the forefront, rather than the presence of the war or even love.

Through close readings of the characters and the reexamination of their positions in the text, I incorporate a well known but relatively modern diagnosis: posttraumatic stress disorder. This thesis argues that each of the four primary characters was a sufferer of posttraumatic stress disorder (though before it was classified as it is today), mainly due to the experiences that they had during wartime, and that this evaluation of them gives a perspective on the novels that is quite unexplored. I conclude that, while these novels were written in the shadow of the Great War and the characters’ traumatic experiences occurred in part because of it, the war should not be read as anything more than a catalyst for the major action. My interpretation also provides a look into the hidden vulnerabilities of the characters, especially Jake and Frederic, and, contrastingly, into the women’s commonly unacknowledged power in the novels. This thesis was written on the basis of presenting a new way of reading Hemingway’s novels by focusing less on the machismo and more on the pain and suffering that exists underneath.

“I Feel Like I Am Everybody”: Camp Sensibility in Joe Brainard’s I Remember and His Legacy

The second-generation New York School writer and artist Joe Brainard’s I Remember is a book-length poem comprised entirely of anaphoric list entries. By sharing personal memories in a seemingly unfiltered way, Brainard’s persona becomes crystallized over time; readers begin to see the development of the first-person speaker, as a wholly American childhood emerges in tandem with a queer coming-of-age in New York City. The work employs hyper-specific details in order to make it seem as though readers are one with the speaker, with Brainard. In a way, he is writing for an implied reader who happens to be just like him. He is allowing himself to insist that he is the same as his readers, using what José Esteban Muñoz refers to as queer relationality.

This queer relationality highlights and perhaps demonstrates that there are moments and aspects of I Remember that do not and cannot account for everyone that is not Brainard. In using Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp,’” I show that one can begin to see the way in which Brainard’s text contains and celebrates a camp sensibility that has the potential to alienate readers by excluding them. Brainard’s campiness is never not endearing, but it can block access to the speaker, making him more of an enigmatic figure for some readers at times than a stand-in for themselves. However, by jumping from one tender memory to another, seemingly-unrelated one and by writing with a tone that fascinates readers, Brainard is able to draw them back in; his conscious construction of self and persona in the poem is one that constantly charms readers, encouraging them to continue reading and identifying with him. The force and momentum of the work rely entirely on this feature.

For the last decade of his life, Brainard stopped making art. He spent more time outside of New York, but his involvement with the New York literary world never ended. Though still relatively unknown in both academia and the general public, Brainard’s work influenced and continues to influence writers today, over twenty years after his death. This thesis ends by examining Brainard’s legacy in the the work of his friend, the poet David Trinidad, to see the ways in which his work integrates a Brainardian camp sensibility, one that has perhaps become increasingly present in the years following gay liberation. Finally, I consider the role of the archive in Brainard’s legacy and the archive’s potential shortcomings, in order to see the ways in which there remain mysteries for contemporary readers, questions about Brainard’s art that may not have precise answers.

Reading Riverbend: Learning from the literary dimensions of the Iraq War blog, Baghdad Burning

For many Americans, the Iraq War is a half-remembered history of contradicting narratives. For Riverbend, the pseudonymous Iraqi writer behind the prolific blog, Baghdad Burning (2003-2013), the Iraq War is a chronic ache of daily terrors. It is that “prickly feeling of anxiousness,” which, with time, raids, and unrelenting unrest, “dulls and turns blunt,” she writes in her post “The Insomniac…” in January of 2004. “Have you ever left the house and worried that you didn’t turn off the oven or the iron? That’s what the feeling turns into – except it lasts all day…and night…and week…and month, after month, after month […].”

This thesis is a literary examination of Baghdad Burning, one which posits Riverbend’s immense opus of posts as a possible remedy for this historical amnesia of the Iraq War. Instead of reading of Riverbend’s blog through the seemingly obligatory lens of new media criticism, this thesis regards Baghdad Burning as a literary tool in conversation with such theorists and critics as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Mikhail Bakhtin, Edward Said, and Wolfgang Iser. This approach is not to deny Riverbend’s journalistic function outright; on the contrary, I further contextualize my analysis through news articles, governmental reports, and the complementary postings of Riverbend’s peers in what is called the “Iraqi Blogosphere.” Therefore, my unconventionally conventional critical framework is meant instead as an encouragement to consider Riverbend within longer histories of critical thought and to illustrate the instructive complexity of her posts.

In my introduction, “Baghdad is Burning,” I discuss the oversimplified approach to Iraq War historiography, which prompts an explanation of my reasons for electing Baghdad Burning as my primary text. I also suggest that Riverbend’s text puts several perceptual and critical demands upon the reader, all of which elicit active and engaged reading. In Part I, “A Satirist and Her ‘Rantlog,’” I explore the critical demands of Riverbend’s humor and answer by characterizing her as a performative satirist with both contemporary and ancient equivalents. I then look at how she mobilizes this satire in her critique of the American media. Part II, “Online Orientalism,” parses out the curious moments of orientalist othering in Riverbend’s text exemplified by e-mails she receives from the American readers of her blog. I classify these interactions as “online orientalism” in order to suggest several broader implications of these orientalist attitudes and provide a frame with which to critique them. Finally, in my coda, “On Repeat,” I look at Riverbend’s yearly reflections on April 9th, on the anniversary of the Fall of Baghdad. Using these posts, I propose a different approach to remembering the Iraq War, one, like the experience of reading of Riverbend, is active, engaged, and anything but simplified.

Trials of the Living Dead: Statelessness and Political Bodies in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

The undead monster of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein occupies various spaces of liminality; physically as an undead, as man and monster, and legally as stateless. This thesis explores these contradictory stances as Victor Frankenstein not only transgresses a moral boundary drawn by religious notions of creation, but also trespasses on the state’s performance of sovereignty through a hold on population control—what Michel Foucault refers to as “biopower.”

With this framework, I examine how the displacement and patchwork of physical bodies interrogate the relationship between body and state, revealing a structurally violent and hostile environment intent on destroying the monster. This critique asserts itself most obviously in the failed trials, where the state’s presence and inadequacy become explicit. The trial and execution of innocent Justine and the background of the cottage episode told in analepsis gesture towards a predatory court system that exists even without the monster. The monster, excluded from the formal courts, forces a legal pluralism by turning his interactions with other characters into informal trials with his word as testimony and himself or Frankenstein as prosecutor. Situated at a moment when national identity was legally tangled with the Alien Act of 1793, the Habeas Corpus suspension of 1794, and the abolition movement, Shelley adopts a highly skeptical perspective towards the justice system. The language of slavery within the novel by both Frankenstein and the monster notably turns away from legal as synonymous with moral.

My second chapter recognizes burial rites, or social rituals of separation as highly nationalistic ceremonies, lending new interpretations to Frankenstein’s violation of dead bodies and the monster’s sacrificial promise to “collect my funeral pile.” The monster’s body, simultaneously singular and multiple, stands as a disrupted version of Thomas Hobbes’ “Artificiall Man” from Leviathan. When the kingly body made of his subjects becomes distorted and undead, what kind of political body comes to life? By drawing on anthropological texts, I examines the ways that sovereignty is constantly interrupted within the novel as the monster transforms to martyr through social rituals, destabilizing the masculine western myths of nation dependent on violent conquest of the other.

The “Multiform” Self: An Exploration of the Double as Fractures in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Picture of Dorian Gray

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde writes, “[M]an was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion” (137). For Wilde, the individual is no longer a consistent character with an ego that is “simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence” (137), but rather a being with conflicting desires. Wilde is not the only writer to be interested in man’s “multiform” nature. His contemporary, Robert Louis Stevenson, also explores man’s duality in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Indeed, both writers bonded over their mutual interest in the double life when they met in the late 1880’s, penning stories where the protagonists are forced to confront their best and worst selves simultaneously. The desire to express conflict between two selves naturally led them to the figure of the gothic double.

By engaging with psychological discourses that emerged during the Victorian fin de siècle, Stevenson and Wilde externalize conflicts that would normally occur within the mind through the figure of the double, a physical alienation of components in the characters’ psyches. With the incorporation of degeneration and other psychological theories that permeated Victorian society during the late nineteenth century, new types of doubles emerged. Among these are the “double-dealer”, the “hereditary double”, the “refracting double” and the “artistic double”. In my thesis, I outline the various features of these doubles, which can be found in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Using Victorian theories of degeneration and psychology to inform the profiles of each double, I argue that Stevenson and Wilde grapple with the repression of personality, nature and soul in their novellas. Ultimately, the writers address the effects of a fractured Self on the ego through the gothic double.

My thesis is organized as one continuous chapter focusing on the figure of the double in Stevenson and Wilde’s works. I divide my thesis into several sections to discuss the types of doubles that I previously mentioned and analyze their functions within the texts. In the first section of this paper, I outline degeneration theories and the psychological field at the end of the nineteenth century in order to provide background information for my analyses before moving on to a discussion of the types of doubles found in the texts. I conclude my thesis by discussing the possibility of viewing the double as an expression of the complex Self and how nineteenth century psychological discourses offer a means to do so.

The Architecture of Language and Propaganda: An Analysis of Censorship and Influence in the Works of Elizabeth Bowen and George Orwell

This thesis explores literary reactions to wartime legislation and living conditions that occurred during the Blitz. It examines the dichotomies that the conditions of war destabilize: fiction and truth, forced and voluntary, darkness and light, male and female, public and private, interior and exterior.

First, the essay overviews circulating propaganda and censorship regulations that encouraged the population of London to self-censor, and then reviews George Orwell’s critique of the wartime actions taken by the government in “Freedom of the Press” and “The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda.”  It then turns to Elizabeth Bowen’s short stories “Careless Talk,” “In the Square,” “Mysterious Kor,” “The Happy Autumn Fields” and her novel The Heat of the Day—all of which were written and published during or just after the Blitz—to examine how the wartime climate manifests in literature through the landscape and characters’ actions. I look to Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” and his definition of anxiety, as well as Benjamin’s interpretation of Freud’s theory in Illuminations to link the characters’ anxious states of consciousness to their inclination towards cryptic exchanges as well as their despairing searches for a private space. I argue that the influence of popular propaganda campaigns that promoted self-censorship, combined with the unpredictable environment of war, disturb the consciousness, and Bowen reflects this in her literature because she emphasizes newly complex social dynamics that result from a change in environment. I then contrast Bowen’s reflection of the wartime climate to Orwell’s exaggeration of the wartime climate in 1984.

This essay then uses Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space to relate the destroyed state of the environment to the heightened conscious state of the characters and conclude that the characters’ heightened consciousness creates a “poetic space” where they find stability. It also uses Michel Foucault’s panopticon principle from Discipline and Punish to track how Bowen uses forms of light in her literature to convey how only in complete darkness do characters achieve total privacy, but I argue that this safe space that is created by a “blacking out” can be created either behind shielding walls or the secure space of language. In both Bowen’s works and Orwell’s novel, I conclude that the state of the environment mirrors the characters’ state of mind.

The paper contrasts the unideal world that Bowen creates in her literature with the dystopian world in George Orwell’s 1984. I conclude that Bowen uses surrealism, symbolism, Gothic horror, and tropes of propaganda in her literature to provide a realistic representation of the Home Front plight that the British citizens faced while Orwell constructs a warning that goes against totalitarian regimes as well as the English orthodoxy of censorship and self-censorship.

“A Bell That Could Never Ring”: Orality, Textuality, and Contemporary African American Literature

This thesis engages with three contemporary works of African American literature, particularly as they relate or fail to relate to African American literary theory’s ambivalent attachment to the trope of orality. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play An Octoroon, Claudia Rankine’s book of poetry Citizen: An American Lyric, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s non-fiction book Between the World and Me all register thorny and frustrated questions regarding the status of textuality and orality in the African American literary tradition. This thesis takes textuality as both a scene of writing, and, in a more Derridean sense, as a structure of citationality, iterability and absence. The first two works, contrary to the intensified surface orality of their mediums (poetry and theater), mobilize a textual poetics, and conversely, the latter work seems to resist its own status as writing, and strives after a fantasized oral communicative mode.

Each work, I argue, concerns itself with its audience, reader, and addressee only to subvert the orality of the call and response it performs. These works implicitly interrogate where one locates the African Americaness of African American literature, and seem to rearticulate this question as: to whom does African American literature speak or write? Each of these works both obsesses over and fundamentally troubles communication with any kind of audience or reader, and yet seems to emphatically orient its language along a communicative channel.

In an introduction, I outline the larger theoretical contexts in which I place these three texts. I chart both the development and contours of the trope of orality, and summarize and synthesize its post-structuralist negation as emblematized in philosopher Jacques Derrida’s early essay “Signature Event Context.” I also consider Amiri Baraka’s short call and response poem “SOS” as representative of a poetics of orality, and the Black Art Movement’s positioning of the black artistic voice in relation to his (black) audience. I use “SOS” as a work against which to read my three main texts. I then move to discuss An Octoroon, and how its performance of textual monologue constitutes a double disidenfication with both the figure of the tragic mullato and the figure of the black artist. I then look towards the second person prose poetry of Citizen as a textually dense and racially ambiguous site of identification. By foregoing writing in the lyric I, Rankine seems to defer the authority and authenticity of the black lyric voice. I mobilize structural linguistics to negotiate the mutual implications of the present second person and the absent first person. I finally turn to Between the World and Me, an epistolary memoir, and use Lacanian psychoanalysis to expose the queer limits of Coates’s written address, limits which are especially visible when read with its source text, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. By comparing all of these works, I ultimately argue that textuality is not inimical to but operative within each work’s subverted call and response.

A Playtesting Philosophy: Identity (Re)Construction and Ethical Exploration in The Talos Principle.

Playtesting, n.: "a method of quality control that takes place at many points during the video game design process. A selected group of users play unfinished versions of a game to work out flaws in gameplay, level design, and other elements, as well as to discover and resolve bugs and glitches."

What happens when a philosophical encounter becomes an activity, when your actions become an argument? This thesis, which employs a digital-born website format and creates an innovative experiential web presence, explores the effects of medium on our understanding of philosophical and ethical precepts through phenomenological and narratological analysis of The Talos Principle, a first-person puzzle-adventure video game wherein players adopt the identity of an Artificial Intelligence and explore a virtual world of physics puzzles and existential uncertainty. Players engage in a game-spanning Socratic dialogue on political philosophy and the definition of personhood with a computer program and read over one hundred diegetic and non-diegetic texts, playing through conceptual puzzles alongside more conventional ones. Drawing on theories of radical constructivism, narrative interactivity, and play, I argue that by recasting the evaluation of philosophical concepts as playtesting, as the adopting and discovering of "glitches" in multiple ethical perspectives, the video game can be designed and experienced as an explicit philosophical teaching tool, an ethical playground wherein philosophical literature can be encountered and empirically evaluated, read and tried, in a manner unachievable by any other single medium.

My project experiments with medium and form as much as The Talos Principle. Chapter One begins with a gameplay video, which I analyze through the lens of Ernst von Glasersfeld's theory of experiential learning and knowledge as a personally constructed subjective possession. Through immersion in an unreal virtual world, players immediately come to understand the rules and goals of the game through the embodied activity they undertake by controlling their characters; their responses are informed by their newfound understandings.

Chapter Two focuses on the impact of the narrative forms and sources of external corroboration of players' interpretations of the rules governing the game world. I analyze the effects of initial knowledge-states on the levels of importance placed on player- character encounters and the ways in which reading the real-world philosophical excerpts and diegetic fictional philosophies become incorporated into experiential play.

Chapter Three deconstructs the game-spanning Socratic dialogue between player and Artificial Intelligence character Milton. The source code exposes the various philosophical subject-positions anticipated by the designers and consequently made available for players to explore and claim as their own, with dozens of unique player choices and espoused values funneled into one of the conversation's six possible endings. My interview with the conversation's narrative designer provides the foundation for the intended and potential philosophical and ethical takeaways from The Talos Principle and the ways in which the concepts explored and the philosophical thinking strategies learned in-game carry consequential weight when the player exits the game and returns to the real world.