The Obligated Individual: Faulkner in the Fifties

After he was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, the US Southern novelist William Faulkner (1897-1962) fashioned for himself a new reputation marked by a distinctly rhetorical writing style, a newly public presence, and careful affiliations with academic, government, and media institutions. Critics generally regard the fiction published during this period as an aesthetic blunder and the liberal humanism expressed in public remarks like the 1950 Nobel address and the 1955 Nagano Seminar as a propagandizing idealism at odds with problematic elements of the writer’s Southern ideological heritage apparent in his comments on the Civil Rights movement and especially in his 1956 interview with Russell Howe. This thesis proposes a contemporary way of reading this phase of Faulkner’s career by emphasizing the philosophical project beneath the writer’s aesthetic practice and historical context. My approach combines Existentialism, the work of culture theorists like Stephen Greenblatt and Kwame Anthony Appiah, and the moral criticism of early critics to reveal how Faulkner used philosophy in service of overcoming his own ideological patterns of thinking. Chapter 1 surveys the definitive authorial worldview Faulkner established from his public platform in the fifties. I make use of the standing relationship between Faulkner and continental philosophy, borrowing theoretical notions from thinkers like Simone Weil, Simone de Beauvoir, and Iris Murdoch to more fully articulate what the writer means by “soul” and “environment.” Chapter 2 begins an examination of the development of this worldview across his career by showing the suspicion of the individual characteristic of his early work. I turn to Absalom, Absalom! (1936) as the most sophisticated representation of a model of personhood which subordinates the individual’s free choice to their historical context; through an attention to the text at the level of the word, I locate in the Sutpen story a basic ethical imperative to adequately recognize the full humanity of any other person. Then, I show how Faulkner eventually accepts the basic tenets of liberal individualism in his late fiction by tempering a traditional ideology of freedom with discourses of human obligations and the individual’s rootedness in history and society. In Chapter 3, I find in Requiem for a Nun (1951) a program for redeeming the individual by overcoming the spirit of revenge towards an attitude of forgiveness and endurance. Finally, Chapter 4 looks to A Fable (1954), the climax of the writer’s philosophical project, for the fullest rendering of his redeemed model of individualism. I argue that this epic Passion Week allegory uses myth to establish the free individual as a site of irreducible value and emphasize the primacy of one’s duty to other human beings above contingent duties to family or nation. Ultimately, I characterize the Faulkner of the fifties as a writer profoundly concerned with the relationship between art and public discourse, using his fiction to manipulate the US cultural imagination and rehabilitate its ideology of freedom with a restored emphasis on human responsibility.

Where is prose going when it’s departing from itself: The enthalpy of poetic prose across the works of Borges, Khatibi, Proust, Cixous, Blanchot, and Beckett

Urged by Maurice Blanchot’s answer to his question in his 1959 book The Book To Come, “where is literature going?”, this thesis preoccupies itself with the philosophical fiction of six writers, those being Marcel Proust, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Maurice Blanchot, and Abdelkebir Khatibi. It explores the movement of their prose into the domain and discipline of poetry.
In order to tether and contain my analysis of each text I have chosen to use the recurring motif of the sentence as a system: the investigation follows particular sentences that have been lifted out of the texts and are subsequently subjected to close and careful analysis which regards and observes their closed network and its reflection of the larger matrix of the text their situated in.
Using that structure of analysis, I begin by investigating the spatial poetics in Borges’s Borges and I and Khatibi’s Love in Two Languages. I particularly focus on the white space created and forged by lineation and delve into the poetic implications and intentions of their spatial structure.
Following the tenor of that analysis, I proceed to analyze the poetic tendencies in particular sentences in Proust’s Swann’s Way from In Search of Lost Time, Hélène Cixous’ essay Extreme Fidelity, and Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster. Using my established rhetoric on spatial poetics, I enter a rigorous excavation of syntax, grammar, diction, and spacing to examine the ways in which their prose yields to poetry.
An exploration of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable follows where I use the foundational properties of the philosophical theory of απορία and reinterpret it through Beckett’s understanding of it thus attempting to show how the text’s aporetic structure leads it towards the domain of poetry. I also introduce a poem I wrote inspired by the text as response, commentary, and proof of the text’s poeticism.
I then reach my epilogue where I analyze my own writing in this thesis so as to exhibit how the pursuit of writing about these poetic texts inevitably renders the language that is writing about it undoubtedly poetic, which in turns proves their poetic nature.
 

Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, A Biography: Mediating Queer Identity Through Configurations of Blackness

Published in 1928, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, A Biography has been heralded and read as among the first examples of outrightly and unapologetically queer literature. Over the course of the novel, Woolf explores gender and gender fluidity in relation to the subject’s identity, and Orlando presents an intersection of queerness, time, and memory that drafts the queer body as an intricate, complex, and productive place. In this thesis, I argue that Orlando not only challenges the early twentieth century literary canon through its pellucid representation of queer/transgender identity, but also as it presents a corrective to the history of queerness through Woolf’s treatment and presentation of the site of the body. The queer body operates in this text as a chronotopic site of recovery, a recuperative space that retains the ability to store and transmit the queer self/body/identity, and the memory of queer selves/bodies/identities, through time. Furthermore, this thesis argues that the potentialities of the queer body are made possible through the presence of the black body in the text, and posits that the articulation of Orlando’s identity hinges on their ability to think through their own self via configurations of blackness and black bodies. Configurations of blackness in the text are tightly intertwined with scenes and instances of Orlando’s identity and subject formation, and blackness, black people, and black bodies form the foundational basis that enables Orlando to form not only their identity as a white person and subject, but also their identity as a queer person. This thesis concludes by arguing that the black queer body is a source of power both within and without the text, and concluding chapters theorize how that power can be acknowledged and written into contemporary discourses to register such power and draw greater public investment to the literary fields of black studies and black queer studies.

Surviving Femininity: Navigating the Relationship Between Death and the Feminine in Literature

This paper explores the relationship between death and femininity in Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, and Natalie Diaz’s When My Brother Was an Aztec. I consider the meaning of femininity primarily as it pertains to problems of the body, intellect, and inner emotional world. The term femininity has transformed over time and takes shape differently across myriad cultures, sexualities, and gender identities. People have long since struggled with giving words to a concept that resists singleness. In response writers in the likes of Lorde, Plath, and Diaz have produced artwork which speak to the complexities of femininity which not only they, but many other people experience as well.
Each of these texts also reckon with physical and emotional death. Death in literature and life is often an item for romanticization or ends up being purely negligent. The feminine being has been systematically oppressed by patriarchal power structures, which in turn causes people to lose power even over their own deaths. As each text explores, sometimes femininity seems to take precedence over death. Femininity has the potential to cause death or interpret it depending on how it’s written, felt, or read. By closely reading these texts, I examine not only how each author characterizes death and femininity, but more specifically where the points of intersection are between the two.
The Cancer Journals serves as a framework of how to treat femininity and death with which I will use in my discussion of Plath and Diaz. Poetry is the optimal space to explore such topics for its promise of control and range of emotional expression in the said and unsaid. In order to properly link death and femininity, I consider poetry and femininity as a performance, and investigate what that means for the two collections.

The Poetics of Detention and Belonging: Spatializing Angel Island Immigration Station

Angel Island Immigration Station was a detention center that operated from 1910 to 1940 in San Francisco Bay and detained primarily Chinese immigrants traveling to the United States. While they awaited entry or deportation, immigrants painted and carved classical Chinese poetry into the walls of their detention barracks, resisting immigration authorities’ repeated attempts to paint over their poetry or fill in their carvings with putty. Translated by Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung in Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, these poems articulate the immigrants’ dreams of freedom, longings for home, and frustrations with confinement. In my thesis, I organize the poems into three primary categories: legal liminalities, spatial imaginaries, and cross-temporal exchanges.
My research explores the central question: how did Chinese immigrants on Angel Island use poetry to produce, engage with, and transform the liminal space of detention? To answer this critical inquiry, I deploy legal, literary, and spatial analytics to explore how Angel Island and its poetry embody the marginal sites of the detention center and the racialized body. I draw on my visit to Angel Island to analyze how the natural and built environment structure the entangled spaces of detainment, law, and race. I argue that Angel Island poets appealed to different scales of the body, space, and time to construct an open, intertextual dialogue of survival and resistance spanning continents and generations. My thesis enters into dialogue with Angel Island’s anonymous poets, as well as the longer genealogy of Chinese American immigrant writing, to historicize the critical immigrant themes of space, place, and identity.
 

Formatting, Orature, and Language in the Undercelebrated Postmodern: The Ousting of Racial Metanarratives via Experimentation

This is an exploration of BIPOC authors that generally fall under the umbrella term postmodernism, which is generally understood to be a late 20th-century movement stemming from the developments of French intellectuals such as Jean Baudrillard and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Within literature, this denotes experimental features such as self-reflexivity, unreliable narration, and metafictional qualities, as the postmodern is most concerned with leaving behind preconceived sets of conventions and rulesets in order to be able to create new ways of understanding texts and literature that are actively working to set themselves apart from any type of classification or categorization. While many of the postmodernists most recognized today tend to be part of a group of select white North American male authors such as Don DeLillo or John Barth, this paper will explore how authors such as Ishmael Reed, Gerald Vizenor, Ben Okri, and Louise Erdrich wrestle with powerful themes of marginalization, language, and identity and simultaneously toy with the very notion of literature, both from the point of view of postmodernism and of the history of literature within their respective cultures. The theme of orature will also be explored here in tracing the influence of generational oral storytelling and how its elements can also be understood as predating the postmodern as well as its experimentation within oral literature’s ability to be constantly changing and intertwining opposition. At the same time, the thesis will be dissecting the notion of ‘secret languages’ and how to understand them as part of greater metanarratives that actively work to marginalize, separate and oppress, and why this also reflects the postmodern urge to leave behind predefined rulesets and conventions. Lastly, the thesis will get to the heart of why the experimental techniques employed by the various texts cited within counter the grand narrative of race and racialization. Key texts include Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed, Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles by Gerald Vizenor, The Famished Road by Ben Okri, and Tracks by Louise Erdrich.

Desire in Venice: Dichotomizing the Apollonian and Dionysian and Restructuring Expression in Thomas Mann’s Death In Venice

Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice has been understood multiple times through the philosophical forms of the Apollonian and Dionysian outlined by Frederich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. The scholarship surrounding the novella argues that the main character, Aschenbach, begins the novella as an Apollonian man, a man characterized by self restraint and awareness, and by the end of the novella becomes a Dionysian man, characterized by the indulgence of desire, which eventually causes his death. For example, after mentioning the presence of the Apollonian and Dionysian influences in the work, Jeffrey Myers summarizes the critical consensus surrounding Mann’s novella in his journal article “From Death in Venice to Death in Davos” when he writes, “… Aschenbach… undergo[es] a radical transformation from severe northern discipline to a weakening of the will and moral laxity, from an arduous work ethic to lotus-eating and sybaritic self-indulgence.” However, I argue that Aschenbach remains an Apollonian character throughout the entirety of the work, as his self control remains steadfast up through the final moments of the novella. Because of this, the novella no longer outlines the fall of a man due to the indulgence in desire, and instead chronicles Aschenbach’s moral trials and tribulations surrounding his infatuation with a young boy. This infatuation primarily manifests itself as a type of aesthetic admiration for the boy, as Aschenbach heavily admires the youth’s beauty. Further, the fact that critics argue that this aesthetic admiration is the result of a Dionysian influence eliminates the possibility of Aschenbach’s blatant queer sexual desires to take a physical form separate from an artistic lens. Thus, through the repositioning of Aschenbach as an Apollonian character, I will theorize about the queer and inherently sexual possibilities of Aschenbach’s desires if he were to indulge fully in the Dionysian form and what it means for Aschenbach to remain loyal to the Apollonian form while simultaneously uncover the unwillingness of surrounding scholarship to discuss how the physical nature of his unrealized desire fits into the Dionysian.

Pleasurable Knowledge: The Tasteful Subject in Sense and Sensibility

What does it mean to have good taste, and why is it so important to have? The argument of this thesis is that taste is the knowledge of what is pleasing to others. Placing Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility alongside the long history of the concept of taste, this thesis concludes that the ideal subject of taste is able to align her own private pleasure with that of others. Like the sympathizer in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the subject divides herself by taking on the viewpoint of the other and imagining that the other’s pleasure or displeasure is also her own. Through this mechanism of sympathy, the subject cultivates a sense of self-control that, at the same time, allows for personal pleasure. This social sensitivity is synonymous with “good taste,” and the doctrine of “general civility” described by Sense and Sensibility’s Elinor Dashwood abides by the same principle that harmonizes self-interest with the common good. In this way, Elinor also aligns herself with the gourmand, a figure theorized by the gastronome (and Austen’s contemporary) Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. Elinor and the gourmand, as models of taste, defend both the private pleasures of the self and the public pleasures of social life. My reading of Austen reveals that a balance between self and society — the puzzle of modern life — is most achievable through this contradictory understanding of taste.

Anger Makes Me a Modern Girl: ‘The Awkward’ Trope in Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding and Ian McEwan’s Atonement

The trope of the Awkward Young Woman has existed in the literary tradition for generations, but to this point has gone unnamed. From Fanny Price in Jane Austen’s 1811 Regency novel Mansfield Park to Lois Farquar in Elizabeth Bowen’s 1929 Anglo-Irish novel The Last September to Kayla Day in Bo Burnham’s 2018 American film Eighth Grade, she has been scapegoated and celebrated, a subject of empathy or of vitriol, but her insecurity and embarrassing conduct probe the most pressing issues facing the environment she stems from. In Carson McCullers' 1945 play The Member of the Wedding, the protagonist Frankie Addams, a “girl grown too-tall, too-fast,” is awed and in love with her brother and his fiancée, and wishes to become “a we of me” by joining their relationship. Her portrayal hits at questions of queerness, economic status and privilege, social decorum of the Jim Crow-era American South, and racialized bigotry and violence. Briony Tallis, the protagonist of Ian McEwan's 2001 novel Atonement is not outcast from her community—her precociousness and intellect serve her throughout the story, but make her a dangerous and envious counterpoint to her sister Cecilia and her partner Robbie. Her portrayal explores villainized feminine awkwardness, and brings into question her credibility as a narrator. Using the arguments present in Affect Theory, Narrative Transportation Theory, and Mimetic Theory as touchstones and referencing The Accidental by Ali Smith and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison as countertexts, this thesis will dissect these novels to define and explore the trope of “The Awkward,” and why she is both revered and reviled by generations of writers.

An Appeal to Children’s Media: The Subversive Approach and Contribution to Fantasy in Howl’s Moving Castle

This thesis will propose a conversation about the transformative aspirations of Howl’s Moving Castle – both the 1986 novel by Diana Wynne Jones and the 2004 Studio Ghibli Adaptation (directed by Hayao Miyazaki) – within the context of children's media. Despite the middling reception of the film by critics, this paper seeks to set forth a unified front, in which Jones and Miyazaki are both equally successful by virtue of their subversions of pre-established notions of the genres, forms, and traditions. Importantly, children’s media is an evasive concept, unlike literary genres such as Romance, Non-Fiction, and Poetry, that which is ‘children’s literature’ is included “by virtue of what the category implies, not so much about the text itself as about its intended audience.” It is a genre defined by the audience, its content an estimation or projection of what, at most, adults think children like, and at least what adults think children need in order to adapt within a hegemonic cultural identity. Children’s film is perhaps a more malleable form of media, especially in the context of the family film, which caters to both adults and children and foregrounds complexity in their “increasingly frequent treatment of difficult, sensitive, or ‘taboo’ subjects, as well as in their directors’ use of complex narrative and aesthetic devices,” per Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer’s writing in ‘New Perspectives in Children's Film Studies,’ breeding a body of work that aims to introduce critical thinking and allegory, at an early age. Both the novel and film’s respective projects, then, can be understood through their critical engagement with their respective forms. They introduce complexity and subvert expectations in ways that complement each other, but within their respective lines of thought.

Sailing Utopia: A Hunt for Queer Pirates in the Work of Claude McKay, Virginia Woolf, and Jordy Rosenberg

At its core, this thesis argues that the ambivalent figure of the pirate can help us to understand José Muñoz’ concept of queerness as a horizon which never arrives (Crusing Utopia 2009). My introduction defines the ocean, and the pirate ship upon it, as an anti-national space rife with potential. Through Derek Walcott’s Poem, “The Sea is History” (2007), and Rediker and Linebaugh’s The Many-Headed Hydra (2013), I show that history has been written by the nation-state; but around the sea, alternative stories exist. As queerness has been erased by the nation-state’s histories, the ocean then becomes a perfect place for queer utopic speculation.
Though they are peripheral figures, pirates spend plenty of time in the fictional spotlight. At times we cast them as villains, and at others we champion them as charismatic vagabonds. A pirate’s earring, long hair, and ruffly clothes perform hyper-masculinity with items that, to modern viewers, are typically feminine. These subversions evoke a queerness that the homosocial space of the ship does not negate. And as piracy is not a solitary affair, collectivity sustains this queer utopia.
I use the pirate as a heuristic to investigate how three primary texts forming a non-traditional historical archive—Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille (1933), and Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of The Fox (2018)—understand the interplay of empire, queerness, and dispossession. Each chapter focuses on a specific place and paratext (Genette 1997) in order to unlock the utopic queer aspects of the novels. The first chapter, pulling from Julius Scott’s book The Common Wind (2018), establishes the pirate as a dispossessed figure who circulates alternative forms of knowledge, viewing the title through the lens of the port city. The second chapter takes up interior paratexts as the ship; which is associated with the disabled body, masculinity, and gender nonconformity. We see the pirate as not simply celebratory, but ambivalent, with the potential for dystopic ends.
Finally, I conclude by arguing that a queer piracy must always remain a potential. A utopic queerness looks back to the past, but forms the present around the ever-changing potentials of the future; while a dystopic piracy acts in isolation, it is immutable, or it focuses on a return to an unrecoverable past.
 

Jhumpa Lahiri and the Complex Immigrant Identity: We Belong Everywhere and Nowhere

Jhumpa Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri, a second-generation immigrant and a diasporic author who is grappling with the concepts of home, identity, acculturation and contra acculturation, tries to navigate her own relationship with these concepts by understanding what identity means for the Indian immigrant characters in her books. This thesis delves into the different and overlapping strategies Lahiri uses to explore the conflicts around immigrant identity, by closely analyzing her books Interpreter of Maladies (1999) which is a collection of fictional short stories, The Namesake (2003) which is a fictional novel, In Other Words (2016) which is a piece of non-fiction memoir, and Whereabouts (2018) which is again a piece of literary fiction. Almost like a religious or spiritual journey, this thesis takes us through the process of realization, where the subject first has to go through a rigorous and painful process of navigating identity and experiencing an excruciating ambivalence, reconstructing themselves and finding a third territory to belong altogether, before coming to the revelatory moment of self-realization or enlightenment that we belong nowhere.

The dissertation begins by exploring her analysis of the in-betweenness of identity for first-generation immigrants. It then moves to how second-generation immigrants seek an identity that is based neither on the old nor the new country, nor a hyphenated combination of the two, instead they search for a third unknown space to recreate themselves without any misgivings or expectations and in order to compromise for the lost places. This mutability of identity or change isn’t the goal, but it is encouraged by Lahiri and she asks her readers to reconstruct and rediscover themselves rather than being limited by certain parameters of identity, especially when they don’t identify with those parameters. The ultimate goal, however, is something else. It is to recognize the homelessness that the subject is truly experiencing. It is to recognize that identity is merely a construct and that we transcend all political boundaries of location which can possibly define us, and we are ultimately left in a state of metaphorical homelessness where we belong everywhere and nowhere.
 

From Jinn to the Virgin Mary: Four Bedrock Classification Systems for Folktale Triumph and Fail across The Arabian Nights and Grimm's Children and Household Tales

The field of folklore studies has relied upon a classification system attempting to identify all known folk stories designed by two scholars, Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, since the early twentieth century. Aarne's Types of the Folktale is an ambitious attempt to organize folk stories into different "types," in order to create a one-stop shop for classifying and comparing folktales regardless of their time or place of origin. Aarne's index has undergone two revisions by Thompson, who doubled the size of the work by adding tales from new regions. Thompson's revision largely remained true to Aarne's system, but he later published a new work, Motif-Index of Folk Literature, which focuses on cataloging individual motifs rather than entire tales. As the field of folklore studies grew, new scholars turned their attention to these seemingly simple tales. Russian structuralist Vladimir Propp and French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss both took up the task of understanding the spoken story and devised two new approaches to assessing folktales in their respective works Morphology of the Folk Tale and "The Structural Study of Myth." The present study aims to compare these different approaches to the taxonomy of folklore using common tale types found in two of the most influential anthologies of folk stories: Grimm's Children and Household Tales and The Arabian Nights.

An Ethics of American Work, Labor, and the Role of Labor Protest: One Way to Think about American ‘Hard Work’ and Labor Reality 

In this thesis, I seek to understand the genesis of the uniquely American idea of “hard work,” interrogate its ethics, analyze its effects on the contemporary state of work and labor in the United States, and to recommend more ethical ways of constructing an economy in which people work. In Section I, I introduce the idea of American “hard work” and interrogate if it’s possible to re-conceive of this traditional idea as well as the broader economic structures that both support it and give life to it. In Section II, I use Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth” and Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism in order to show a prime example of the American idea of “hard work” through a wealthy man that is canonically representative of the American Dream and to provide one idea as to where this drive to accumulate wealth may have originated from. Here, “hard work,” I argue, has its roots in a Protestant, and specifically Calvinist, devotion to the rational organization of society and labor, as defined by Weber and his since been co-opted into the American subconscious even if its religious roots have given way. In Section III, I use Melville’s “Bartleby” to understand to what extent this idea of hard work has been taken and to what extent this idea has been resisted. I then analyze the ethics of Bartleby’s negation of the possibility of work using Joseph Raz’s and Ronald Dworkin’s conceptions of the right to protest and resist authoritative directives. In Section IV, I use contemporary instances of labor resistance in the form of the Great Resignation in the United States and the “Lying Flat” movement in China to see how this Enlightenment era idea of “hard work” has evolved and been rejected in modernity. Then, in section V, I introduce ethical ideas of work as proposed by Bertrand Russell and John Ruskin in order to reimagine how the American idea of work and working life can be reformulated. In Section VI, I propose provisional solutions to the American problem of work through ideas of universal basic income and post-growth economics. Section VII concludes.

What You Do, I Do: The Friendship of Lenù and Lila—Exploring the Tension in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels 

In her Neapolitan Novels, Elena Ferrante constructs a narrative that hinges on the turbulent friendship of Lenù and Lila. After Lila’s purposeful disappearance, Lenù decides to go against Lila’s wishes and writes about their whole friendship, making Lila’s life concrete and unerasable. Lenù utilizes her grief for the loss of her friend as the drive and power of the novels. Their friendship, and this act that produces the novels, provides a tension to the narrative that seeps into its words and affects the reading of the novels. The tension, emanating from the friendship, is due to (1) Ferrante’s inconclusive assignment of protagonist and antagonist which causes the characters to try and merge into one; (2) the competitive nature each girl possesses that stems from their inner self-hatred; (3) the suspense of love in the story that emanates from the unreliable narration that creates intense moments of unexpected behavior and significant breaking points in the novels. The oscillating events of the girls’ lives that creates consistent equilibrium is made suspenseful by the narration of the novels being only supplied by Lenù, not Lila. However, while some see Lenù writing about Lila as a vengeful act, Lenù herself cannot exist without some semblance of Lila being created, and Ferrante, through the friendship, makes it unclear where one girl starts and one girl ends, ultimately making the readers question which girl is truly the narrator. The tension also comes from the idea layed out early by Lenù, that their friendship was always going towards something terrible, something “inevitable and unexpected” (Shulevitz). This suspense controls the narrative and how Lenù describes herself and Lila, keeping the reader just far enough away in understanding the two girls to keep them engaged with the narrative.

The Idea of Hailsham: Politics, Love, and Persuasion in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go 

In this paper, I present the argument that the barbaric system of genetic slavery constructed in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go distracts scholarship from the framework that should be used to understand the novel. Never Let Me Go is best understood as the story of a colonial political ideology constructed by the Guardians which I define as “Hailsham” - named for the school that is built to provide the Guardians with the means to advocate for their ideology in the public square. The philosophy of Hailsham is as follows: the sinful choice to create an inherently unnatural race of clones poses a threat to the survival of morality. If the clones are raised in a civilized manner, they can restore morality without dismantling the benefits - or the cruelties – of the donations system. To justify my definition of Hailsham as a political ideology, I employ Glannon’s principles on the ethics of cloning to explain how cloning in Never Let Me Go creates humans as means to an end and disperses them into a system of public property. I use the Guardians’ expulsion of Miss Lucy to prove that their first commitment is to that system of public property, not to the alleviation of pain for individual clones. I then utilize the philosophy of Ignatieff and Said, to explain the manner in which the Guardians’ sense of moral superiority and authority combines with their disgust for both the clones, and the modern system that made them, in order to produce a colonial ideology that produces and extracts redemption from clones without disturbing the donor system. I then explore the construction of the school of Hailsham as a system meant to produce persuasive material - in the form of art and improved treatment - that enables Guardians to make the argument of Hailsham in the public square. The art proves the clones’ humanity, and their improved quality of life provides tempting moral consolation.

My subsequent argument, once I have established Hailsham as a political ideology, is that the persuasive effect of Hailsham backfires on the Guardians by convincing the students that they have worth and value. Hailsham persuades them to fantasize that they are entitled to certain privileges. This fantasy of Hailsham - embodied in the idea of deferrals - catalyzes the main confrontation in the novel: when confronted with their own mortality and subservience, Ruth, Kathy, and Tommy do not fall into a paralyzing pattern of detachment and acceptance common in Ishiguro novels. Instead, the concept of deferrals motivates Tommy and Kathy to initiate their romance and ask the Guardians for a deferral.

Finally, the request for a deferral constructs a political allegory by using Tommy and Kathy’s romance to confront the Guardians with their own thesis. The use of art to reveal their romance mirrors the Guardians’ use of art to reveal the souls of clones. When Tommy and Kathy’s art is unable to triumph over their disgust for clones, it shows that disgust for clones triumphs over the Guardians’ conviction and they reject their own persuasive model of Hailsham.