Narrative at Risk: Accident and Teleology in American Culture, 1963-2013

Accident in fiction is always inevitable. When a character in a novel suffers a car accident, for example, the accident is the effect of the author\u27s intentions, and therefore it is not accidental. The words and images that constitute the meanings and events of the text do not change. The accidents in the narrative always happen the same way, reading after rereading. Drawing from this observation, the question that Narrative at Risk attempts to answer is, in its simplest iteration: how can narrative accurately represent accident when its textual representation is not subject to the effects of accident? I ask this of a number of American cultural objects that were produced over the last fifty years, from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to the present. Narrative at Risk interrogates representations of accident primarily in novels and films--but also in television, roleplaying games, comic strips, and videogames--in order to examine how contemporary American culture ascribes meaning to the accidental. I read a wide array of accidents--from mechanical failures to failed suicides, depictions of biological evolution to games of chance--as providing a broad but nonetheless coherent understanding of how American society has conceived of accident in relation to individuals, communities, and the species as a whole. Narrative at Risk, in treating media such as film, television, and videogames alongside literature, broadens our understanding of how accident developed as a danger over the past fifty years, as well as how various media influenced and shaped one another through borrowed reading practices. In the introduction, I focus on the crystallization of the mass media that brought traumatic events into American homes again and again, specifically, the moment of President John F. Kennedy\u27s assassination and the epistemological and ontological crises this event and its media coverage initiated. The first chapter reads the role of this mediation and the crises of the 1960s as they jointly inform representations of accidental mechanical failure. Through readings of four texts, I theorize a politics of accident, taking as my initial subject what Ronald Reagan called his most formative moment: his role as a train accident victim in King\u27s Row: 1941), and his discussion of this role in his 1965 memoir Where\u27s the Rest of Me? I delineate how Reagan\u27s obsession with narrating accident later shaped a politics of the accident in texts such as David Cronenberg\u27s film Crash: 1996), Don DeLillo\u27s novel White Noise: 1985), Colson Whitehead\u27s novel The Intuitionist: 1999), and Rockstar Game\u27s Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas: 2004). The subsequent chapter shifts from the first\u27s broad historical range to texts composed and published at the end of the Cold War: Paul Auster\u27s novel Leviathan: 1992); Jeffrey Eugenides\u27s novel The Virgin Suicides: 1993); and Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man : 1996) an episode of the television show The X-Files: 1993-2002). I read the failure of suicide attempts in these texts as accidents that express the limits of intentionality, which bring to the fore the nation\u27s inability to conceive of a future beyond the ideological bounds of the conflict with the Soviet Union that provided meaning during the Cold War. The third chapter recontextualizes the final years of the Cold War. Here I read Richard Kenney\u27s poem, A Colloquy of Ancient Men from his collection, The Invention of the Zero: 1993), alongside two novels: Michael Crichton\u27s Jurassic Park: 1990) and Richard Powers\u27s The Gold Bug Variations: 1991). Rather than depicting the futurelessness of the United States, these texts look to deep history on the scale of evolutionary time. They depict evolution as a series of random, accidental changes that take place in the history of a species\u27 development; in doing so, they together trace the Cold War fear of thermonuclear annihilation shifting to an anxiety of genetic manipulation. The fourth chapter turns to the 1970s to investigate the early years of the culture wars. I begin by reading how chance disrupts the narrative of Kathy Acker\u27s novel Blood and Guts in High School: 1984), then consider the religious right\u27s hyperbolic condemnation of chance in TSR\u27s roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons: 1974). I then scrutinize games of chance in three other texts: Michael Cimino\u27s film The Deer Hunter: 1978); Thomas Pynchon\u27s novel Gravity\u27s Rainbow: 1973); and Sam Lipsyte\u27s short story The Dungeon Master : 2010). These three cases demonstrate how chance undermines the paranoid fantasy that there are external forces authoring the world. Finally, Narrative at Risk concludes with an exploration of accident in the present through a discussion of two television shows--Breaking Bad: 2008-2013) and The Americans: 2013-)--and Steve Erickson\u27s 2012 novel These Dreams of You. Imagining accidents as the fault of the government, these texts collectively suggest American culture\u27s continued reliance upon teleological thinking and conspiracy theory

Portland State Magazine

PSU’s alumni magazine, published 2-3 times a year. In this issue: New wireless technology, WiMAX, could change the way the world goes online; Jane Jacobs, author and visionary, speaks her mind; a professor writes about her theory of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome; future caregivers grapple with life and death decisions; they were singers, conductors, and now they own an opera company; and more.https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/psu_magazine/1072/thumbnail.jp

The Architecture of Joseph Michael Gandy (1771-1843) and Sir John Soane (1753-1837): An Exploration Into the Masonic and Occult Imagination of the Late Enlightenment

In examining select works of English architects Joseph Michael Gandy and Sir John Soane, this dissertation is intended to bring to light several important parallels between architectural theory and freemasonry during the late Enlightenment. Both architects developed architectural theories regarding the universal origins of architecture in an attempt to establish order as well as transcend the emerging historicism of the early nineteenth century. There are strong parallels between Soane\u27s use of architectural narrative and his discussion of architectural \u27model\u27 in relation to Gandy\u27s understanding of \u27trans-historical\u27 architecture. The primary textual sources discussed in this thesis include Soane\u27s Lectures on Architecture, delivered at the Royal Academy from 1809 to 1836, and Gandy\u27s unpublished treatise entitled the Art, Philosophy, and Science of Architecture, circa 1826. Soane\u27s Museum at Lincoln\u27s Inn Fields provides a three dimensional encyclopedia that is an embodiment of architectural vision and memory. I propose Soane\u27s Museum as parallel to Gandy\u27s architectural watercolor drawings, particularly his final series executed for Comparative Architecture from 1836 to 1838. While these works remain distinct, they are complementary examples of visual representation which rely upon architectural narrative through emblem and symbol. Another correspondence between Soane and Gandy involves Soane\u27s role as a Masonic architect and Gandy\u27s role as an occult visionary. As the result of a planned reconciliation between two groups in freemasonry - the \u27Antients\u27 and the Moderns - Soane became the Grand Superintendent of Works for the United Grand Lodge of England in 1813. This led to Soane and Gandy\u27s shared visions for London\u27s Freemasons\u27 Hall, designed and built between 1813-30 (and subsequently demolished in 1863). I argue that this is the architectural project through which Soane and Gandy\u27s common interest in universal symbolism was made manifest, as evidenced by the design and presentation drawings held at the Soane Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. In each of these collaborative works of architecture, Soane and Gandy displayed \u27Masonic and occult imagination.\u2

The Gamut Looks at Cleveland, Special Edition, 1986

CONTENTS OF SPECIAL ISSUE, 1986 Candace S. Shireman: Marble Mirrors of Society: Cemeteries in Cleveland, 1797-1984, 1 From Issue Number 11, Winter 1984 Arthur Geoffrion: Landmark Complex, 15 From Issue Number 4, Fall 1981 Elizabeth Kirk: Severance Hall, Cleveland’s Temple of Music, 19 From Issue Number 18, Spring/Summer 1986 Walter C. Leedy, Jr.: Cleveland’s Terminal Tower – The Van Sweringens’ Afterthought, 39 From Issue Number 8, Winter 1983 Mary Peale Schofield: Meade and Hamilton’s Livable Cleveland Houses, 63 From Issue Number 6, Spring/Summer 1982 Sara Ruth Watson and John R. Wolfs: Movable Bridges over the Cuyahoga River, 79 From Issue Number 3, Spring/Summer 1981 Michael Samerdyke: Spellbound at the New Mayfield, 88 From Issue Number 18, Spring/Summer 1986https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/gamut_archives/1036/thumbnail.jp

Right modern: technology, nation, and Britian's extreme right in the interwar period (1919-1940)

This study examines the extreme right wing political tendency in Great Britain during the interwar years and particularly its relationship to technological modernity. The far right has been much misunderstood and under-researched, often seen as part of "Appeasement Conservatism" and as a group of out-dated elites inhibiting Britain's modernization. In fact, this study suggests, the extreme right was distinct from Tory Conservatism and promoted its own (exclusionary and objectionable) paradigm of modernism. In its policies, rhetoric, and practices, the far right, above all, advocated a technically modernized Britain. Only such a modernized state, they believed, (in terms of industrial and military strength), could take its place in the new generation of Great Powers in a predatory and chaotic world. Extreme right leaders were convinced that Britain must insulate itself from such economic and political chaos by preserving its Empire, creating an autarkic economy, eliminating "foreign elements" at home, and by creating a lethal modern defense. For Britain to accomplish these objectives, it would have to master and apply modern science and technology on a national scale. For Britain to maintain (or re-assert) its former world leadership, said the far right, it had to become a "Great Technological Nation." Members of Britain's extreme right were especially influenced by the fascist dictatorships - their crushing of Marxism, their supposed elimination of class war, and especially their apparent accomplishments of modernization. A disproportionate number of British fascists and fascist supporters were key members of Britain's industrial and high-tech. elite. As they praised the dictatorships and attacked Britain's liberal-democratic system, they used issues of national modernization (aviation, modern highways, radio communications, military mechanization) as a key battlefield for political debate. In such debates they routinely positioned their own tendency as the best hope for progress against the supposed irrationality of the left and the alleged ineptitude of professional politicians created by democracy.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Jonathan Schneer; Committee Member: Dr. John Krige; Committee Member: Dr. John Tone; Committee Member: Dr. Gus Giebelhaus; Outside Reader: Dr. David Edgerto

Tar for Mortar: "The Library of Babel" and the Dream of Totality

Tar for Mortar offers an in-depth exploration of one of literature’s greatest tricksters, Jorge Luis Borges. His short story “The Library of Babel” is a signature examplar of this playfulness, though not merely for the inverted world it imagines, where a library thought to contain all possible permutations of all letters and words and books is plumbed by pious librarians looking for divinely pre-fabricated truths. One must grapple as well with the irony of Borges’s narration, which undermines at every turn its narrator’s claims of the library’s universality, including the very possibility of exhausting meaning through combinatory processing. Borges directed readers to his non-fiction to discover the true author of the idea of the universal library. But his supposedly historical essays are notoriously riddled with false references and self-contradictions. Whether in truth or in fiction, Borges never reaches a stable conclusion about the atomic premises of the universal library — is it possible to find a character set capable of expressing all possible meaning, or do these letters, like his stories and essays, divide from themselves in a restless incompletion? While many readers of Borges see him as presaging our digital technologies, they often give too much credit to our inventions in doing so. Those who elide the necessary incompletion of the Library of Babel compare it to the Internet on the assumption that both are total archives of all possible thought and expression. Though Borges’s imaginings lend themselves to digital creativity (libraryofbabel.info is certainly evidence of this), they do so by showing the necessary incompleteness of every totalizing project, no matter how technologically refined. Ultimately, Basile nudges readers toward the idea that a fictional/imaginary exposition can hold a certain power over technolog

Entangled Knowledge

The intimate relationship between global European expansion since the early modern period and the concurrent beginnings of the scientific revolution has long been acknowledged. The contributions in this volume approach the entanglement of science and cultural encounters – many of them in colonial settings – from a variety of perspectives. Historical and historiographical survey essays sketch a transcultural history of knowledge and conduct a critical dialogue between the recent academic fields of Postcolonial Studies and Science & Empire Studies; a series of case studies explores the topos of Europe’s ‘great inventions’, the scientific exploitation of culturally unfamiliar people and objects, the representation of indigenous cultures in discourses of geographical exploration, as well as non-European scientific practices. ‘Entangled Knowledges’ also refers to the critical practices of scholarship: various essays investigate scholarship’s own failures in self-reflexivity, arising from an uncritical appropriation of cultural stereotypes and colonial myths, of which the discourse of Orientalism in historiography and residual racialist assumptions in modern genetics serve as examples. The volume thus contributes to the study of cultural and colonial relations as well as to the history of science and scholarship

The Banality of Virtue: A Multifaceted View of George Orwell as Champion of the Common Man

This dissertation focuses on several aspects of the life and works of one Eric Arthur Blair, better known as George Orwell. It views Orwell as a servant of empire, as a revolutionary, as an intellectual, as an optimistic skeptic, as a writer, as a sort of prophet, and as a critic. It makes the case that Orwell wrote with the interests of the common people at the forefront of his mind, and that the threats to humanity and the liberal Western tradition existing in the 1930s and 1940s still exist today, albeit in a form that would have surprised Orwell himself. The passing of the year 1984 prompted a sigh of relief in Western societies who celebrated Big Brother's failure to arise in that celebrated year. As we end the first decade of the twenty-first century, we should consider whether or not we truly have avoided the perils of totalitarianism and the possible nightmare world that Orwell envisioned. This work engages Orwell's past, his present, and his unseen future: our own present. It applies Orwell to the postmodern world in an effort to emphasize that his work still matters