The ghost of the ‘Y’ : paternal DNA, haunting and genealogy

Based on a personal family history experience, in this paper, I consider the way in which genealogical DNA testing is revealing family secrets, in particular paternity secrets, which would previously have remained unknown via ‘traditional’ methods of genealogical research. Reasons for the displacement of these invisible fathers from the records are discussed, and the power of genealogical DNA testing to bring them into focus is examined. Such discoveries may disrupt and unsettle, causing people to think differently about the fathers and grandfathers with whom they have grown up or have believed to be part of their personal histories and, for some people, may challenge their sense of identity. Beyond personal identity issues, in this paper, I draw upon ideas about ‘ghost-work’ to suggest that these experiences have some of the features of hauntings and that the ghostly fathers who break through may speak to us about social realities and structures, beyond the confines of linear tim

The ghost of Alcestis

This chapter considers a complex of materials centred on the Alcestis of Euripides and its reception history as an opera (Lully, Gluck) in early modern France. The interest of this particular text is that its operatic setting by Lully generated a polemic in the 1670s which initiated the ‘Querelle des anciens et des modernes’, a founding moment of modernity. This study thus interrogates the very notion of ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ as it is deployed around the Alcestis, that is, as Lully and Gluck translated modernity into music. The fundamental question of this modernity would be ‘Who or what was returned to Admetus?’ My argument is that the ghost of Alcestis, written out, written over, or perhaps repressed the in 1674 Lully opera, re-emerges in the theoretical discourse of Racine and Perrault surrounding the opera as the general question of what, exactly, can be retrieved from antiquity. Equally, her ghostliness eliminated from the plot of Gluck’s 1776 Paris reform opera, it is her voice, her very music, which is invaded by the musical figure of the ghost. The theoretical frame for this study is formed by the notion of ‘hauntology’, a trend in recent critical and psychoanalytical work that attempts to link the theme of the ghost to textuality in general

Gold Teeth: Making Meaning through Narrative

How do we create meaning in life through the telling of narratives? What do we have to gain by comparing stories from different cultures and times? By looking at two seemingly disparate stories - The Story of Kotikarna and Thomas Pynchon\u27s Inherent Vice - and asking ourselves how they impart similar meanings through varying narratological elements, we can better understand how humans order and establish value in the world, and how humans argue for these orders and values through narrative

Strings in Background Electric Field, Space/Time Noncommutativity and A New Noncritical String Theory

Searching for space/time noncommutativity we reconsider open strings in a constant background electric field. The main difference between this situation and its magnetic counterpart is that here there is a critical electric field beyond which the theory does not make sense. We show that this critical field prevents us from finding a limit in which the theory becomes a field theory on a noncommutative spacetime. However, an appropriate limit toward the critical field leads to a novel noncritical string theory on a noncommutative spacetime.Comment: 14 page

Ian Rankin and the ethics of crime fiction

Writer Ian Rankin has suggested that crime fiction should invoke a self-conscious interrogation of the dark underside of society, that readers should subsequently be drawn toward an ethical engagement with the world around them. The author considers the implications of this ethical potential with reference to Rankin's depictions of postdevolution Scotland

Seeing it Straight

This Master of Fine Arts thesis is divided into four main sections:FAITH and DISBELIEF: In which I reckon with the implications of faith versus rationality as a secular nontheistic artist. IDEAS: The central locus of my work is a place of indeterminacy between what is known/familiar and what is just one step outside of that. This has nothing to do with mysticism, science fiction, or anything else unmoored from established fact. Section also touches on the particular vantage of a female artist with working class roots.THE WORK: Selection of work made during graduate school, and the the guiding thoughts behind each.EMPTINESS, STILLNESS, ABSENCE, GHOSTS, DOUBT: A discussion of influential artists and ideas

Odysseus of the Arctic: The Epic of John Franklin and the Search for his Lost Expedition

This paper examines and maps the reasons for the lasting impression and legacy of the search for Sir. John Franklin\u27s disappeared 1845 expedition in search of the Northwest Passage. In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, burgeoning British Arctic exploration provided a rich foundation for serialized narratives, which, as they played off sentiments of national ambition and imperial pride, inspired a romanticization of the Arctic region and the men who explored it. The search for John Franklin\u27s missing expedition became the epicenter of this trend due to the search efforts of his wife, Lady Jane Franklin, and the controversial findings of explorer John Rae. Most research focuses primarily or solely on Jane\u27s efforts. As well as the public press coverage of the search and the response to Rae\u27s reports as the cause of the expedition\u27s popularity. This paper examines those two variables in tandem as well as mapping the legacy of the search through the movements and emergence of folksongs and other artistic works inspired by the expedition. Through analysis of letters and journals connected to the expedition and search, British newspapers publishing Arctic content, and archived recordings and broadsides of songs, this paper asserts that the relationship of the expedition to the quasi-mythological Northwest Passage, the efforts of Jane Franklin—amplified by the press, and the national fervor behind it--- all cemented the lost Franklin Expedition as a keystone event in the history of western exploration, and a story of uniquely legendary status among the sagas of the arctic

Regina Maria Roche’s \u3cem\u3eThe Children of the Abbey\u3c/em\u3e: Contesting the Catholic Presence in Female Gothic Fiction

This article examines Regina Maria Roche’s immensely popular gothic novel, The Children of the Abbey (1796), in light of the ideological and political campaigns that occurred in Britain leading up to the passage of the Catholic emancipation bill in 1829. The Children of the Abbey has been the subject of recent critical interpretation by a number of scholars who attempt to argue that it is pro-Catholic. However, by confronting the portrait of her dead mother in the final volume, Roche’s heroine Amanda discovers not a magical representation of the unknowable and inexplicable past that often stands for Catholicism but instead a rational and common-sense explanation of an earlier historical avatar of displaced feminine power, a coded endorsement of the Protestant way of understanding the world. Amanda gets to the root of female disinheritance and recovers in a real and tangible way her and her brother’s true identities. They seize their patrimony only by understanding and claiming the power of the displaced matriarchy for themselves. This article demonstrates that an objective assessment of the plot, imagery, rhetorical codes, and characters of The Children of the Abbey suggests that the religion Roche expounded was the system of bourgeois morality that we now understand as Providential Deism. While professing rationality and common sense as its ideals, however, the Providential Deist consistently deployed a bifurcated vision of Catholicism. That is, it presented Catholicism in a nostalgic glow, as a gauzy throwback to an earlier feudal era, while also probing it as a threatening political and tyrannical force that, if brought back to life, would threaten the secular values of contemporary Britain