The Disappearance of Moral Choice in Serially Reproduced Narratives

How do narratives influence moral decision-making? Our ongoing studies use serial reproduction of narratives, that is multiple retellings as in the telephone game, of morally ambiguous situations. In particular, we tested stories that include a minor misdemeanor, but leave open whether the wrongdoer will be punished by a bystander. It turns out that serial reproduction (retelling) of stories tends to eliminate the possibility of intervention by the bystander under certain conditions. We reason that this effect can be explained either by preferences of the readers or by the reader\u27s discomfort to get involved. A second finding is that retellings of third-person narratives of moral situations lead to a higher degree of change and invention of the outcome than first-person narratives

Scotland, the cradle of comics

No abstract available

Walking Corpses & Conscious Plants: Possibilist Ecologies in Graphic Novels

In “Walking Corpses & Conscious Plants: Possibilist Ecologies in the Graphic Novel,” I examine how graphic narratives have historically been used to express political concerns; I then rate the impact of two contemporary works which imagine planetary crisis in relation to this context. Working with Robert Kirkman\u27s The Walking Dead and Alan Moore\u27s Saga of the Swamp Thing, I aim to illustrate that the violent worlds depicted in each fiction attest relevant social critique. As a frame for this analysis, I turn to the work of philosopher David Kellogg Lewis. Using his model of modal realism, I argue that engaging ideas of alternate realities through graphic narratives can be beneficial to stimulating questions of political discourse among readers which might not arise otherwise. Beginning with a consideration for early examples of sequential art and their social functions, the first of my three chapters builds a foundation for understanding how the modern comics form came into being. Next, I focus my attention upon the significance of the portrayal of violence in my two primary texts. Both works imagine spaces of total war but portray this experience through vastly different perspectives. Mainly, my analysis of Kirkman\u27s work concerns how the presentation of the human body is linked to suicide bombers and the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. Here I apply the work of philosopher Adriana Cavarero, author of Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, citing Kirkman\u27s post-apocalyptic universe as a symptomatic expression of cultural concerns regarding ceaseless conflict and erasure of identity. Conversely, my interest in Moore\u27s Saga of the Swamp Thing is motivated by his fusion of awareness into the environment. Moore\u27s monumental revival of a marginally successful superhero demonstrates that certain themes, like natural preservation and dependency, may become more pertinent to discuss with the passing of time

Kate Chopin\u27s Contribution to Realism and Naturalism: Reconsiderations of W. D. Howells, Maupassant, and Flaubert.

No one has previously undertaken a detailed examination of Kate Chopin\u27s documented intertextuality with writers such as W. D. Howells, Hamlin Garland, Maupassant, and Flaubert. My purpose is to examine Chopin\u27s works in the context of writers with whom she interacts and so to reveal her impact on the development of literary realism and naturalism. My study reveals that, though her mature writing eliminates sentimentalism, she never abandons romance elements residual from her youth. Her typically subjective narrator removes narrative authority, intensifies our involvement with characters, and validates the marginalized voice. Darwin and the philosophers temper her Catholicism, yet she maintains a sense of the divine and perennial nature of the force of love. Her acknowledgement of the influence of other writers reveals her sense of continuity as a means of understanding our selves. In Chopin\u27s first novel, At Fault, she borrows a subplot of Howells\u27s A Modern Instance to respond to the idealism Howells inveighs against even as his novel upholds it. From Howells\u27s perspective, love as the basis for action is illusory and ideal. Chopin, understanding love as inherently human rather than as an ideal or abstract concept, critiques Howells\u27s notion that, lacking love, the ideal of marriage should be upheld. Appreciating Maupassant\u27s freedom of expression, Chopin departed from American models and responded instead to his stories. Richard Fusco reveals in detail how Chopin emulated Maupassant\u27s structures. Within those structures, she more efficiently expresses the force of love in her stories. We can use Fusco\u27s schema to examine Chopin\u27s conscious dialogic engagement as she focuses not on Maupassant\u27s larger concerns with an uncaring bourgeoisie, but on narrower concerns, typically within the female consciousness. Chopin finally returns to the novel form with The Awakening, a reconsideration of Flaubert\u27s Madame Bovary. Emma Bovary experiences no awakening, retaining romantic misconceptions. Edna awakens to the need to escape temporal limitations. Chopin pleads for the romantic vision and the necessity of understanding one\u27s inner reality. Under the influence of these writers, Chopin demonstrates continuity, forms a link between French and American realism and naturalism, and contributes to the movement toward soft naturalism

Minor Subjects in America: Everyday Childhoods of the Long Nineteenth Century

In my American studies dissertation, I argue that contrary to dominant discourses of separation between spaces of childhood and adulthood, representations of indigeneity, both explicit and implied, affirm the quotidian presence of social and political structures naturalized through children’s culture. Children’s literature, Native American autobiographies, and advice literatures historicize gendered inequalities reliant on particular racial representations. In other words, the intersections of gendered and racialized inequalities surface forcefully in these genres as spaces produced to reify the subjugation of minor and marginal identities through historical narratives. I understand children and the spaces they inhabit to constantly negotiate power, agency, and innocence in a way that is both fundamental to national identity, and at the same time made inaccessible to the adult population through age difference and legal subjectivity. However distant, the tensions between adult and child flex as the desire for a malleable offspring comes up against American models of independence, between creating boundaries for children and negotiating these boundaries, all of which make children’s culture a complex and complicated space for the study of national identity. Methodologically, the chapters take up an interdisciplinary approach, reading representations of women’s culture, fantasy, children, and indigeneity within legal frameworks in order to make visible the dynamic ways in which nationhood permeates everyday life. The interpellation of children into white supremacist, patriarchal, heteronormative U.S. national identity is read through primary texts such as The Tales of Peter Parley, The Whole History of Grandfather’s Chair (1841), Margaret Fuller’s “The Great Lawsuit,” Lydia Sigourney’s Letters to Young Ladies (1833) and Letters to Mothers (1839), and Zitkala-Ša’s serial periodical, “Impressions of an Indian Childhood” (1900) and Eastman\u27s serial periodical, “Recollections of the Wild Life” (1893). These diverse texts are in conversation through a theoretical framework that recognizes the coding of behavior and identity, reliant on representations of Native American bodies and culture

Accounting for Mysteries: Narratives of Intuition and Empiricism in the Victorian Novel

This dissertation explores the tensions between an empirical epistemology and an intuitive method of knowing the world as depicted in popular Victorian novels. These narratives attempt to assimilate alternate modes of understanding; however, the uneasiness of the relationship between empiricism and intuition speaks to larger cultural tensions about the possibility of reconciling fact and feeling in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. I argue that intuitive and imaginative modes of cognition are continually privileged in novels that explicitly claim to adhere to empirical forms of knowledge. As I examine the work of Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, and George Eliot, my project traces what I suggest is a particularly Victorian desire to empirically account for the material facts of the world and a simultaneous reluctance to abandon a sense of moral certainty that can be maintained only within the realm of instinct and intuition

Transactional bond in the novels of Charles Brockden Brown

The six novels and various other fiction pieces Charles Brockden Brown wrote between 1799 and 1801 coherently demonstrate the operation and effect of literary and artistic representation in early Republican America. In original close readings of Arthur Mervyn, Edgar Huntly, Ormond, and several other works, this dissertation identifies transactional bond and describes how Brown charted the establishment of the public and private individual self through transactional bond in three specific arenas: relationships between the developing self and written, visual, or reported representation; relationships between master/mentors and apprentices; relationships among women. Bonds that begin, operate, and dissolve between male characters are exercises in constructing young Republican manhood. Through individual young male\u27s experiences, Brown describes a process for certifying male suffrage. Through the mentor/protege model, Brown makes explicit the questions that surround his society\u27s structuring of that autonomous citizen-self. Female bonds work toward impressing a female self into the useful mold of the good Republican wife/mother. Transactional bonds in Brown\u27s novels are explorations of gender, authority, and autonomy, complicated by the influence of written or visual gesture. Brown actuates the competition among those forces by presenting explicitly visual word portraits in the narratives, employing techniques in text that parallel the directly visual techniques in paint of portraitists of the post-Revolutionary era

Authorial Cameos in Post-Romantic Russian Literature

This dissertation examines representations of authorship in Russian literature from a number of perspectives, including the specific Russian cultural context as well as the broader discourses of romanticism, autobiography, and narrative theory. My main focus is a narrative device I call "the figured author," that is, a background character in whom the reader may recognize the author of the work. I analyze the significance of the figured author in the works of several Russian nineteenth- and twentieth- century authors in an attempt to understand the influence of culture and literary tradition on the way Russian writers view and portray authorship and the self. The four chapters of my dissertation analyze the significance of the figured author in the following works: 1) Pushkin's Eugene Onegin and Gogol's Dead Souls; 2) Chekhov's "Ariadna"; 3) Bulgakov's "Morphine"; 4) Nabokov's The Gift. In the Conclusion, I offer brief readings of Kharms's "The Old Woman" and "A Fairy Tale" and Zoshchenko's Youth Restored. One feature in particular stands out when examining these works in the Russian context: from Pushkin to Nabokov and Kharms, the "I" of the figured author gradually recedes further into the margins of narrative, until this figure becomes a third-person presence, a "he." Such a deflation of the authorial "I" can be seen as symptomatic of the heightened self-consciousness of Russian culture, and its literature in particular. By examining figured authors across these works, I explore authorship in Russia as a self-questioning, and potentially self-erasing, practice

Textual Refuse: Iain Sinclair's Politics and Poetics of Refusal

This thesis directs scholarly attention and recognition to contemporary British writer Iain Sinclair, whose textual refusals provide an alternative model of cultural production to those prescribed by late era capitalism. In doing so, it considers Sinclair's engagement with the notion of refuse. As Walter Benjamin's work eloquently testifies, reading "the rags, the refuse" reveals much about the constitution of culture. Refuse is an integral element of the everyday, and of modern consumer culture. As such, there are compelling reasons for it to be brought to the fore as a topic for study. To recognise the potential and possibilities of refuse is to refuse the ideological and structurating machinery of capitalism, which has devised systems to render refuse invisible and invalid. In many ways, Sinclair creates and brings to light what dominant culture has attempted to bury: counter-cultural poetics, indeterminate narratives, alternative histories. Sinclair's "textua l refuse" is the visible scriptural manifestation of those subterranean histories that hegemonic culture has sought to forget, omit and/or discount. In any economy that fetishises the commodity, Sinclair's association with the marginalised realm of refuse is politicised, and similarly his creation of textual refuse is politicised activity. Sinclair's textual refuse is a refusal of the commodification of literature. Within the theoretical framework of this thesis, refuse is neither failure nor negation. This thesis promotes Sinclair's refusals as dynamic acts; their ruptures and blockages are not impasses, but are, instead, productive. Given the inextricable link between refuse and contemporary production and consumption, Sinclair's engagements with refuse double as an argument for his timeliness and relevance as subject of academic enquiry