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Articles 1 - 21 of 21
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Descended From Cain: The Biopolitics In Beowulf, Jia-Ying Liu
Descended From Cain: The Biopolitics In Beowulf, Jia-Ying Liu
The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English
No abstract provided.
Biopower, Biopolitics And Pandemic Vulnerabilities: Reading The Covid Chronicles Comics, Pramod K. Nayar Ph.D.
Biopower, Biopolitics And Pandemic Vulnerabilities: Reading The Covid Chronicles Comics, Pramod K. Nayar Ph.D.
Critical Humanities
This essay examines Covid Chronicles: A Comics Anthology from the perspective of biopower and biopolitics. It contends that, on the one hand, the comics capture individual suffering and collective trauma of the pandemic; on the other hand, these comics draw attention to the role the state plays in regulating bodies to be monitored, governed and, in some cases, deemed disposable.
The Ungovernable Novel: Towards A New Political Imaginary, Joseph Turner
The Ungovernable Novel: Towards A New Political Imaginary, Joseph Turner
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
The primary objective of my thesis is to provide an initial definition of what we could call the “ungovernable novel.” I borrow the concept of the “ungovernable” from the field of political theory, and I apply it to the theory of the novel by way of an engagement of Mikhail Bakhtin’s and Georg Lukács’ theories of the novel. Building on this theoretical foundation, I argue that our contemporary political imagination has reached a historical juncture: we must abandon the dystopian framework that we have inherited from the Cold War, and we must move in the direction of the ungovernable novel. …
A Foray Into The Camp: Human And Ecological Liberation In Contemporary Queer Conversion Therapy Literature, Mitchel Jurasek
A Foray Into The Camp: Human And Ecological Liberation In Contemporary Queer Conversion Therapy Literature, Mitchel Jurasek
Honors Projects
Through the analysis of two contemporary conversion therapy novels in North America, this project explores the intersections of biopolitics (specifically camp theory), queer theory, ecocriticism, and YA literature. Emily Danforth’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post and Nick White’s How to Survive a Summer are paired with scholars such as Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Joshua Whitehead, Greta Gaard, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Claudio Minca, Catriona Sandilands, Luce Irigaray, and Michael Marder to create a complex and intricate understanding of how ecologies impact queer youths’ experience in conversion therapy camps. The effect of such an intersectional and ecological understanding of queer becomings …
The Meaning Of Peace: William Faulkner, Modernism, And Perpetual Civil War, Jason Luke Folk
The Meaning Of Peace: William Faulkner, Modernism, And Perpetual Civil War, Jason Luke Folk
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
Much of scholarship regarding the presence of war in literary modernism has foregrounded psychic trauma endured by veterans of World War I. The returning soldier is often figured as representative of the war’s infiltration of the homefront. The common argument claims that the erosion of the distinction between war and peace (as well as private and public) is a mirror image of the veteran’s wounded psyche. This thesis, however, argues that peace and war in the West have always been indistinct. The body politic is, in actuality, constituted by a perpetual civil war. Furthermore, the novels of William Faulkner, because …
Ecological Crisis, Or “Intersex Panic,” As Answer Of The Real?, Stephanie Hsu
Ecological Crisis, Or “Intersex Panic,” As Answer Of The Real?, Stephanie Hsu
The Goose
Drawing upon Cal’s eventual metamorphosis into “The [white] Man” in Middlesex, and an examination of the Real of ecological crisis, Hsu explores the intersection of environmental racism, climate change denial, and intersex discrimination in order to advocate for a renewed awareness of ecological interdependency and the need for self-determination of people of colour in ecological and environmental justice discourses.
Trans-Pacific Imaginaries And Queer Intimacies In The Ruins Of Middlesex, Dai Kojima
Trans-Pacific Imaginaries And Queer Intimacies In The Ruins Of Middlesex, Dai Kojima
The Goose
Taking up Roland Barthes’s concept of the “third meaning,” Kojima analyzes the character of Julie Kikuchi, the Japanese American love interest of the grown-up Cal. Taking Julie seriously as a character beyond mere plot contrivance and cultural reference, Kojima invites us to consider the intertwined histories of economic rise and fall, trans-Pacific wars, and other intimacies that Middlesex remains entangled in yet fails to fully acknowledge.
Materialism’S Affective Appeal, Elizabeth Mazzolini
Materialism’S Affective Appeal, Elizabeth Mazzolini
The Goose
Citing the pronounced lack of academic engagement with Middlesex since its publication and riffing on the novel’s recounting of the demise of the auto industry in Detroit, Mazzolini examines how cycles of obsolescence and currency work within academic discourse and ultimately advocates for the novel’s potential for examining the material and affective nature of relevance itself.
On Being Intimate With Ruin: Reading Decay In Middlesex, Kaitlin Blanchard
On Being Intimate With Ruin: Reading Decay In Middlesex, Kaitlin Blanchard
The Goose
Blanchard argues for an intimate attention to the ruin in Middlesex and Detroit as a means of exploring the geo-bio-politics of decay as a problem of our socio-ecological present.
From Rusty Genetics To Octopussy’S Garden, Stacy Alaimo
From Rusty Genetics To Octopussy’S Garden, Stacy Alaimo
The Goose
Alaimo critiques the “rusty” understanding of genetics, gender, and sex in Middlesex, advocating instead for queer ecological futurism.
Mulberiddlesex, Catriona Sandilands
Mulberiddlesex, Catriona Sandilands
The Goose
Through a careful tracing of the botanical presence of mulberry trees in Middlesex, Sandilands argues for a reading practice that takes plants seriously. Thinking with plants interrupts the tendency to consider literary plants primarily as motifs, metaphors or agents of crude naturalization. Sandilands insists on involving plants in reading Middlesex in order to take the novel in less anthropocentric directions: even as Cal enlists mulberries to signal inevitability, their own stories overflow the novel’s deterministic views of race, species, territory, and gender identity.
Border Crossings, Watery Spaces, And The (Un)Verified Self In Middlesex, Jenny Kerber
Border Crossings, Watery Spaces, And The (Un)Verified Self In Middlesex, Jenny Kerber
The Goose
Kerber traces the ways in which water liberates and transforms various characters in Middlesex in order to critique and complicate water’s taken-for-granted liberatory powers. Kerber invites us to consider the majority of those for whom water is as deadly as it is (possibly) emancipating, especially those most vulnerable to climate change and other ecological and violent upheavals.
Dehumanism And Disposability, Julietta Singh
Dehumanism And Disposability, Julietta Singh
The Goose
Singh draws our attention to the “mute objects” of Middlesex, particularly The Obscure Object’s silent Black maid, Beulah, who quietly supports the unfolding romance between Cal and The Object. Through careful attention to histories of people silenced by slavery, dehumanization, and violence, Singh demands that we consider where and through what means some get to be fully human while others are made and sustained as objects for their comfort and play.
Beyond The Biography Of A Gene, Laura J. Collins
Beyond The Biography Of A Gene, Laura J. Collins
The Goose
Collins approaches the ethical nuances of Cal’s intersex narrative in Middlesex, drawing comparisons with current debates in North Carolina concerning gender-normative bathroom use and trans rights, in order to advocate for more ethical practices of relation and responsibility outside of mere knowledge creation and policy.
Middlesex And The Biopolitics Of Modernist Architecture, Nicole Seymour
Middlesex And The Biopolitics Of Modernist Architecture, Nicole Seymour
The Goose
Highlighting the architecture of the Middlesex house of Eugenides’ novel as a major technology of modernity, Seymour argues for the biopolitical understanding of such modernist architecture and for the ways in which it often works against the exploitative effects of automation and sexology, yet constitutes a complex and even contradictory force in processes of modernization, and in the novel itself.
Introduction: Sex And The (Motor) City: Ecologies Of Middlesex, Kaitlin Blanchard, Catriona Sandilands
Introduction: Sex And The (Motor) City: Ecologies Of Middlesex, Kaitlin Blanchard, Catriona Sandilands
The Goose
This special cluster consists of twelve short essays, originally presented in two linked roundtables at the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) conference in Detroit in June 2017, examining Jeffrey Eugenides' 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Middlesex. Through the novel, these papers explore the historical, intersectional, and ecological understandings of Detroit, exposing an exceptional—indeed, epic—range of social ecologies, concerned with everything from intersex and multispecies bio/geopolitics to transnational economies, to the aesthetics of architecture and decay. Focused on a very particular novel, written about a very particular city and experience of it, these papers bring to light and …
Embodied Ecologies And Metafictional Musings: The Limits Of Writing Intersex In Middlesex, Christopher Breu
Embodied Ecologies And Metafictional Musings: The Limits Of Writing Intersex In Middlesex, Christopher Breu
The Goose
Breu critiques the limits of the intersex narrative of Middlesex and advocates for a non-reductive, materialist, and “muddled” approach to understanding sex and gender.
The Terror Of The Political: Community, Identity, And Apocalypse In Don Delillo's Falling Man, Dillon Rockrohr
The Terror Of The Political: Community, Identity, And Apocalypse In Don Delillo's Falling Man, Dillon Rockrohr
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
Falling Man by Don DeLillo casts the event of 9/11 and its aftermath in such a way that the novel itself enacts an aesthetic terror aimed at explicating the ubiquitous social-atmospheric elements of community- and identity-formation out of which terror precipitates. As DeLillo figures terrorism in the novel as apocalyptic in that it is a violence that reveals the violence constitutive of political community, including the political community of liberal democracy, which ostensibly relegates violence to domains not considered legitimately political. DeLillo’s novel, as an act of aesthetic terrorism, not only thematizes the instantiation of terror that precipitates out of …
Manifestly Haraway By Donna J. Haraway, Andrew Gordon Jeffrey
Manifestly Haraway By Donna J. Haraway, Andrew Gordon Jeffrey
The Goose
Review of Donna J. Haraway's Manifestly Haraway.
The Somewhere We Wish Were Nowhere: Dystopian Realities And (Un)Democratic Imaginaries, Benjamin B. Taylor
The Somewhere We Wish Were Nowhere: Dystopian Realities And (Un)Democratic Imaginaries, Benjamin B. Taylor
Senior Independent Study Theses
How do political practices influence mass culture? Conversely, how does mass culture influence political practice? This project addresses these questions by turning to the concepts of utopia and dystopia. Imagined utopic and dystopic visions express both the hopes and anxieties of the societies producing them. Dystopias also highlight the mechanisms of power that function within particular social orders. Through readings of Lois Lowry’s The Giver and Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, I demonstrate how utopia and dystopia function and how we can respond to dystopic realities by theorizing solutions that are more conducive to the …
Viral Possibilities: Media, The Body, And The Phenomenon Of Infection, Daniel Mcfadden
Viral Possibilities: Media, The Body, And The Phenomenon Of Infection, Daniel Mcfadden
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
This thesis examines how the concept of virality is articulated in popular culture, and the connection that this articulation shares with notions of the virus in philosophical thought. The first chapter traces the emergence of a new wave of virus media following the geopolitical changes following the end of the Cold War, and the further shifts that have occurred in how the virus is culturally considered. The second chapter examines the politics of a phenomenological encounter with media depicting viruses. The third and final chapter discusses how understandings of the virus shape the notion of community as both a material …