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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
'As Vivid As Blood In A Sink': (Re)Reading Queerness And Repression In Teju Cole's Open City, Jack Hoda
'As Vivid As Blood In A Sink': (Re)Reading Queerness And Repression In Teju Cole's Open City, Jack Hoda
Master's Theses
Teju Cole’s Open City (2011) is an exemplar work of contemporary fiction. For its complex representation of subjectivity, hypnotic narrative tone, and global political scope, the novel has been praised by readers and critics alike. Julius, the text’s first-person narrator, guides us along seemingly innocent wanderings throughout New York City, ruminating on history, art, and politics while presenting himself as the enlightened, cosmopolitan ideal. However, the shocking penultimate revelation that Julius raped a young woman from his past alters our encounter with the text and its narrator. We come to realize that this meandering novel is, in reality, a carefully …
The Queer Gothic Hero's Journey In Oscar Wilde's The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Kyle Leon Ethridge
The Queer Gothic Hero's Journey In Oscar Wilde's The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Kyle Leon Ethridge
Master's Theses
This study of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray argues that the novel participates in a Gothic subversion of the archetypal hero’s journey. The novel employs Gothic devices to supplant heroic narremes. As the novel progresses, both Dorian (as a type of hero-character) and the narrative repeatedly deny or subvert the normative idea of heroism later reified in Joseph Campbell’s archetypal theory. While Campbell’s hero attempts to secure and universalize a heterosocial story, Wilde’s hero is recuperated through a reconfiguring of normative failure as queer success. What is ostensibly a failure of the normative hero to achieve his quest …