Department of English

In Richard II, authentic valuation and meaning-making occur at the boundary of the self, where the mind comes into agonizing contact with an exteriority that forces it to re-evaluate itself and grow into a fuller self-awareness, a deeper capacity for internalization. In the first third of the paper, I analyze the way in which words that seem to mean one thing mean many to explain how the sophistry of ceremony in Act I foreshadows the collapse of Richard's world in the latter acts. In the second and third thirds, I analyze Gaunt and Richard (and, briefly, the queen) during moments of extreme psychological stress – moments when the threat of loss moves them into unprecedented inner worlds and novel methods of self-expression and self-understanding. Change comes to them through an extreme influx of sudden external disasters, acting upon their minds in ways that alter their self-perception, in similar modes. Disempowerment empowers them, finally reconciling them to the unavoidability of death.

Career/Educational Goals: English Teacher/Writer/Translator in Europe

John Cheever's work is typically interpreted as a critique of middle-twentieth century suburban culture—a culture associated with dullness, alienation, and rigid social mores. Early on in his career, during the ’40 and ’50s, Cheever was often lambasted by left-leaning critics for not going far enough in his condemnation of suburbia. Alfred Kazin, for instance, called him a "toothless Thurber," thinking of him as a writer who complacently upheld bourgeois values instead of exposing their hypocrisy. Later critics read Cheever more charitably, recognizing a puzzling and compelling ambivalence in his social position. He seemed to be both celebrating suburban life and critiquing its shortcomings. In this paper, I try to move away from articulating Cheever's attitudes towards suburban culture, for he wrote great stories about New York City, Americans abroad, and prison. And he wrote about characters from a wider range of social classes than only the upper-middle class. Many of his characters, regardless of their class, are preoccupied with money and its adverse influence on their lives. Drawing on Blake Bailey's recent biography of Cheever and criticism by Alan Nadel and Stephen Schryer, I examine Cheever's hallmark ambivalence as having to do with his ideas about socioeconomic class in general—ideas that stem from his coming of age during the Depression and from his professional experiences during an era in which literary labor became increasingly professionalized. In addition to focusing on his most famous stories, such as "The Country Husband" and "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill," I look at classics from the late forties and earlier uncollected works.

The comic book industry in the 1970s produced the first mainstream superhero comic to utilize social commentary and character revisionism. Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams’ Green Lantern/Green Arrow: Hard Traveling Heroes addresses the milieu of the 70s and is analyzed alongside documentary evidence to create connections between the textual narrative and social events. The narrative alone focuses on divorcing its title heroes from their traditionally conservative ideologies. The dialectical unity of these components creates an overall picture of innovation in the industry. It also denotes a generational shift in ideology that reflects the change in cultural values between the ‘60s and ‘70s.

The ways that scholars have interpreted Invisible Man stem from firstly, the concerns of earlier generations of black communities who sought to move towards a future where black people have political influence and secondly, a problem within literary criticism, a field that has decided that novels must move beyond the black experience in order to be taken seriously. In one way or another, it seems that some of the critics of the 1960s and 1970s are responding to this decision, either denouncing Invisible Man or defending it. Some of the newer critics fall into this debate and end up defending the book with representational politics. However, at this moment our reading of the novel must change. For at this moment, when even the Civil Rights Movement has secured black political influence, when the Black Arts Movement has secured black pride, and when the Black Lives Matter Movement has sought to affirm what its predecessors took as a given, black people still face deadly racialized terror. This moment feels like the ditto of the archives, and it is this aspect of black life, constantly in danger, at risk, that Invisible Man reckons with. Yet, for all of its resonance with the past, this moment is distinct because progress has been interpreted as a decrease in risk. However, such a notion is false, and scholars like Christina Sharpe, Achille Mbembe, Saidiya Hartman, and others attest to this dangerous falsehood. Therefore, as we turn to black cultural production to guide us through a moment that feels so familiar but is perhaps even more dangerous, we need to consider what older methods of reading Invisible Man might have missed: Ellison’s concern with the racial terror that persists even after the gains of black politicians and intellectuals. Ellison takes black life seriously, life that encounters, survives, and moves beyond gratuitous violence. It is time to read Invisible Man through lenses that take up this living.