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

Beckett's oeuvre is not the representation of nothing or language's failure, it is the understanding of language as the locus of existence in literature through the denial that language is as able to go beyond itself. In incorporating the philological philosophies of W. V. Quine and the later Ludwig Wittgenstein, the mimesis of Beckett is one of intertextuality. The novels of Beckett, specifically Watt and Three Novels, actively destroy the possibility of language to be anything more than the consideration in a particular instance of text of a background theory created through intertextuality. At each moment the relationship between a particular instance of text and the background theory is created and then destroyed as Beckett removes the possibility of universality or subjectivity from his work. The functioning of his literature requires that it function only qua language.

In this paper, I explore how the NHL mascot Gritty exemplifies the fraught relationship between work and play in late-stage capitalism, one I show to be particularly tangled in professional sports, and Gritty’s relationship to this tension is what makes him relatable to so many young, left-leaning people who have had to struggle in the gig economy. Using Sianne Ngai’s theoretical framework in Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, I analyze Gritty as an emblematic zany figure—understanding his performance “as not just artful play but affective labor” and as expressive of white male anxieties about the feminization of labor (1). At the same time, I argue that Gritty resonates with many left-leaning people because they are accepting of the anxieties he represents. I try to better understand the paradox of why Gritty, as a capitalist marketing tool, has become a symbol in the leftist movement. As I examine memes and viral content, I consider the role that race has played in popularizing Gritty—a mascot arguably coded through white masculinity that has used historically Black methods of cultural production to rise to fame. These explorations lead me toward a meditation on the question of whether cultural subversion is truly possible within a system that frequently profits from this resistance.

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 situational comedy is one of those genres that only really work on broadcast mediums. The style of regular, weekly programming is central to the way that the sitcom works and what it is doing for audiences. It is the pleasure that one gets out of sitcoms that is the subject of this paper, and how this is related to the medium in which it is distributed. The sitcoms that were airing within the last year share striking similarities, which strangely are not noted by other analyses of the genre. It is this lack that this paper is attempting to address. Understanding the medium in which the sitcom is distributed in relation to the similarities in the shows' structures causes one to realize why the shows have such striking similarities. These similarities point to what the sitcom is doing and how it operates. The sitcom promotes community while isolating individuals.

Maxwell Patchet intends to pursue a PhD in English literature and eventually teach English at the collegiate level.

The scope of this paper is to show how self-despair is articulated in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse in a way which I argue is very similar to Søren Kierkegaard's formulation of self-despair in The Sickness unto Death. Whether Woolf read and knew Kierkegaard is a question that no critic has focused upon yet. Neither has any critic considered her in relation to the Danish philosopher. Although from her private writings there is no mention of his name, my point is that either she was directly influenced by his ideas and put them into her novel or, more interestingly, she did not know him but came to a formulation of the same concepts which much resembles his.

After tracing how Kierkegaard's concept of self-despair gets his way in To the Lighthouse, in the second part of my paper I will focus on the way out Kierkegaard and Woolf propose and here I will show again how their solution takes an almost parallel development. This is still more interesting when we consider the essential basic difference that informs their philosophical conceptions. Kierkegaard's philosophical basis is religious, Woolf's is secular, so that their roads should traditionally be antithetical from the start. Instead, I argue that this is not the case: Woolf accepts Kierkegaard's thought and makes it hers. The language she employs is reminiscent of his as well. Yet, her following pari passu Kierkegaard's philosophy and informing the novel with it, does not mean that a religious basis is given to the novel, which remains profoundly secular, as Woolf's thought was. When she feels that an adjustment is needed not to compromise her own secular thought, she does not adapt her secular view to the religious; vice versa, she is able to translate Kierkegaard's religious thought to her secular perspective.

As regards the question of the particular kind of secularism I think she embraces, there has not been significant scholarship yet either, but a couple of critics have considered her in relation to religion. Pericles Lewis has argued that Woolf is seeking in her novel "to effect a re-enchantment of the world, a new form of spirituality independent of the Christian God and appropriate for the twentieth century"(144). According to him, Woolf was seeking to preserve, against the materialism dominating her age, "an intimate, imaginative sphere, a remnant of religious life and locus of mystical experience, which she called 'the wedge-shaped core of darkness' or 'the privacy of the soul'" (146). While Lewis thinks that Woolf's work rebels against her father's agnosticism, Mark Gaipa sees her novel as coming to terms with it. Gaipa gives an interpretation of the novel which is primarily based on Woolf's relation to the religious views of her parents (who stand behind Mr Ramsay and Mrs Ramsay). According to him, Woolf had always thought of her mother as a spiritualist, and of her father as a materialist: these views for her were irreconcilable. What he argues Woolf is able to achieve in her novel is "to bring them together" (30) in embracing agnosticism. For him "agnosticism connects her father's materialism and her mother's spirituality"(18). These critics' studies show, at least, that there has not been a void around "Woolf and religion," but the question I primarily engage myself with, namely "self-despair" from a Kierkegaardian perspective, has still to be considered. I argue that what emerges from a Kierkegaardian reading of Woolf goes against the critical perspective on the question of the self in Woolf which dominates at present. Critics such as Ann Banfield and James Naremore have argued that Woolf's world is "without a self," while my point is that not only is the self present in Woolf but it is also her primary concern. Reading her novel through Kierkegaard helps to see this going on, but it also shows what is at stake in her particular secularism: if the basis of the novel remains secular in the proper sense of the word, her dealing with such an inner question as the self, and complicating it by adding despair as its inherent characteristic and the task of becoming itself as its central task necessarily compels her to acquire a spiritual dimension, both in the language she employs and in the solutions she advances. Religion is always outside her sphere, so that the secular is not in question. Yet, spirit is there.