Barrett

Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.

Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.

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Miserablists: Seven Stories

Description
The seven interconnected short stories of Miserablists spring from a reality created by its protagonist and ostensible author: Paul Marston, a persistently melancholy undergraduate who tries to exorcise the ghost of a past love by adapting the story into a screenplay for a film entitled Miserablists. What happens to our…

The seven interconnected short stories of Miserablists spring from a reality created by its protagonist and ostensible author: Paul Marston, a persistently melancholy undergraduate who tries to exorcise the ghost of a past love by adapting the story into a screenplay for a film entitled Miserablists. What happens to our identity, Paul asks, in post-narrative selfhood—that is, when the meaningful narratives we’ve told ourselves about others and ourselves collapse?

In other stories (wherein Paul tries—and often fails—to figure himself a secondary character), the tangled lives of his immediate social circle unravel, overlap, and disintegrate amidst the decaying milieu of the Scene and the maddening sprawl of Phoenix. A brief sampling of happenings: Sophie confronts ideological qualms with capitalism by way of a summer gig selling knives to depressed housewives; Brett nearly burns a house down on the Fourth of July; hallucinogenic kombucha is foisted upon a hapless Alex; black mold overtakes Paul’s residence; etc.

The core text is followed by an afterword supposedly written by (the perhaps psychotic) Saul P. Thomas Marton, Ph.D. and acts as an academic analysis of the nonexistent film adaption of Miserablists. There, Marton places Marston’s work in conversation with many influential critical text and works of fiction that shaped the formation of Miserablists (including Roland Barthes’ Lover’s Discourse, Slavoj Žižek’s The Plague of Fantasies, and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year at Marienbad).
ContributorsWebb, Zachariah Kaylar (Author) / Gilfillan, Daniel (Thesis director) / Garrison, Gary (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05