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- Genre: Masters Thesis
Description
John Herdman provides a brief explanation for neglecting the Victorian sensational double in his work The Double in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, "Nor have I ventured into the vast hinterland of Victorian popular fiction in which doubles roam in abundance, as these are invariably derivative in origin and break no distinctive new territory of their own" (xi). To be sure the popular fiction of the Victorian Era would not produce such penetrating and resonate doubles found in the continental, and even American, literature of the same period until the works of Scottish writers James Hogg and later Robert Louis Stevenson; and while popular English writers have been rightly accused of "exploit[ing] it [the double] for sensational effects," (Herdman 19) the indictment of possessing "no distinctive new territory of their own" is hardly adequate. In particular, two immensely popular works of fiction in the 1860's, Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White (1860) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), employ the convention of the double for a simultaneous sensational and sociological effect. However, the sociological influence of the double in these two texts is not achieved alone: the "guise of lunacy" deployed as a cover-up for criminality acts symbiotically with the sensational double. The double motif provides female characters within these works the opportunity to manipulate the "guise of lunacy" to transgress patriarchal boundaries cemented within the socio-economic hierarchy as well as within other patriarchal institutions: marriage and the sanatorium. Overall this presentation formulates "new distinctive territory" in the land of the Victorian sensational double through the works of Collins and Braddon.
ContributorsSims, Rachel (Author) / Bivona, Dan (Thesis advisor) / Broglio, Ron (Committee member) / Lussier, Mark (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
The archive has always been a central piece to William S. Burroughs’ generative legacy. I argue that the William S. Burroughs Papers accentuate the cut-up/fold-in as contingent on perception and a product of being-in-the-world, as described in The Third Mind and in interview. These experimentalist forms are noticeably replicated throughout the W.S.B Papers, and are a heuristic to his literary oeuvre: specifically, the relationship between word and image, and entering the “image” within his word. The cut-up/fold in methods are more than a literary device. They are captured throughout the archive as a rhetorical tool. As curator Robert Sobieszek observes that Burroughs introduced a new dimension into the field of writing (1996), this paper displays the visual overture of this new dimension accentuated via an interdisciplinary approach: Burroughs utilizes the fields of visual culture (with collaborator Brion Gysin) and photography to apply a replication of the cut-up (a literary form) to the image, illuminating newfound, semiotic pathways of visual communication. Through evidence of cut daily news, plural grids, and pantropic street photography, Burroughs’ new dimension germinates visually, and is a reflection of how and what Burroughs, one of the most profound authors of the 20th century, keeps in his field of view. In the W.S.B Papers at Arizona State University, the cut-up pattern, if cut and shot appropriately, is applicable to both word and image.
ContributorsNiño, Alexa S. (Author) / Broglio, Ron (Thesis advisor) / Hope, Jonathan (Committee member) / Rose, Shirley (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
This thesis explores how to read the American experimental novel VAS: An Opera inFlatland, a collaboration between Steve Tomasula and graphic designer Stephen Farrell.
VAS demonstrates how twenty-first-century tools and technology can construct a
narrative that resembles the human experience shaped by contemporary tools and
technology. VAS includes not only a conventional story line but also narrative elements
outside the story line, such as collage material and a multimodality, all of which
contribute to the novel’s emerging, posthuman narrative. The reading experience of the
conventional novel is immersive; experiments with the novel disrupt the immersion of
reading, and this disruption produces a presence: the reader becomes conscious of
reading, of narrative structure, of the broken conventions, and even of the novel itself.
Martin Heidegger’s analyses of tools and technology can elucidate how novels produce
presence by breaking conventions, for conventions are like tools, and broken tools, such
as a broken hammer, become present to the user that was a moment ago immersed in
their use. The reading of VAS that results is two-fold: (1) a stylistic comparison of VAS
and This Is Not a Novel by David Markson, two experimental novels that differ in the
technology used and represented and, ultimately, the presence made, and (2) a reading of
VAS that considers how the novel makes present its narrative dimensions, out of which
emerges the novel’s narrative.
ContributorsStewart, Nicholas J (Author) / Hope, Jonathan (Thesis advisor) / Broglio, Ron (Committee member) / Holbo, Christine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022