Browsing by Author "McInerney, Maud Burnett"

Now showing 1 - 20 of 47
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    All the World's a Page: Theatricality in Laurence Sterne's 'Tristram Shandy'
    (2006) White, Andrew; McInerney, Maud Burnett
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    An Evolving Trajectory: Reading Political Disillusion in William Butler Yeats's "The Circus Animals' Desertion"
    (2015) Kelly, Brooke; McInerney, Maud Burnett
    For my thesis, I sought to enact a new reading of William Butler Yeats’s “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” I attempted to reach beyond its commonly accepted reading, which states that it was written merely as an account of the feeling of defeat that Yeats experienced in the last years of his life when he felt he had lost his connection to his old works. While this reading is fundamentally accurate, I find this explanation alone to be under-reaching, encouraging me to look into the political and historical context of Ireland during Yeats’s lifetime, in an attempt to detect a deeper meaning. I argued that Yeats’s primary motivation behind writing “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” was to highlight his disillusion with postcolonial Ireland, and the ways in which he felt disappointed by the result of a cause about which he felt so passionate. The trajectory of Yeats’s career both as a poet and a politician, most specifically as a member of the Irish Senate, fluctuated around the Irish rebellion from England. Originally, Yeats believed in Irish nationality through the arts, which shifted as he became more committed to political nationality during the rebellion. His palpable disappointment displayed in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” surrounds his realization that poetry was never acknowledged as the political tool he believed it could be. This political reading of the poem, with the help of New Historicism, demonstrates the ways that poetry cannot be separated from its context. The metaphor within “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” is representative of Yeats’s sense of futility after the failure of his life’s mission to unite poetry and politics under the greater veil of Irish nationality.
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    Babylon revisited: apocalypticism in 20th century film
    (2004) Curtis, Charles; McInerney, Maud Burnett
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    Back I Turn'd: Eve and Milton and the Power of Coming Second
    (2013) Dopulos, Katherine Marie; McInerney, Maud Burnett
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    Bloody Knives: Political Violence in Frank Herbert's 'Dune'
    (2008) Sanders, Gabriel; McInerney, Maud Burnett
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    Containment Breach: Exploring the Intersections of Narrative and Database from Encyclopédie to Wiki
    (2017) Jacocks, Olivia; McInerney, Maud Burnett
    While many think of the database as a culturally-neutral object that exists solely to retrieve data, this paper examines historical and literary examples of the database as an agent of narrative. It is crucial to understand these underlying narratives because of the tangible consequences that arise when narrative remains unmarked within the database and to understand how literary works deliberately use the database form to construct narratives characterized by their non-linearity, multiplicity, and collectivity. In order to illustrate this important relationship, this paper covers the narrative-database debate as vocalized by Hayles and Manovich, ultimately siding with Hayles and her view of the two as symbionts. From there, it discusses examples of narrative present in dictionaries and encyclopedias from the 18th century to the 20th century, followed by a look at how a notable literary example, Pavic’s The Dictionary of the Khazars, presents narrative in the form of a dictionary. Finally, the bulk of this article focuses on the 21st century wiki format and of a monumental and ongoing collective literary endeavor, the SCP Foundation wiki. The SCP Foundation presents a unique challenge to traditional conceptions of narrative because of the experimental narratives produced by mimicking the database, the site’s preoccupation with its own larger narrative and with archival narrative more generally, and for the site’s radical intercanonicity, determined both through site-specific canons and by a broader, hegemonic conception of canon that dictates which narratives are privileged over others.
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    “Do thou thy warste, and I defyghe the!”: Mordred’s Rebellion Against Arthur and Malory in Le Morte Darthur
    (2017) Mayersohn, Anna; McInerney, Maud Burnett
    While Thomas Malory borrows most of the plot of the final division of Le Morte Darthur from La Mort le Roi Artu and the stanzaic Morte Arthur, he displays originality by deepening the thoughts, feelings, and internal conflicts of the heroic characters and by placing more weight on the bonds of friendship and family that fall apart at the end of the Arthurian legend. In contrast, he shows no such interest in putting a sympathetic or even humanizing light on the villainous Mordred. The first half of this essay examines Malory’s strategies for establishing the role he needs Mordred to play: an enemy to the right order of things and a personification of all the pernicious forces acting on Arthur’s kingdom. However, the second half of the essay demonstrates that reading Le Morte Darthur with an eye to what Frank Kermode calls “secrets”—aspects of the text that interfere with the dominant “inbuilt interpretation”—reveals flaws in Malory’s distinction between the essentially noble heroes and the villain who leads them astray. Although Malory attempts to portray an idealized bygone society undermined not by its own innate flaws but by the wicked and wholly unnatural influence that Mordred contributes, the picture that actually emerges resists such a simplistic interpretation. Mordred’s rebellion against the authority of his king and father Arthur finds a parallel in his refusal to play the role Malory assigns to him.
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    Exposed on this Bleak Eminence: The Poetics of Shellshock
    (2005) Van Ogtrop, Mary; McInerney, Maud Burnett
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    Ezra Pound and the Chinese Character: Constellation, Figuration, Technology, Meaning
    (2011) Blood-Patterson, Eli; McInerney, Maud Burnett
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    From Blood to Ketchup: Examining Processes of Readership in Watchmen
    (2010) Shaw, Emily; McInerney, Maud Burnett
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    Graphic Remembrance: Recuperation and Absence in Thi Bui's The Best We Could Do (2017)
    (2019) Nguyen, Andrew; McInerney, Maud Burnett
    The Best We Could Do (2017), a graphic novel serving as memoir by Thi Bui, employs formal elements of absence presenting in turn a recording of a narrative of absence salient in the memories of a family of refugees from the Việt Nam War. The mode of the graphic novel allows for Bui to recreate a narrative structure that presents innocence, stability, family, parenthood, and motherhood as perceived as lost rather than as absent from herself. She employs many intermedium traditions of the graphic novel, along with many more recent traditions of the graphic memoir, to archive memory and to explore and set right where loss and absence are confounded (LaCapra). These traditions include the use of framed, sequenced storytelling, implementing page layout decision-making for the purpose of regenerating and reinvigorating the past and past bodies (Chute) in an embodied manner. Splash pages, image insertion, and purposefully vague embodied illustration archive images of swimming, of childbirth, and of family. The literal domiciliation (Derrida) of memory provides a home for Bui’s stories of herself and her family, encapsulating a living compendium of emotions while also proving the fullness of its constituent characters, a group of people who live having survived trauma. The recreation of self, of family, living and dead on the page, parallels the literal reproduction Bui engages in as she brings her son into the world. The Best We Could Do provides an answer to the feelings of uncertainty that permeate Bui’s world, visualized, as she enters into motherhood.
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    Green Things: Reading the Green Girdle as the Governing Object of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
    (2013) Forster, Matthew; McInerney, Maud Burnett
    My thesis examines the significance, both narratological and symbolic, of objects in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. A poem marked more by the poet’s exposition than any action involving the protagonist, Gawain, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight can be read as an object‐centric narrative. Embracing the poem’s object‐centricity, my thesis follows the path of the poem’s primary narrative, from the axe of the Green Knight, to the pentangle emblazoned on Gawain’s shield, before settling, as Gawain does, on the green girdle he has been given by Bertilak’s wife. Using the dual theoretical lens of Object Oriented Ontology and Thing Theory, my thesis reads each object in conjunction with Gawain and the poem more holistically, attempting to determine one central object that can be figured to govern Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This double theoretical framework enables one to see an object’s role both in the primary narrative and in the world of metaphorical meaning. Additionally, it creates the possibility of reading Gawain onto each object and the object back onto Gawain. Ultimately, it becomes clear that the green girdle is the most appropriate choice to govern Gawain and the poem. When worn as a girdle, a functional tool, it saves Gawain’s life when he is struck by the Green Knight’s axe. As a metaphorical sign, worn as a baldric around his shoulder, the girdle comes to represent a variety of things, ranging from Gawain’s failure to uphold his Christian virtues to a mark of camaraderie when adopted by the other knights. A complex, irreducible object, it best represents Gawain and the poem at large.
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    [Identity] is [Capitalism] plus [Abjectification]: [Post]-Soviet Subjectivity
    (2014) Trickett, Nicholas; Roberts, Deborah H.; McInerney, Maud Burnett
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    "It Might Be All One Language": Narrative Paradox in Birds Without Wings
    (2008) Schwartz, Katrina; McInerney, Maud Burnett
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    Just Play Along: Exploring Metafictional Games in Works of Cervantes, Borges, and Auster
    (2017) Lorenz, Amber; Quintero, María Cristina; McInerney, Maud Burnett
    In 1605, Miguel de Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, a playful metafictional novel that engaged the reader with questions of authorship and the relationship between reality and fiction. Over three hundred years later, Jorge Luis Borges would write many short stories that would dig into and expand on these questions, such as "Borges y yo" and "Pierre Menard, autor del Quixote". Borges’ stories take Cervantes’ playful ideas and push them into the unsettling, raising questions about an author’s relationship to their own text but also how identity is formed—or fractured—through writing. A few decades later, Paul Auster wrote City of Glass, a bizarre novel that tracks a mysterious set of circumstances that lead Daniel Quinn, the protagonist, into an exhaustive investigation and philosophical introspection—it revolves around books, writing, reading, and the uncertainty of the line between madness and creativity, between the real and the imaginary. All three of these authors play with the conventions of narration and engage the reader in a very active way—ultimately leading the reader to hold all the power in constructing meaning from the works.
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    LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPES: EXPLORING THE BRIDGE BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND HISTORY THROUGH THE POETRY OF LUIS PALÉS MATOS AND DEREK WALCOTT
    (2018) Lomba Guzmán, Gabriela; Burshatin, Israel; McInerney, Maud Burnett
    Derek Walcott famously writes in his poem “A Cry from Africa” that he is “divided to the vein”—in itself a succinct exploration of what it means to be born into a colonized (or once-colonized) country. Luis Palés Matos explores this division in different words, but to a similar effect, as he describes “la antillana” [the Antillean] that is “una mitad española / y otra mitad africana” (“Ten con ten” 37-38). The history of the Caribbean manifests itself in both of these lines as they complicate narratives of Caribbean identity. My essay not only aims to explore what it means to be divided to the vein, but more precisely, what it means to be divided to the tongue. Through Palés Matos’s lens, this tongue is one that is both Spanish and African and through Walcott, it is African, English, and Dutch. The tongue, when explored through the works of these two poets, becomes a site of resistance. By employing my reading of Homi K. Bhabha’s “OF Mimicry and Man,” I trace how Walcott and Palés Matos challenge a one-dimensional rendering of the Caribbean and allow for a more nuanced understanding. Though both poets work within the linguistic in order to reframe accounts of the Caribbean, they differ in intention and in effect. Walcott’s poetry embraces colonial language and poetics, yet manages to employ them within his larger critique of colonialism. Conversely, Palés Matos defines and (at times) creates a Boricua Spanish, which works within a larger Antillean language. Through this linguistic invention, Palés Matos creates a document that records the sonic aspects of the islands—ones that are inextricably tied to African dance and song. By exploring the linguistic finesse of these two poets, my project aims to uncover how their respective works delineate different accounts—with attention to their advantages and limitations—of a Caribbean history.