Browsing by Author "Reckson, Lindsay Vail, 1982-"

Now showing 1 - 14 of 14
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    “Bearing something ordinary as light”: Anti-disciplinary Knowledge and the Cosmology of Black Birthing in Aracelis Girmay’s “The Black Maria”
    (2024) Yin, Isabella; Reckson, Lindsay Vail, 1982-
    A cosmology of birthing becomes a powerful idiom and force for Girmay, both in “the black maria” and in her 2020 essay, “From Woe to Wonder.” My thesis explores the intricate frameworks within Aracelis Girmay’s “the black maria,” a cosmological reading of black birthing as an insurgent ground for experimental gender and motherhood, alongside an examination of a ‘gestational temporality,’ the act of being born and reborn as a creative practice of resistance in an anti-black world. In this thesis, I read Girmay’s works in dialogue with Hortense Spillers’s foundational understanding of ungendering and atomization in the Middle Passage, as well as Katherine McKittrick’s anti-disciplinary reading of black creative knowledge making. The cosmological framework allows Girmay to resist the disciplines of knowledge that confine black bodies, generating her own knowledge practice through a poem that considers elements of narrative, astronomy, and physiology together. The creative practice of Girmay’s poem is a project that is both ante- disciplinary, existing before disciplines at the inception of our universe, and anti-disciplinary, resisting the violent disciplining of knowledge. The concept of a gestational temporality resists violence in a similar way. Girmay understands that the project of preparing a black child for an anti-black world does not end in the biological processes of gestation, but continues throughout the child’s life, as the child is constantly returning to the metaphorical space of the womb as a source of care, power and insurgence.
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    Bodies Under Construction: Architectures of Pleasure and Whiteness in Chesnutt's "Po Sandy"
    (2015) Jones, Sydney; Reckson, Lindsay Vail, 1982-
    In this work, I examine the intersections of race, architecture, and consumption in “Po Sandy,” a late nineteenth-century work by Charles Chesnutt. Whiteness, in Chesnutt’s conception, emerges through violent performances of its own “naturalized” coherence, often in seemingly innocuous ways. In fact, Chesnutt reveals that even quotidian relationships between bodies and built space embed these types of racialized consolidations. Drawing on critics who have uncovered the white desire to consume an “other” in an effort to secure a racial position, I examine how this exploitative appetite radiates beyond the literal body into the spaces it occupies, which themselves take on corporeal logics. Thus, in Chesnutt, buildings are figured as variously “desirable” or “pleasurable” based on the white racial work they perform—the extent to which they provide a fetishized version of “blackness” as constitutive material for the white self. But Chesnutt, I argue, does more than simply outline the violent construction of whiteness; he also points to the places where the breached black body refuses to be architecturally consumed, where haunting and “sticking” in space disrupt the white form’s appropriative engagement with structures. Ultimately, Chesnutt’s work lends insight into the deeply pernicious attempts to construct whiteness in and through the built landscape and imagines radical, alternative ways of interacting with architectural spaces.
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    Death Sentences The Aesthetics and Politics of Last Words in ​In Cold Blood​, ​Capote​, and ​Infamous
    (2020) Melville, Hannah; Reckson, Lindsay Vail, 1982-
    Perry Smith's last words in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and two recent cinematic adaptations of the novel, Capote and Infamous, cumulatively challenge the concept of finality. The content and portrayal of Smith's execution within the novel and films break down social expectations about life, character, and last words. While all three are largely considered final, the existence of In Cold Blood and its adaptations disproves this prevalent assumption. Each source presents Smith as redeemable despite the brutal murder of the Clutters and, in doing so, establishes the permanent possibility of redemption. The very notion of death is undermined as the narrative within the novel serves to immortalize Smith's character despite the execution – a socially dictated end. In the case of last words, the understanding of their role and limits is deconstructed through their recreation and reframing. Ultimately, In Cold Blood, Capote, and Infamous interrogate formal and narrative assumptions about finality.
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    DNA and Dickinson Exploring the Symbiotic Possibilities of Genetics and Poetry
    (2018) Saum, Anna Aileen; Reckson, Lindsay Vail, 1982-
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    Football is the Continuation of Politics by Other Means: The Spectacle, Touch, and Intimacy in Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
    (2014) O'Brien, Kate; Reckson, Lindsay Vail, 1982-
    "Football is the Continuation of Politics by Other Means: The Spectacle, Intimacy, and Touch in Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" looks at the ways in which communication is precluded in late Capitalism through the critical lens of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle. The novel suggests touch as a site of intimacy in a place and time where meaningful communication is all but excluded. Billy Lynn approaches these issues as a way to examine the latent violence propagated and perpetuated in even the most seemingly mundane aspects of daily life. It asks us to recognize the environment around us as coercive and systematically impersonal, and suggests that touch can function–-for better or worse–-to break the overwhelming stasis and fundamental silence created by dedication to the image in late Capitalism. The paper outlines pertinent aspects of the Spectacular society as expressed in Billy Lynn: the role of commodity, dedication to the image, and preclusion of touch. Next, I use Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain in order to examine the potential of physical pain to highlight the body's reality. Then, I examine the role of production in Postmodernity in order to understand how the potential for intimacy is mediated in the Spectacle through equipment, both in the case of football and war. Finally, I consider situations in the novel in which touch acts as a stand-alone method of communication-–regardless of the message–-in an overdetermined society. My paper posits that touch is a means of entering the undeniably human, a way to create a space in which to communicate the ineffable.
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    Generations of Desire: Belle Reprieve and the “Beautiful Dream” of Blanche DuBois
    (2018) Abbott, Clara; Reckson, Lindsay Vail, 1982-
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    Prophecies of the Breach: The Whiteness and Blackness of Sea Monsters
    (2014) Kahn, Nicholas A. B.; Reckson, Lindsay Vail, 1982-
    This essay addresses racial monstrosity in the sea-monsters of two important novels from the antebellum United States: the "shrouded human figure" in Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1839) and the White Whale in Melville's Moby-Dick (1851). Whereas scholarship on the racial monstrosity of these monsters has historically read them allegorically as products of the specific conditions of pre-Civil War America, I argue for transcending the allegorical reading. I read the monstrosity of Moby Dick and the "shrouded human figure" rather as rooted in fears and desires that were not abolished with slavery, and are not confined to a historical moment. They blur metaphysical boundaries that are fundamentally human, lying between known and unknown, self and other, white and black. I argue that, given an allegorical reading, Poe's sea-monster embodies a fear of racial revolution that is racist; but becomes a more-destructive metaphysical fear of blackness overtaking whiteness when one moves beyond the allegorical/historical reading. Similarly, for Ahab Moby Dick embodies the fear of blackness usurping whiteness, but Melville offers something that Poe does not: a way of viewing the monster that reconciles whiteness with blackness. Melville's antidote to the monster is linked to the abolitionist mentality that blends black and white America into a new and coherent whole. But, more importantly, his vision of peaceful incorporation (rather than violent division) turns the boundary between white and black from a source of fear into a catalyst for transcendent human communion.
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    "Strolling toward nowhere": Urban Space and Narrative Time in Zadie Smith's NW
    (2020) St Onge, Kaden; Reckson, Lindsay Vail, 1982-
    Smith's experimental style reflects not just a different way of representing space and narrative time, but also a different way of understanding how people and spaces change within a singular place. The narrative is presented through depictions of geographical space rather than through a linear depiction of time, and the space of the city and the act of moving through that city is reflected within the text itself. Just as the novel itself is only experienced through the "routing" act of writing and/or reading, the city is only experienced through various routes of movement in both time and space. This thesis explores the relationship between the characters' mnemonic relationship with NW in terms of how they move through the temporalized and historicized space of the city and how these aspects interact with the novel as a text through theories on the navigation of space and narrative. It begins by looking at the structure of the novel as a whole and its position within broader realist and postmodernist traditions. It analyzes instances of movement and routing within the novel, showing how this movement reflects a dynamic definition of space, time, and the representation of memory. It also views how the characters' individual experiences with Northwest London affect their development throughout the novel to show how the action of the novel and the characters' development exists as an additional layer of history within NW as a space.
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    Textuality/Sexuality: Failures of Intimacy in Adam Rapp‘s Red Light Winter
    (2015) Leonard, Nina; Reckson, Lindsay Vail, 1982-
    In my thesis, I explore the relationship between metatheatre and embodiment in Adam Rapp’s 2006 play Red Light Winter. The play is structured by an unwell-made-ness that leads to its ultimate fragmentation, and throws the process of making and self-making into sharp relief. This unwell-ness, composed of an unboundedness, a breakdown of boundaries, plays out on two levels: at the metatheatrical level with an unboundedness of the play’s structure, and on an interpersonal level with an unboundedness of body. Although the fluidity of this unboundedness offers the possibility of opened and therefore inclusive boundaries, the structures that dominate the play rely on a reinforcement of boundaries between the self and other that threatens the characters’ hope for intimacy. This separation is enacted through abjection; an intactness of identity achieved in its distance from illness, from the unwell. In paying attention to the gendered power or ability to experience and command an unboundedness of being, we gain a sense of the play’s failure to achieve its own coherence of self.
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    The Case for Contradiction: Locating Vitality in Queer Nonsense through Virginia Woolf's Orlando: A Biography
    (2022) Chen, Rebecca; Reckson, Lindsay Vail, 1982-
    A biography charts an individual's life through time, recording important events and details such as birth, education, marriage, and eventually, death. Yet Virginia Woolf's Orlando: A Biography (1928) subverts that expectation in a myriad of ways. This essay establishes how biography and narrative work to enforce heterosexual demands for stability and cohesion using Lee Edelman's theories of "reproductive futurism". J. Halberstam's work on trans biography establishes context for understanding how trans people have been mis-represented in biography and narrative, and explores the necessity for narrative to "embrace contradiction" in order to represent transgender people ethically. Working with these theorists in my interpretation of Orlando, I argue that non-narrative strategies such as contradiction and silence present opportunities for imagining life outside of narrative free from heterosexual demands. First, I trace the presence of contradiction within the narrative of Orlando as well as in the critical discourse surrounding the novel to highlight contradiction as a strategy opposed to narrative. Next, I consider the opportunities that arise when one accepts contradiction in resistance to narrative stability, both through the fictional relationships within Orlando and in the relationship between Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf, the relationship that inspired the novel in the first place. Finally, I will consider other alternatives to narrative such as silence, which gesture further to a world outside our narrative comprehension.
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    "The earth was locked up tight": Reading Cat's Cradle Through Climate Criticism
    (2015) Profeta, Stephen; Reckson, Lindsay Vail, 1982-
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    The Future of Next Wednesday Night: Douglas Crimp's Queer Planning in an Early Year of AIDS
    (2024) Cohen-Mungan, Shana; Reckson, Lindsay Vail, 1982-
    In this essay, I close read Douglas Crimp’s 1987 weekly planner to offer a theory of what I call the “queer planning” that unfolds on and around its pages. Queer planning is the improvisational process of devising social connectivity through the quotidian gestures which underly and complement various scales of social movement to fashion an impossible future. I focus on the everyday acts of imagination, experiment, and collaboration that José Esteban Muñoz, Fred Moten, and Stefano Harney connect to queer of color potentiality and fugitive planning, hoping to open a sense of how queer relation sustained itself amidst the AIDS catastrophe’s decimation of social life. Queer planning revises theories of queer (anti)futurity which either deny queerness access to the future or situate queerness on a distant horizon, aligning with a death drive or utopia respectively. Instead, planning engages a queer future as physically and temporally proximate as the planner’s weekly scope, insisting on a temporality of possibility amidst mass death.
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    Unasked, Unspoken 'Theory in the Flesh' in Danielle Evans' Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self
    (2014) Nichols, Dana A.; Reckson, Lindsay Vail, 1982-
    In her short story collection, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, Danielle Evans makes implicit racism visible to the eye. She relies on character and form to fill in subtext, but most importantly her work demands the reader to understand the coded world in which all of her characters live. Subtlety runs deep in Evans' narration to the point where it taps into the epicenter of what it means to be marginalized right this very moment. Her stories show the ways racism is navigated and resisted. This thesis is my literary exploration of modern day implicit racism in America. Prejudice is still persistently expressed through actions and words even if it is not the premeditated racism of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and lynching. All forms of racism function to render its subjects physically and psychologically incapacitated in the world. Evans elucidates the types of silent violences that her characters are fighting. As overt racism has receded from sight, so too have its obvious indicators. Racism is now deeply internal, psychological, physiological, and spiritual. How can we talk about race in the 21st century? We can't really. We can't talk about racism because it is skillfully concealed in normative language and behavior. My entry point into this literary exploration is fundamentally about the inconvenience of language. In the perpetuation of racism, language is actually quite skillful, but in the attempt to reveal its existence on the receiving end, it is almost impossible.
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