Last Class, Some New Reworkings

It was nice getting to meet some of the new faculty last week.  I particularly enjoyed meeting Matt Hooley, whose academic interested mirror many of my own: Modernism, Ecocriticism, the relationship between art and literature.  Besides supplying me with a nice reading list to beef up on ecocriticism, he also gave me some advice on how I might be able to blend Modernism with Ecocriticism by examining works of art from the Modernist period. For those interested in ecocriticism, you might want to look up Lawrence Buell and Tim Morton. 

As for other updates, it seems I needed to reframe the narrative theory component of my research project accordingly: 

Where Willie is a vacuum of volition, Burden suffers an identity crisis that precludes him from entering Anne Stanton’s life as legitimate suitor because he has no presiding worldview where he can be seen as master of himself or subsequently—in terms of Southern culture—a viable husband and patriarch to Anne Stanton.  All this only highlights the performative aspect of Burden’s own narration and how the noir cynicism and self-loathing latent to his homodiegetic voice and characterizations are a manifestation of his youthful inability to become a true gentleman like Adam, Anne Stanton’s brother, who exhibits morality, confidence, and strength.  More of an thinker than a doer, the homodiegetic Burden has been thrown into a perpetual state of affected impassivity whereby his cynicism and self-loathing can still be seen as inherently masculine, though largely ineffectual in a paternalistic sense, if we employ the lens of what Kaja Silverman calls “Reflexive Masochism” to certain segments of Burden’s recreated/homodiegetic narration.