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Saturday, 23 July 2005
MA Degree
Mood:
 cool
Wednesday, 20 April 2005
My MA Thesis Synopsis
Mood:
 happy
Gothic Elements In the Novels of Joyce Carol Oates
Horace Walpole's publication of the Castle of Otranto back in 1764 marked the rise of a new novel genre which was to dominate English letters for centuries, namely the "Gothic novel. Many of the Gothic elements now established and considered classic are credited to Walpole's novel. The Gothic novel addressed the trinity of time, place and character in a hitherto quite unprecedented manner. It delved deep into history known and unknown. It depicted horrific atmospheres with crumbling castles and mansions and finally far from being different to those environs, the characters portrayed were generally victimized women locked in attics. The Gothic novel, one is tempted to believe, are fairy tales yet devoid of the latter's luminous green world.
Despite ongoing criticism levelled against the Gothic novel for what its detractors have always deemed its sensationalism, melodramatic overtones as well as its play on the supernatural, it survived critics' scathing criticism. In fact, no better evidence of its tenacious vigour can be cited than the impulse which now and then drives writers of totally opposite leanings to try their hands at it. One only needs to remember that a constellation of literary luminaries as prestigious as Dickens, Poe, The Brontes, Virginia Woolfe, Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Stephen King, Isabel Allendi owe a substantial lot of their artistic strength and subsequent popularity to the Gothic.
It has been the contention of this study that Joyce Carol Oates draws heavily on the traditions of the Gothic. She has affinities with the Gothic and consciously employs many of its elements and motifs. However, she manipulates them to meet a revisionist agenda she has in mind.
On accounting for the appeal of the Gothic among the reading public in the eighteenth century, Clara Reeve wrote in her preface to The Old English Baron that the Gothic novel is a picture of Gothic times and manners. Oates seems to be heeding this conclusion. She aptly applies it to modern or for that matter postmodern America where the terrors of the night are replaced by the terrors of light. According to Mary Katherine Grant, Oates'
… body of fiction tells the tragic tale of decades wasted by war, assassinations, riots and a people paralyzed by their fear of being powerless to change things. But her works do more than chronicle the horrors … , they are efforts to raise the consciousness of ordinary people to the realization of the destruction of their lives.
For Oates, in the modern world where the beastly, the emetic and the atrocious are routine, no novelistic medium can capture this spirit and render these sad truths more vividly than the Gothic. It is Oates' belief that the Gothic is the only type of fiction that is capable of laying bare the mechanics involved in the dehumanization of large segments of society especially women and the poor.
Like her female predecessors, the Brontes and Mary Shelly, to name but a few, Oates adopts the Gothic genre to point to the brutality of patriarchal systems which have always exercised discrimination between the two sexes in favour of men. For all what critics say about Oates, she probably remains one of the true advocates of women in modern American literature. It has to be made clear, though, that the thesis is not a feminist polemic for or against Oates canon as a novelist. The thesis is primarily meant to show how Oates fits within the parameters of the Gothic.
Of all Oates' oeuvre, her postmodernist novels, Bellefleur (1980), Bloodsmoor Romance (1982) and Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984) are the most massively indebted to the tradition of the Gothic novel. Except for Bellefleur, even the titles of these novels are revelatory of the hold the 'Gothic' has on Oates. Much of Oates' work was written during very traumatic times in this world, and her three novels are an apt illustration of that. Through her acknowledgement of the tragedy that is occurring, Oates nurses hopes that through her work she can bring these blatant catastrophes home forcing the American to deal with them rather than shy away from facing up to them.
Oates’ conflation between life in modern America and the ‘Gothic’ in both its literal and literary senses provides a framework for a reading and an analysis of the trinity of novels that makes provisions for the totality of experience presented in them. To read and analyze each of the three novels in isolation is to do more thematic harm than good. They were meant by Oates as parts or fragments of "…a highly complex structure" designed to function as"… chapters or units in an immense design…"(Mysteries… 'Afterword') and should be approached as such.
It is this stress on the totality of experience and the thematic inseparability of the three novels that this study takes as its point of departure. The three novels are approached as three chapters in a book chronicling America from as far back as the seventeenth century. The chronological arrangement of the three novels is such that opting to read them in an order that is different from the one intended for them proves disruptive of the sequence Oates had in mind and may in the process impede a better understanding of the quilted fabric she has been painstakingly knitting for years. With this in mind, the thesis proceeds in its analysis of the three novels chronologically; Bellefleur being the oldest of the three is studied first, then comes A Bloodsmoor Romance, the second in the year of publication and finally there comes Mysteries of Winterthurn ,the most recent of the three.
Of all the Gothic elements permeating the three novels, three stand out as the most substantive and revealing. The curse, for one, occupies centre stage in Bellefleur, while in A Bloodsmoor Romance; romance is dominant. In Mysteries of Winterthurn mystery reigns supreme. Oates' insistence on foregrounding one Gothic element in each of the three novels is speculated to have been the corollary of an influence the American-born Russian Formalist, Roman Jacobson had on Oates . It seems that Oates had in mind Jacobson’s concept of “The dominant” in the work of art while writing these novels. This concept provides a very valid frame of reference and helps explain why a particular Gothic aspect or element is made to foreshadow all the other elements. According to Jacobson:
The dominant may be defined as the focusing component of a work of art: it rules, determines, and transforms the remaining components. It is the dominant which guarantees the integrity of the structure.
The argument of the thesis is in four chapters. Chapter one chronicles the development of the Gothic novel ever since it made its first appearance on the literary scene with the publication of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. It is a survey of the ‘Gothic’ throughout history making mention, in the process, of Gothic writers as well as the themes and issues this genre has been addressing itself to. This chapter serves as a background and a frame of reference against which the study sets and evaluates Oates’ Gothic contribution in the three novels.
Chapter two addresses the Gothic motif of the Curse in Bellefleur. Through a “…dizzying profusion of plots”, readers are given glimpses of the white Bellefleur family in seven generations. Because the Bellefleur family history has been one of savagery and carnage and because the sins of the fathers are visited on their offspring- a Biblical principle and a Gothic stipulate- members of the new generation of Bellefleur feel that some sense of doom or curse is hunting and haunting them and is responsible for the miseries and misfortunes that befall them from time to time. Only those who realize and own up to the enormity of the crimes perpetrated by their forefathers and fathers against other races and the poor will be delivered leaving the arrogant who believe in the supremacy of the white race to meet their tragic end in Gideon’s Kamikaze bomb dive into the Bellefleur manor.
Chapter three discusses the element of Romance in A Bloodsmoor Romance, typical of a Gothic romance; readers meet the orphaned heroine who suffers at the hands of her sisters in her adopted family. Very early in the novel, Deirdre gets abducted and leaves her family for twenty years. When she comes back, after having to fend for herself until she has established herself in the world of sorcery and channeling voices, she blesses the lives of her other four sisters and, selflessly, allows them to share with her the money she inherits from her mother . The mother in a dramatic turn of events, typically Gothic, is discovered to have been a blood-relation to Deirdre’s adopted family.
Chapter four handles mystery and detection in Mysteries of Winterthurn. The atmosphere of the novel is that of twilight where mystery and enigma seem to be the order of the day. Three murders are committed and Xavier the traditional detective starts the journey of identifying the perpetrators. While Xavier is shown throughout trying to resolve the mysteries and identify the killers, Oates is engaging the readers throughout the incidents and events in probing the reasons for the violence which claimed the lives of an innocent child in the first murder case, poor factory girls in the second case and a clergyman in the third. The typically Gothic question “who is the culprit?’’ turns into the more difficult question ‘Why’. And in answering the question “why” the entire society is identified as the real culprit through its biased beliefs which see women, children and the poor as creatures of no human or social consequence.
The thesis ends with a short essay wherein the main arguments and findings are recapitulated. This essay serves as a retrospective reflection on Oates’ Gothic project in the novels as proved or refuted in the thesis. It is intended to offer an evaluation of Oates’ contribution to the ‘Gothic’ in the three novels. It also seeks to underscore the areas where Oates deviates from the long-established Gothic model and uncover the reasons for such generic infidelities.
Wednesday, 23 June 2004
To: AOU_EFL@yahoogroups.com
From: "Sameh Galeel" Add to Address Book
Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 03:17:55 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [AOU_EFL] (unknown)
Dear self-appointed moderator,
Please see to it that that this situation is rectified or leave the job to more capabable hands.
Hi guys,
Long time no see.
How is it going in there? Listen ya, I am writing to find out about
the messages I send you. I don't seem to find myself on the group
list anymore. I don't want to carry it to extremes and subscribe to
the one conspiracy theory that says they were deleted on purpose.
Please illuminate me
thank you all
Sameh
Sameh Abdil Galil
Al-hassa
Confused !
To: AOU_EFL@yahoogroups.com
From: "saras_knowledge" Add to Address Book
Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 09:10:33 -0000
Subject: [AOU_EFL] Confused !
Hi guys,
Long time no see.
How is it going in there? Listen ya, I am writing to find out about
the messages I send you. I don't seem to find myself on the group
list anymore. I don't want to carry it to extremes and subscribe to
the one conspiracy theory that says they were deleted on purpose.
Please illuminate me
thank you all
Sameh
Tuesday, 15 June 2004
Brutal Honesty !
For the first time since I started blogging, I am going to use the blog for what It was originally meant namely reflections and personal book-keeping. Enough with editoralizing and giving people shit. People as vulnerable as I am should start reforming themselves first then long after wards they can start thinking of changing the world around. I think I am not the only one who extoll in finger-pointing and blaming others for the mess they themselves create. I think it's part of a cultural mind set and a structure of feeling that is so quick to blame and go public about self-created facts and figures. I'll come to this point later.
What I did today
1- Nothing 2- Nothing 3- Nothing
It's very sluggish down here. The hot weather is having its negative toll on people and they are all mulling vacations plans to escape the hellish weather.
A colleague is giving me yet good reasons to yet loathe him all the more.
Plans of travelling all the way to Egypt are cancelled on second thoughts.
A friend of mine sent me an Email asking when I'll be home and this is what I had to say to him
hi Mahmoud
How are you? I was close to coming all the way back to Egypt this week for a two week holiday, On second thoughts I found it very costly and would devour hard-earned money . I decided not come home especially when I got to know by cheer accident that I have a month holiday in store in three months' time. How are you my best of the best of friends ( I am not sure this is grammatically correct)? Are you recycling old email messages? I think you sent me the self-same message 5 months back in time. I love you hooda. Take care of your precious self and make your self obvious on the net. We need to talk and discuss items on each other's future agendas.
Posted by samehgalil at 7:15 PM EEST
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Updated: Tuesday, 15 June 2004 7:30 PM EEST
Monday, 14 June 2004
Material Cupidity !
Hi Refaat,
How are you, sir? I don't quite agree that donkey-turned people are the out-put of our notorious system of education back in Egypt. I would say that teachers in our ram-shackled system of education have an agenda that is quite different to that of the society they are operating in. And there we go, we have this gap between what society thinks what education should be like and what teachers are lobbying for. It is now the teachers' no-longer-hidden agenda to promote material cupidity in our schools. Teachers teach students how to collect money no matter what. Our teachers never fail to provide students with role- models on how to be money-oriented by launching professional wars against each other for as little as a private lesson. Teachers start wars against each other and tell all the lies there are about each for the simple reason that they believe each is a potential threat to the other should any private lesson exist. I would rather think that Shylock-turned people are our system's real contribution
Sameh Abdil Galil
Sunday, 13 June 2004
Clear Instructions please !
This is Sameh writing to you from Al-hassa branch. It's been a while since I last accessed the group. Hi Ismail, I still harbour the feeling that you can help us more by telling us exactly what you expect and want us to communicate to the students out of this e.learning business. Kindly be reminded that you can not expect your students( we being the students in this case) to do well without giving them clear instructions.
What epistemological ( linguistic or otherwise)gaps do you expect us to fill with the students by hurling them through every now and then to the computer lab? And what difference would the English lab session(s) make for the students now that they have a specialized course meant to teach them how to develop their computer and internet skills? I am hopeful that the two courses- TU and English- will not clash leaving the students totally in the dark and losing all sense of direction .
I don't want to seem too disappointing . I am just trying to communicate to you the reasons why we don't try to help you with the feed-back you ask us about every now and again
Regards
Sameh Abdil Galil
Saturday, 12 June 2004
Sadly beautiful analysis
From: Sameh H. A. Abdil Galil [mailto:samehgalil@lycos.com]
Sent: 11 June, 2004 12:58 PM
To: k.hafez@jurisconsultes.com
Hi,
this is Sameh from Saudi Arabia. I read with avid interest your analysis
as why we failed spectacularly as we did with the world cup bidding.
Your insights are sadly beautiful. I hope those in charge read your
thought-provoking tract. I hope they can for once in their life wake up
from their moral slumber and consider the reasons for this spectacular
failure. I like your language very much .
God bless you
Sameh Abdil Galil
Saturday, 5 June 2004
Linguistic militancy is a reflection of a paranoid mind-set!
Hello every one,
I hope you are all as fine as I wish for you to be. While skimming through the messages I received from the group on Friday, I sensed something ( I wouldn't call it negative because I don't believe in value judgments). I noticed that an undercurrent of militancy is fighting its way through some of our dear colleagues' messages. While commending the efforts of the promising young lady, Mr. Samy Hanna, for one, does not fail to remind her to prepare for her fighting oh, sorry teaching vocation. A Mr. Fayed or Ismail, I don't quite remember, ostensibly lauding her efforts, gives the same poor young lady a yet another lecture on the virtues of "Fight[ing]" to achieve her goals. What our dear colleagues apparently forgot was to give the poor girl the address of the nearest Al-Qada training camp and the details of how she can have herself enrolled in one of its programs.
Hey guys please give us a break; teaching not warfare is what you are talking about. I hope I am wrong in assuming that linguistic militancy is a reflection of a paranoid mind-set.
I would like also to draw the attention of Mr. Fayed to the fact that "deeds" are positive by nature and don't need the qualifying adjective " positive" . Better still, qualifying the word "words" with the word "ideal" in " ideal... words" is a violation of selectional restrictions or a collocation clash( whichever he feels inclined to call).
Sameh Abdil Galil
Al-hassa
Saudi Arabia
Saturday, 29 May 2004
Surreal silliness!
Hello everyone,
I am writing in reference to a diminutive message I received from the group the other day. The writer of the message, obviously meaning well, tried to amuse group members by cracking a joke. However, unfortunately for him, his message misfired and fell on disapproving ears. Let me tell him that he and his forwarded punctuation trick failed to impress me, and I didn't fall on my knees out of laughter at what he deemed a potentially laughter-conducive joke.
My first reaction to the assumed joke was one of frustration and rage. Frustration at the thought of how our colleague proved to be totally out of touch with reality. He doesn't realize that the world has changed beyond recognition in the last 50 years and that abominable gendered pigeon-holing is no longer there.
Sad for him, he doesn't seem to realize that the world is poised towards equality and a fair distribution of gender roles between women and men. Instead of him coming to buttress these efforts, our colleague acted like a regressive force and opted for us to go all the way back to square one where women are thought little of and dehumanized.
The punctuation trick or for that matter joke, while unwittingly promoting gender bias and male chauvinism, only succeeded in showing us that some people in our midst still cling to fossilized misconceptions about the relationship between men and women no matter how much they try to profess otherwise.
I am hopeful that the guy has not, as yet, revealed the content of his forwarded punctuation trick to his students. We have had enough with scores of teachers who helped widen the gap between the two sexes with their miscalculated, poorly selected material.
Sameh Abdil Galil
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