Adventures in MFA Land

I'll be presenting at the Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference taking place in Pittsburgh during the middle of June. Here's my abstract:  Attention has been paid to the role of mothers in horror film yet a deconstructing analysis of the types of horror film mothers and how the actions of those types impact their child victims is lacking. Consequently, the relationship and circumstance of the fictional horror mother and her fictional horror child victim is often generalized as simply dysfunctional. This broad interpretation of dysfunctional prevents an understanding of the child victim’s experience and role. A frequent type of child victim is the child of a ‘guilty’ mother. Often, her guilt arises from her inability to assist her child and is further complicated by her relationships with those around her. Her guilt impacts her actions and attitudes and as a result impacts her child. While, both the ‘guilty’ mother and the tormented child are victims, their torment is experienced...

Here we are in the middle of the summer: barbeques, day trips, family trips, and hopefully-some extra time for reading. This summer, I'm rereading Servant of the Undead and Mistress of the Undead, the first 2 books in my Tribe of the Undead dark, erotic horror/urban fantasy series. Why am I rereading my own stuff? I'm working on book 3 in the series, Disciple of the Undead. Wow are these books dark! The last fiction book I wrote was the very fun, upbeat and romantic, Not Home for the Holidays. Writing something so different is both challenging and fun. One piece of writer advice that is out in the world is that authors should stick to one genre so that readers will know what to expect from you and your work. Since you're reading this newsletter, you already know I don't follow that advice. My fiction falls in several genres. I also write academic articles and chapters and non-fiction books. In July 2019, I attended the Popular Culture Association's Research Instit...

confinement, abuse, escape Betty Cooper, in the earlier Riverdale comic universe, is characterized as the sweet, hard-working, girl next door. Many Archie comic stories feature her “tom-boy” side, showing her to be a talented athlete or skilled car mechanic, but most often the circumstances reveal that she is a compassionate girl who puts the needs of others before her own. In her depiction on the show Riverdale, this caring side, a personality trait that is typically admired, is exploited, transformed into a weakness, and used to cause her downfall. This exploitation is emphasized through The Sisters of Quiet Mercy plotline. Until its closure in the middle of Season 3, The Sisters of Quiet Mercy was a residential institution dedicated to reforming the troubled youths of Riverdale. While claiming to aspire to honest and good values, such as hard-work and spiritual devotion, the so-called ‘Sisters’ ran an illegal distillery, used conversion therapy, and gave the resident teens Fizzle Ro...

When a show is titled after the setting, viewers know the setting counts big time. In Riverdale, the place is everything. That wasn’t the case in the classic comic world of Riverdale. That pleasant anyplace serves mainly as a background for the antics and events of Archie and his light-hearted high school gang. It is so unimportant that the writers could create an ever-changing town with museums, airports, and other landmarks that came and went over the decades as the stories needed. As a result, there was no reason for creating a local history to impact the storylines, and the town of Riverdale did little to influence the actions of the characters.    The Riverdale of Riverdale couldn’t be more opposite. The setting of Riverdale itself is the character most changed from the classic comics. This new place is more than a backdrop, it complicates the plotline and motivates the characters. The Gothic setting gives the show a dark edge. Broken families, hearts, and spirits replace...

  Hooper and Quint are opposites of each other in all regards with one exception—their personal relationship to sharks. Both Brody and Quint have self-defining shark narratives.  Hooper’s shark story is revealed at the Brody’s dinner table when Ellen, Brody’s wife, awkwardly says to the just arrived Hooper she’s been told he’s “in sharks.” He confirms that he loves sharks then relates a childhood experience in which a baby thresher shark wrecked the boat he’d been in. He swam to shore and watched the fish finish destroying his boat (0.41.43–0.42.26). This story explains his very personal and emotional connection to sharks.  Quint’s story comes later, at night, while the three of them are aboard the Orca, preparing to face the shark. The captain tells of his time aboard the USS Indianapolis and how, after their ship was hit by a Japanese sub, sharks devoured many of his shipmates (1.29.28–1.33.15).  This famous monologue, another product of the script collaboration as...

Abstract...for work in progress.  Doing research at Bowling Green State University's Ray & Pat Browne Library for Popular Culture Studies . For decades, the Archie comics have depicted the fictional world of Riverdale and while doing so explicitly and implicitly addressed era-relevant social issues. Two characters have consistently been at the forefront of transgressive interests since their first appearances in 1941 and 1942: Betty Cooper, sweet girl-next-door, and Veronica Lodge, privileged debutante. These characters have been reinvented and freshly envisioned in the CW’s series, Riverdale . The world surrounding Archie Andrews, already dynamic as it has been developed over an extended period of time via multiplatform storytelling, has been updated, intensified, and othered. This multilayered amplification of setting provides an effective backdrop for the revitalized Archie characters but also complicates the understanding of the degree to which Betty and Veron...

A viewing of horror films featuring mothers with distressed children, The Exorcist , Babadook , and Hereditary , offers the opportunity to examine ways in which uncanny situations and Lacan’s conflicting imaginary and symbolic order create the frightening impossibility of absolute comprehension. The Exorcist , released in the end of 1973, is one of the early horror films featuring a mother whose child is being terrorized. While it’s true that the mother character, Chris MacNeil, is a career-minded single mother, she is not a ‘guilty’ mom. She doesn’t feel conflicted about her own behavior as a mother. Additionally, she is not being punished by society nor is she resentful of her child’s, distress and apparent need for help. Her child needs help and, with the support of her community and society, she does everything she can to get it. Her situation is not uncanny; it is understandable and customary, and, as a result, the mother character is not a source of tension. Instead, she re...

Within the context of a horror film, this three-pronged tensional dynamic highlights the unique vulnerabilities and conflicts of the ‘guilty’ mom and creates an avenue through which viewers experience Jacques Lacan’s Real. Lacan’s Real is the uncanny location between the conflicting imaginary order and symbolic order. The Real creates the impossibility of absolute comprehension. Not being able to understand something when one’s life is at stake is frightening. The imaginary order is the part of human consciousness that exists without language and expression. In the imaginary order, the self is connected to others, objects, and the world. This order is without boundary or definition; it is the fantasy image of self. It is narcissistic, fueled by unsatisfiable demands. It is the order of the maternal. The mother, in her traditional role, exists in the imaginary order with the child. She protects the emotions of the child and creates emotional safety. For these reasons, the traditiona...

For one reason, this triangle of tension is uncanny. Obviously, horror film writers are working intentionally to craft situations and circumstances that are eerie, disturbing and frightening, so making things uncanny is good craft. Ernst Jentsch, in his essay, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” defines the state as a person’s “doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might be, in fact, animate.” He was quick to note that awareness and understanding of such a state is important to the writer. He says: In telling a story one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton and to do it in such a way that his attention is not focused directly upon his uncertainty, so that he may not be led to go into the matter and clear it up immediately. Uncanniness is created when the distinction between r...

Mama , Rosemary’s Baby , The Others —the maternal plotlines of these films make them stand out. Well-crafted horror film mothers are more than characters; they are women who drive the plot. Jeanine Basinger’s definition of the woman’s film as “a movie that places at the center of its universe a female who is trying to deal with emotional, social, and psychological problems that are specifically connected to the fact that she is a woman.” (59) applies to the consistently popular horror films featuring monstrous moms.  Mothers in these films are often given the generic label of dysfunctional, but this broad term is not sufficient. We can assume if a mother is a main character, she is flawed and conflicted. If her role of mother is highlighted by the storyline, it is necessary that the conflict be connected to that aspect of her character. A mother character who is not conflicted by her parenting responsibilities would not be conflict worthy. This is to say, if she were fully functi...

PCA 2019 in Washington D.C.  Scary Vulnerability: Considering the ‘Guilty Mom’ Horror Film Through the Lens of Lacan’s the Real Abstract The ‘guilty mom’ is at the center of three tensions: society’s expectation that she provide for her child’s emotional and physical safety, the child’s needs, and her own needs. Within the context of a horror film, this tensional dynamic highlights the unique vulnerabilities of this marginalized, archetypal character and creates an avenue through which viewers experience Jacques Lacan’s the Real. A comparative assessment of The Exorcist (1973), Babadook (2014), and Hereditary (2018) offers the opportunity to examine the ways in which Lacan’s conflicting imaginary order and symbolic order create the impossibility of absolute comprehension. Salvoj Zizek expands on Lacan’s theory to identify the “real Real” (2006). This modality can additionally inform an analysis of the unique terror of the ‘guilty’ mom horror film. Read the pap...

Total-E-Bounds new line Clandestine Classics, a series of classic novels such as Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre that have been given a "50 Shades of Grey" make-over  has received a fair amount of criticism and been the source of many jokes . This video offer a interesting, intelligent, discussion.

Welcome back guest blogger Carol Owens Campbell. Carol is an MFA student studying fiction at Pine Manor College's Solstice in Creative Writing program. Her current work in progress explores the turbulent echos of the Kent State Massacre as seen through the eyes of a young college student. In this second of two parts, Carol continues her exploration of hats in Flaubert's Madame Bovary . *** Flaubert’s motif of ‘hats’ in Madame Bovary contributes to a nonjudgmental theme resonating throughout the novel that “Each of us is different.” As a symbol of this truth, Flaubert describes a variety of ‘hats.’ He also describes a variety of individuals who populate his novel, each symbolized by the ‘hat’ each wears, i.e., an adulterous woman in veils, a group of nuns in hoods, an ethical husband in a leather hat, two men who seduce a married woman, one man in a jaunty straw hat and another bareheaded, a druggist in a skullcap, a young daughter in a bonnet. The image of each ‘hat’ con...

Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club is one of those books that people like to talk about, argue over even. I asked five people what Fight Club is “about,” you want to hear what they said? • 19 year-old male: “consumerism and the destruction of the human spirit.” • 41-year old female: “good and bad of a person, person confronting their own reality.” • 49-year-old male: “gay cruising.” • 21-year-old female: “dude who had insomnia and that was how he fell asleep.” • 32-year-old male: “what happens when people go to support groups.” Actually, I asked six. The sixth person, my 16-year-old son. His response, “I don’t know, is there anything to eat? When’s dinner?” Ironic when you consider one of the things people say Fight Club is about is the emasculating effect mothers, who smother their sons by providing too much for them and not allowing them to get tough, have on their sons in post-modern US. Who’s right, you want to know. What do I think the book is about, you ask. Here’s what it’...