School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemRace, Capital and Desire in Roberto Bolaño: Genre in 2666( 2022)Roberto Bolano’s posthumously published 2666 is a novel split into five parts without a clear logic of organisation. I argue that its unity lies in the way each section takes up and then dissolves the conventions of a different genre. Before engaging in a close reading of the work, I seek to establish the importance of generic interpretation in contemporary literary criticism by arguing that genres are not simply categories for sorting texts, but names for complex representational mechanics through which a text relates to its social world. Upon this basis, I show that the movement of the novel reproduces the same trajectory in each of its five parts: each section uses the conventions of the genre but only to negate its usual organisation of meaning and therefore relation to history. Ultimately, I argue, these structures of experience decompose in confrontation with the colonial destruction of life. Since there is no single received literary form that adequately represents the transformations of racial violence, Bolano negates a procession of genres as a way of testifying to the complex matrix of power, death and revolt in the contemporary world. (Apologies for absence of accent on Bolano but the system does not let me type them)
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ItemQuality Telefantasy: How Quality TV incorporated telefantasy and launched into the mainstream( 2021)Quality Television is a genre that prioritises realism and cultural distinction. Since 2010, US Quality TV has increasingly incorporated fantastical elements such as magic, monsters and space travel. The central distinguishing feature of Quality Telefantasy is the presentation of fantastical elements in a realistic manner, as in Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, Westworld and the Marvel/Netflix superhero series. The commercial and critical success of Quality Telefantasy has broadened popular taste cultures.
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ItemBeware! Children at Play: A Carnivalesque Analysis of the Monster Child from Early Slapstick to the Nazified Children of Modern Horror( 2020)Monster child narratives often use a formula in which normative power relations between adults and children are temporarily inverted as the child outsmarts the adult, leading to a rupture in the social order. Where children are ordinarily subordinate to adults, this relationship is reversed as the monster child exerts dominance over their elders. Applying Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnival theory, this thesis argues that the monster child figure commonly thought of as a horror movie villain began its life on screen in early silent screen comedy. Through qualitative analysis of a range of case study films from the silent era through to the emergence of horror-themed monster child films produced in the mid-1950s, close comparative analysis of these texts is used to support the claim that the monster children in early silent comedies and later modern horror films have a shared heritage. Such a claim warrants the question, why did the monster child migrate from comedy to horror? The contention put forward in this thesis is that during World War II dark representations of Hitler Youth in Hollywood wartime propaganda films played a significant role in the child monster trope moving from comedy to horror. Although only a brief period, the cluster of Hitler Youth-themed films produced by Hollywood presented the Nazified child as a particularly heinous malfeasant. This new screen villain proved dynamic and durable, resurfacing after the war as a devious Aryan fiend in the horror-themed monster child films that began to emerge in cinema in the mid-1950s. The monster child seen in contemporary horror is a combination of the narrative formula of early silent comedies featuring child monsters playing pranks on unwary adults, and the dark villainy of the Hitler Youth. In tracing the trajectory of the child monster from comedy to horror, the thesis proposes that its carnivalesque character altered during World War II as it came to be associated with the anti-carnivalesque Hitler Youth. The anti-carnivalesque superficially engages with elements of the carnival so that where carnival is dialogic, celebrating an explosion of heteroglossia that embraces culture at the margins, the anti-carnivalesque is monologic and seeks to centralise and contain culture within a singular unified worldview. Following the war, the monster child returned to a carnivalesque state by undermining the social order just as it had in early cinema, however the character had radically transformed during the war so that in the postwar period it sported the Nordic physical features of the Hitler Youth and exhibited a sadism that would increase as the monster child moved further into the horror genre. Yet even as the postwar monster child became noticeably Nazified with its blond hair and contempt for adult authority, the comic origins of the monster child in silent cinema were also legible in its return to carnivalesque narratives in which the monster child overturns the social order.