English

This essay pursues an articulation of the relation between the personal and impersonal as they relate to the artistic work of writing, particularly as seen in the work of South African author J.M. Coetzee. Taking the critical theory of Maurice Blanchot as its touchstone on im-personal-ity, the essay aims to uncover how Coetzee’s writing simultaneously negotiates and foregrounds a middle ground between the personal and impersonal as well as between persons and personalities, which issues in the construction of works of art that are personally impersonal in a way that distinguishes authors like Coetzee and Blanchot from others who are, perhaps, more interested in their own personal expression and ‘celebrity.’ Starting with an analysis of these matters as they appear in his memoir-novels, this essay ultimately pursues the consummation of this impersonal discourse and the work of writing in Coetzee’s recent novel, The Childhood of Jesus (2013).

http://www.mediatropes.com/index.php/Mediatropes/article/view/22385

This essay centers around the need to reconsider, and reunite, time and space in the study of video games by means of games’ dialogical and multi-layered chronotopicity. With an understanding of games as an intertextual, semiological system, a chronotopic model of describing games affords scholars the ability to see the dialogical space-time relations of the digital games in ways not disconnected from the historical forces that have acted upon and influenced them. Paying close attention to a few of the chronotopes in Dungeons and Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara and Dark Souls II, I argue for the relevance of Bakhtin’s theory of the dialogical chronotope to understanding gameplay as an inherently threshold experience; for opening up readings of digital games through the dialogical interplay of chronotopes; and for situating digital games historically, imbricating personal and public histories. Such an analysis of chronotopes in digital games—and the ability to see patterns, or rhythms, of time in space, space in time—provides ways to understand games as algorithmically-mediated texts within their socio-political contexts and historical rhythms beyond analyzing time and space separately in games. The chronotope of the threshold, for example, offers an aural-narrative path to consider the relation of in-game and out-of-game threshold experiences: simulated thresholds like doorways, portals, bonfires, and spawn points map onto their metaphorical, kairotic threshold counterparts in moments of ethical dilemmas, activism, and decisions. Without attempting to register “all” of the chronotopes in the aforementioned games, I plan to build upon Jesper Juul’s and Espen Aarseth’s work on temporality to expand the treatment of gaming “time” as it relates to the chronotopic, threshold experience of (game)play.

Note: This conference paper was presented at the 2018 Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association Conference in March 2018 in Indianapolis, IN.

The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth and its iconological-narrative depiction of blood, gore, defilement, flies, excrement, and monstrosities afford a fertile ground in which to consider how time-space constructs within the game call attention to the liminality of play itself. Through its retelling of the Biblical binding of Isaac, the game illustrates the everyday problems of responsibility living an individual, bare life existence under the biopolitical power of state sovereignty, and the difficulties of thinking about such living through the theologico-politically-rooted paradigm of responsibility and ethics, which this essay both embraces and resists. The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth depicts this threshold experience of life and death through what I refer to as the chronotope of the abject, which ritualizes encountering the signs of death and abjection. In other words, by appropriating the Judeo-Christian-Islamic narrative of the binding of Isaac, the game (like many games, though perhaps not as explicitly) offers a glimpse into the paradoxical and ambivalent experience of living, and gaming, as singularly plural beings. Attempting to escape his knife-wielding mother who has been commanded by God (the absolute singular Other) to kill her son as a sacrifice, the infantilized Isaac—with ubiquitous flowing tears—descends into the basement to escape. He flees only to find himself forced to defeat abject creatures, destroy piles of excrement for loot, and collect items, pills, cards, and bombs to survive. Isaac, cursed by trauma and hallowed, uses his tears to respond to the abject, and the narrative, iconology, and mechanics of the game work to call attention not only to how a player confronts the abject—in tears, but also through laughter—when playing but also to the problems of responsibility and ethics, in which we each find ourselves endlessly entangled. The temporal-spatial arrangement of a permanent state of emergency that drives Isaac from room to room, clearing hideous creatures, spiders, flies, and excrement maps onto the player’s own relation to state power according to an economy of sacrifice mediated by self-legitimizing narratives of life, death, suicide, responsibility, and ethics, which are addressed in the context of this game throughout the essay. Thinking about abjection as a threshold experience—the antinomical contact of enjoying and purifying the abject—allows one further to understand the irreconcilability of the computer game medium as it relates to players’ psychosocial drives manipulated by sovereign power. The essay also offers a more local opportunity to reconsider this particular game’s relation to a Christian cosmology, against which it attempts to struggle.

This paper was presented at the 2018 Southwest Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association Conference in Albuquerque, NM.

An early analysis of the ethics of expectations between lovers in coupledom, mediated through quotations by Oscar Wilde. Included in the collection What Philosophy Can Tell You about Your Lover, edited by Sharon M. Kaye and published in 2012.

Presented at the 2018 Humanities Unbound Graduate Conference, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA. April 20, 2018

Chronotopes and their archetypes offer scholars a helpful way to consider games as algorithmically-mediated texts within their socio-political contexts and historical rhythms. Analyzing time-space markings in video games allows one to see the “poetic characters” of language that humans as wild, imaginative animals create, often through play. Behind the rational logic of video game programming, narratives, and mechanics lies a semiosis that is, in the first instance, primarily visual, gestural, material, and metaphorical. This brief theoretical sketch that aligns with Giambattista Vico’s “new science” posits an imbrication of foundationalist and anti-foundationalist epistemological and ontological positions necessary to understanding how the gamer—as an animal poeticum—experiences time and space in games through play. This theory brings video game time-space configurations into crude contact with their mythic and poetic roots as experienced through the body, including a bodily-rooted imagination.

Presented at the 2016 Southwest Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association Conference, Albuquerque, NM. February 12, 2016.

This essay aims to analyze the antinomical puritan-pagan language games in which World of Warcraft engages the player, language games that imbricate the myth of the dour puritan, play, and work in WoW. Drawing upon Jean-François Lyotard’s Just Gaming, I will argue that in an otherwise “pagan” world, the game foregrounds the matter of player agency through the player being always already forced into the puritan-like position of being a predestined subject in a world controlled by a multiplicity of other actions, least of which are the player’s: predestined as a consumer within the spectacular world (following Kevin Moberly) and predestined to an overtly puritan work ethic (fundamentally excessive) and yet a pagan kind of play (itself excessive, unlike puritan play). In Azeroth, the “pagan” becomes a ruse of sorts, a duplicitous language game, which can be seen in the very architecture of some major cities (“cities on a hill”) and the Paladin class. While not exactly tracing WoW’s puritan roots—as the essentialized mythological narratives of “the puritan” don’t do justice to the complexities of historical puritan play—I intend to argue that World of Warcraft reaffirms the player’s predestined subject position. Following play theorists in addition to Lyotard, this essay offers a look at the virtual world as a cultural artifact within the larger gamespace of excess (Wark). By means of its puritan influences, WoW supports and reinforces a culture of excess, notwithstanding one of its prescriptive loading screen tips, “Remember to take all things in moderation (even World of Warcraft!).”

Presented at the Midwest Modern Language Association Conference. Columbus, OH. November 14, 2015.

The tension of past and future—along with the ‘present’ state of hunger based on the 2015 UN Millennium Development Goals Report—will serve as the framework of this paper’s investigation into the relation of modern excessive food consumption to the largely religious medieval narratives on food and restraint. I will attempt to demonstrate how Guy Debord’s idea of “spectacle” can serve as a lens through which to see a series of capitalist-driven shifts in food consumption from the Middle Ages to the present. These shifts include changing relations between restraint and excess as well as a shift from a religious sacred to a spectacist pseudo-sacred. I’ll locate changing ‘appetites’ briefly in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (following Kathryn Lynch) and the food habits of medieval persons alongside the modern phenomenon of processed, hyperreal foods. I’ll explore how modern, neoliberal food production and consumption might disrupt local communities even as it proffers increased community and collaboration within the spectacle. This analysis also provides an opportunity to see how we ‘consume’ and reappropriate the Middle Ages to ‘fuel’ our own modern lifestyles of material excess. It is no coincidence that a resurgence in medieval culinary scholarship is underway precisely when industrial agriculture currently advances to the point of obliterating the (now almost) historical local farmer from existence in the US. An attempt to return to a past agricultural tradition can be pursued through an invention of a ‘culinary Middle Ages.’ As a prelude to a re-formulation of Lévi-Strauss’s culinary triangle in light of the techno-scientific engineering of foods, this essay will argue not for a return to a medieval religious and sacred relation to food but the invention of an antimonial secular sacred engagement with food production and consumption, which perforce must lie outside spectacle and within micro-communities of food.

Presented at Ohio Association of Two Year Colleges Conference. Hosted at Wright State University. October 10, 2014.

During the 2013-2014 academic year, I worked to prepare my web-based ENG 1020 College Composition II course for Quality Matters (QM) review. This involved aligning my course to 41 specific standards created to assess the effectiveness of the design of web-based and blended courses. My proposed session would present information on Quality Matters, specifically the Ohio Quality Matters Consortium, the benefits and difficulties of revising a course for QM review, tips for faculty to make the process smoother, discussion of collaborating with an instructional technologist, and a demonstration of my QM-recognized course. This session would not explain all of the QM standards, but it would address a few of the standards in more depth, such as Standard 8: Accessibility, which presented some unique challenges, including matters that we all will need to address in our web-based courses to ensure ADA compliance. My course is the first English course to earn QM recognition at my institution, and the process is not as daunting as faculty often perceive it to be. In fact, the process of aligning my course to the QM standards helped improve not only my web-based classes but my face-to-face classes, too, which I would expect to be another point of interest for the OATYC conference audience.

Presented at South Atlantic Modern Language Association Conference, Atlanta, GA. November 10, 2013.

This essay sketches some of the narrative, visual, and ideological differences between the print and film versions of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs in how they disparately appeal to “imagination” in an epoch, today, of ever-expanding, networked catastrophe(s). Now in its 40th year in print, Judi and Ron Barrett’s Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (1978)—hereafter Cloudy—along with Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s film adaptation (2009), tell tall tales of falling food that still capture the imagination of children and adults during bedtime story time, family movie night, and other ritualized reading and film-viewing scenarios. The film version of Cloudy, its entertainment value notwithstanding, functions though to restrict the imagination of the child-viewer by refusing the pleasure of suspending disbelief, and thus foreclosing imaginative capacities for rethinking the world and its problems. By means of its narrative reworkings and adaptation, the cinematic Cloudy goes to great lengths to conflate “unproductive” and bodily-rooted imagination with material, neoliberal innovation and invention. The film also illustrates that there is no longer just a natural catastrophe, since the increasingly interconnected economic, political, technological, cultural, social, and geographical networks force natural disasters to be more far reaching, a phenomenon explored by Jean-Luc Nancy in After Fukushima. Drawing on Nancy’s later writings related to “being singular plural” at a time when globalized general equivalency has come to dominate socio-politio-economic relations, my conclusions about the Cloudy film speak to more than just another reboot of a “classic” text (Being 13).  These changes document the historical changes in social relations occurring today, more specifically the increasingly technological mediation of social life. The grand narratives of techno-scientific progress under late capitalism engender the stifling of “unproductive” imagination in a global economy that has commodified everything. In a world that has fashioned technology as its subjects’ new mode of existence, people become entangled in an environment of ever-expanding networked catastrophes. The shifts that occur between the print and film versions of Cloudy indicate not as much differences in medium or in their respective creators’ visions than an ontological frame that depicts the changing landscape of global social relationships and their impact on individual-collective imagination. This includes what I’m calling “unproductive” imagination as well as the more tangible “seeds” of imagination needed now to reimagine, to reimage, a world in which justice moves more freely across these networks, a justice unbound from longstanding but deeply problematic theologico-politico paradigms of progress and responsibility.