Brooke K. Horvath

Bio: Brooke K. Horvath is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Existentialism & Consolation. The author has an hindex of 3, co-authored 6 publications receiving 21 citations.

Robert Coover's Fictions.

Abstract: \"At first,\" once upon no time, \"in an instant half-real half-remembered, the leper is at rest; then he begins his approach.\"1 But no: \"he has always been beginning, always approaching.\" The landscape is mythic, perhaps allegorical: the \"sun at its zenith .... dazzling white this figure crossing the molten red flats, his outline blurred by the savage glare\" (179). A medieval Totentanz \"He merely dances on, arms and legs outflung, . . . scratching his helix across the desert floor, . . . his steaming white helix on the burnt red plane. His robe seems not so much a robe as a . . . winding sheet! Death!\" (180). But, no, the echo is complicated and crossed by the incursions of other echoes which are also to be denied priority. The leper moves in a crazy helix because the narrator, \"we,\" moves us in a \"precise, governed\" pattern \"so regulating our own velocity as to schedule his [the leper's] arrival ... at our starting point\" (180). It is a game, hunt in which the leper is only an object on the geometrical psyche of the hunted nar rator. But as the physical distance closes (\"Down the last arc segment we glide, closing it now .... he is close enough now for us to see his eager smile\" [181] ) the narrator's cool voice becomes less objectively distanced, nervously observant of detail which he tries to dismiss: \"tattered ends of his white flesh confusing themselves with ... his fluttering robe, flake off in a scaly dust .... translucent layers of dead scaly material, here and there hardened into shiny nodules, here and there disturbed by deep cavities. In the beds of these cavities: a dark sub stance, resembling blood not so much as ... as: excrement. Well, simple illusion, blood mixed with pus and baked in the sun, that's what it is\" (181). And then the voice becomes hysterical, the voice of Faustus and Everyman: \"But now? oh my god!?as a mere few paces separate us, our point of origin?and end!?just visible before us, the brute reality slams through the barriers of our senses: the encounter is now imminent!\" (181). \"The leper, tongue dangling . . . whole wretched body oozing a kind of milky sweat, hurls himself into our arms, smother ing us, pitching us to the red clay, his sticky cold flesh fastening to us, me, his black tongue licking my face\" (182). One recalls the folk terror, the frequent legends of curse from the leper's kiss. And yet, the narrator seems to seek his destiny even after he has recognized its inevitability and its horror: \"Our hands, my hands, appear before us . . . extended now for the embrace\" (181); \"I lie helpless under the sickening weight of his perishing flesh. Then, in the same instant, it is over. Purged of all revulsions ... we lay him gently on the red

Suburbianation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth Century American Fiction and Film

Abstract: In the years following the end of World War Q, a new kind of landscape emerged in the United States, one that would immeasurably alter the way Americans think about place. Critics and commentators greeted the emergence of the environment we know as “suburbia” with a mixed reaction: for some, the suburbs represented the material embodiment of the “American Dream”: for others, architectural and environmental homogeneity marked the new suburbs as an alienating, even dangerous terrain. In the half-century since the onset of mass-suburbanization, the United States — which has, by now, become a primarily suburban nation — has continued to struggle with the image and cultural meanings of suburbia. Our vexed cultural relationship to the suburban landscape, evident even before the onset of postwar masssuburbanization, has characterized a small but compelling body of fictional and cinematic works set in the suburbs. This dissertation examines the representations of suburban life and landscape in fictional works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Cheever, John Updike, Ann Beattie, and Gloria Naylor, and in films by Frank Capra, Frank Perry, Mike Nichols, Bryan Forbes, and Reginald Hudlin. I argue that these writers and filmmakers self-consciously explore the dynamics of the suburban environment in their works, revealing the cultural aspirations and anxieties undergirding our relationship to suburbia as a lived environment and an idea(l). Their works present contrasting visions of the suburbs, reflecting America’s troubled and increasingly complex relationship to an environment that, ultimately, mirrors the fantasies and phobias of the culture at

Postmodern American Gothic: The politics of fear in the works of Thomas Pynchon, David Lynch, and Steve Erickson

Abstract: by Brett Paice Whereas the Gothic traditionally relied upon supernatural figures of evil (vampires, ghosts, monsters) to produce the sensation of fear or terror, contemporary manifestations of the Gothic repudiate such abstracted constructions, favoring, instead, metonymical and everyday representations of terror. In this project, I argue that the works of artists Thomas Pynchon, David Lynch, and Steve Erickson signify, what I term, the postmodern American Gothic, through their production of a symbolic economy of fear, paranoia, and dread. I contend that these artists’ works represent narrative critiques of the United States’ culture of consumption and history of imperialism dating back to the myth of Manifest Destiny. Moreover, these artists’ historiographic narratives rigorously complicate traditional conceptions of gender, sexuality, race, nationhood, and colonialism as aspects of American history. Deconstructing the tropic elements of the gothic genre distinguishes these artists’ creation of a gothic aesthetic that privileges the lived horrors of historical record (slavery, the Holocaust, imperial modernity, oppression engendered through male-centered master

Annual Bibliography of Studies in Western American Literature

Abstract: W hat London seems to be suggesting, then, in “T o Build a Fire,” is not any kind of animalistic return for man to a presymbolic state of existence in order to survive; on the contrary, he seems to strongly imply that animals survive through instinct; men of limited mental capacity fail; and that human beings who exercise good judgment, tempered with emotional insights are the human beings who win out over a hostile environment. J a m e s K . B o w e n , Southern Oregon College

Myth (un)making : the adolescent female body in mythopoeic YA fantasy

Abstract: Through a reading of the heroic, female bodies available in Tamora Pierce’s Tortall books (1983–2011) and Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles (2012–2015), this thesis demonstrates how mythopoeic YA fantasy contests the dominant, hegemonic narratives of female adolescence. Owing to the system of binary oppositions structuring this space, the adolescent girl is offered— through the heavily stylised and always-edited images of popular and media culture—a very narrow and limited means of becoming self, one insisting on a discourse of self-through-appearance at the expense of the body’s fleshiness. Demonstrating a creationary or world-building mind-set, this vein of speculative fiction offers a sub or counter-cultural space in which alternative frameworks of living and being an adolescent female body are possible. Through the sometimes-fantastical transformations of the body in Pierce and Meyer’s fantasy, this thesis engages liminality, focusing on the adolescent (between child/adult), the body (between self/other), and young adult literature (YAL) (between children’s/adult literature). Drawing from a variety of fields: YAL and feminist theory, studies of myth and folklore as well as popular culture and cultural anthropology, this thesis speaks to and from the places between oppositions, and does so in order to refuse the individuality and isolation required by hegemonic models, while also offering a re-mapping of the body’s curves and contours, one that takes “lumps,” “bumps,” and “scars” into account. To counter the dominant framework of adolescence, this thesis concludes by offering, through a metaphor of “the Pack,” a model of interdependency and relation. Formed by repetition and connection, this model frustrates the economy of opposition, while also taking into account the body’s raised and irregular surfaces and demonstrating how individuals may be “scored into uniqueness” through relationality.

The interface between the oral and the written in Ottoman Literature : the reader notes on the manuscript of the Story of Firuzşah

Abstract: ....................................................................................................................... v Öz ................................................................................................................................ vi Acknowledgements .................................................................................................... viii Table of