Issue number two
Articles from our latest edition.
Breaking boundaries in fictional memoir: James Frey’s ‘A Million Little Pieces
Final year dissertation on the controversy generated by James Frey’s memoir
Propelled by the furore that surrounded James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, this dissertation is a wide-reaching exploration into the changing nature of the memoir. Through detailed textual analysis, it highlights the ways Frey transgressed the accepted boundaries of the genre, using this as a springboard into a broader discussion about the communication of personal truth through narrative.
Alice Anderson Bonner
To what extent is a text limited by its author and how is this illustrated in Morvern Callar?
Theoretical exploration of the film adaptation of Morvern Callar
In this essay, Morvern Callar is viewed through the lens of Roland Barthes' The Death of the Author. The film literalises Barthes death of the author in the death of James, with Zehnpfund exploring the degree to which this is the catalyst for the birth of the protagonist Morvern, and the limitations this death places on this birth.
Anna Zehnpfund
What is the role of the reader on a text?
Essay that engages with a prominent conversation within contemporary critical theory
Alison Carter interrogates the dynamic relationship between the reader and the text, highlighting the important role of social context in signification and the making of meaning. Carter also considers the expectations of genre, and the preconceptions these create in the reader.
Alison Carter
The Fetishization and Objectification of the Female Body in Victorian Culture
Critical essay in the Victorian Sexualities module
Aspinall herein elucidates the sexual politics of the representations of the female body in Victorian literature, providing a social context that enriches understanding of the writings of the Brontë sisters, Elizabeth Gaskell and Mary Braddon. Victorian sexuality is explored in the Foucauldian sense; as something very much present in the power relationships of the time.
Hannah Aspinall
Discourse Analysis
Critical essay seeking to 'understand the rhetoric of the image'.
We perceive a photograph as more than a system of dots upon a page. As humans we are able to read images, much as we do words. Within the realm of linguistics, verbal systems of communication have been identified as a system of codes, with comprehension of language dependant on an individuals ability to decode. Within this essay I will conduct a linguistic examination of a visual concept.
Corrine Linnecar
‘Semblative a woman’s part’: why and how are considerations of gender and sexuality important in any TWO plays you have read?
Critical essay from the Reviewing Shakespeare module
This essay looks at how the use of the land as allegorical for gender in these plays is telling in its construction of sexuality. Exploring themes of conquering and purity, it compares the freedoms and related actions of two key female characters, in order to highlight how one squanders a chance for emancipation that the other never receives.
Joel Roberts
How central is motherhood to the conception of gender identity in Marge Piercy’s ‘Woman on the Edge of Time’ and Angela Carter’s ‘The Passion of New Eve’.
Critical essay in the Women's Writing module.
Applying several Feminist literary and social theories, this essay looks at the novels of Angela Carter’s ‘The Passion of New Eve’ and Marge Piercy’s ‘Woman on the Edge of Time’, and discusses each text’s representation of the ideologies of motherhood and how these ideologies have contributed to the construction of gender inequality in contemporary society.
Tess Howard
o u r o b o r o s
Creative writing project
I must be a fiction. I have realised I have no earliest memory, only images I have created to explain what it must have been like via my supposed evidence. My name, written by joining dots together placed by someone else, a teacher or a parent, scribbled out by effectively another person still being made.
Toby Shearwood
Ode to a cigarette
Creative writing project in poetry.
The cigarette is a window into the contradictory world of addiction in this work. It is both the ‘fatal associate’ and ‘serene’ and ‘graceful’, a figure of desire and repulsion explored in the voice of free verse.
