Browsing by Author "Bourrier, Karen"

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    Digitextual Modernism: Digital Remediation of Modernist Poetry
    (2021-12) Best, William; Clarke, Michael Tavel; Bourrier, Karen; Sigler, David; Farfan, Penelope; Ross, Stephen
    “Digitextual Modernism” is an exploratory case-study in how digital remediation influences the development of meaning in Modernist poetry. As has been well established in previous scholarship, much of Modernist poetry is exemplary for intertextual theories of semiotics, and digital media likewise are structured upon and heavily influenced by intertextuality in particular, and Modernist theories and poetics broadly. As such, this study posits that various Modernist poems, when digitized, reflect upon their digital mediations and proffer unique intertextual readings beyond or in contrast to “traditional” readings that are largely reliant on the codex. Using the poetry of three authors of relatively disparate styles – Marianne Moore’s “An Octopus” and “The Fish,” T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and W. B. Yeats’s “The Wanderings of Oisin” – this study examines Web-based mediations of the poetry to provide evidence for a long-held but largely underexamined assumption: digital media fundamentally changes or augments the hermeneutic process in reading Modernist poetry. This is accomplished by examining the engagements with intertextual semiotics in each poem, reading the poems in digital media, and considering the theoretical influence of digital media on the intertextuality at play in these readings, as well as analyzing the ways that the poetry critiques digital media. Particular attention is given to “distracted” reading practices, intertextuality between code and rendered text, algorithmic mechanisms of control on intertextuality, and skeuomorphic authenticity. The study concludes with a Coda that brings together “High” Modernists broadly to consider the phantasmagoria of Modernist Facebook profiles in light of the nigh-ubiquitously paradoxical attitude of these authors about the relationship of the author and/or authorial biography to her writing.
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    Map of 19th Century Writers
    (arcgis.com, 2024) Jacobson, Dan; Falahatkar, Hawjin; Brosz, John; Bourrier, Karen
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    Systemic Racism in Nineteenth-Century Tales of Black Revenge
    (2022-11-20) Darbouze-Bonyeme, Nella; Wagner, Martin; Bourrier, Karen; Nyquist, Mary
    Systemic Racism in Nineteenth-century Tales of Black Revenge highlights the shifting conception of racial oppression across France, Britain, and the USA through an investigation of stories of black or mixed-race avengers. In Histoire des deux Indes (1770), Denis Diderot wrote that “all Negroes need is a leader, valiant enough to guide them towards vengeance and massacre”. Far from viewing revenge as a private vendetta, Diderot saw revenge as a way for the oppressed black slaves to repair systemic wrong to which they were victims; to strike against the racial structure of society and establish social equilibrium. He was not alone. Many nineteenth-century writers, from Maria Edgeworth, with “The Grateful Negro” (1804), to Alexandre Dumas, with Georges (1843), imagined attempts by people of color to redress racial injustice. Yet while scholarship has examined the meaning of revenge narratives for ideas regarding black agency, it has neglected the conception of systemic racism of such tales. My thesis contributes to previous studies by filling this research gap. Drawing on narrative theory, I distinguish three different kinds of black revenge in nineteenth-century literature: (1) tales from a weak abolitionist movement, which depict systems of oppression as invincible; (2) tales from a strong abolitionist movement, which identify hidden mechanisms that sustain racial injustice, and (3) tales of a post-abolition era, which deny systemic oppression. I also shed light on cultural variations in revenge narratives, notably French works’ reluctance to support black avengers, British texts’ tendency to locate racial oppression beyond their borders and American tales’ struggle to conceptualize black collective action. This thesis thus adds nuance to previous scholarship on nineteenth-century racial tales of revenge, so far emphasizing what such narratives have in common: an apparent desire to silence the political motives of black agency.