Student Work: narrative

Mary’s Voice
Colin Tóibín’s novella, The Testament of Mary, is a retelling of the Gospels through Mother Mary’s voice, one that is noticeably silent in the bible itself. I hope to place The Testament of Mary next to its source text, The …

Expectations Reimagined
In one of the many plots woven into the web of Middlemarch, George Eliot reimagines Charles Dickens’s fantastic story of Pip and his “great expectations” through the much more realistic story of Fred Vincy.

The Tragedy of Iago
A villain, or at the very least an antagonist, is integral to most narratives. In Othello, Iago drives the struggle toward catharsis.

Another Cinderella Story
Interpretability allows stories to transcend the barriers of space, time, and context.

Is It Always Best to Look?
Whether representations of violence can help to rectify the unjust treatment of the oppressed is a familiar topic of debate, but our discussions focus too much on the intention of the creator and not enough on the effect on viewers.

Unrooted: Dangerous Anonymity
On unnamed narrators in the fiction of Jhumpa Lahiri and Edwidge Danticat.

In the Moment
If I like a film enough after the first watch, I think about it nonstop for weeks on end. I ponder the moments that made me shudder and gasp.

Informational Warfare
"American Sniper" not only espouses a tired “good vs. evil” narrative, but in altering, omitting, and fabricating aspects of the Iraq War, it perpetuates a chronology in which the nuances and complexities of the war are rendered null and void.

THE CINEMATIC
A series of photographs that include cinematic elements, including lighting, format, composition, and creative methods.

ON PERSONS AND PLACE
"Am I annotating or carving my name into another's surface? Do I make pictures that testify or do I take photos that extract and appropriate?"

Fictionalizing
"The human mind is hardwired to see patterns and connections where they otherwise would not exist. Faces are one of the images that our mind most automatically construes out of irrelevant and nondescript objects, so much so that two dashes and a curve or a parking meter can easily resemble a smiley face."

The Storytelling Animal
"We are hardwired to see patterns, to create explanations, to find meaning, and we do this through constructing narrative."