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Addison's Academic Writings This is a section I've been meaning to establish for some time - just selected, HTMLized higlights of my many years of formal education. Eminem: Star-Text As Videographic Armor: 2004. My last significant piece of work as an undergrad, and probably my best. Using Andrew Goodwin's concept of the "star-text," I purport to show how Eminem uses various signifiers (particularly gender and racial ones) to simultaneously pitch himself as an insignificant clown and as a sincere, authentic artist. This balancing act creates a space in which Eminem can get away with a lot of truly worrisome things, which I go on to discuss, with an eye towards music video (as this was for Susan Thomas's Gender and Music Video class). I remain proud of this piece, despite its arguable superfluity of footnotes... and the fact that it is now somewhat dated: with Encore, Eminem seemed actively bent on sabotaging his star-text or at least rendering it incoherent. It's unclear whether anybody noticed, but it certainly would have been a challenge to write this paper after "Just Lose It." "Did 'White Hands' Do Helms's Dirty Work?: 2003. Analysis of the 1990 North Carolina Senate race, with the goal of delving beyond the "White Hands" advertisement. My political science major had by this point become a minor sideline to my "real" major in women's studies; but under pressure, I was still capable of turning out fairly decent work in the former. 'Right Now It's Not The Time To Feel Completely Safe': 2003. For Caroline Desbiens's "Gender & Geography" class. This is an interrogation of coverage of rape in the Red & Black (UGA's campus newspaper), particularly with an eye towards what kind of physical/geographical spaces the paper associated with rape. The Virginia Woolf Papers: 2002. From David Bradshaw's "Virginia Woolf and the Fabric of Things" class at Oxford (where I was enrolled in a study-abroad program under the aegis of the University of Georgia). The first, "One Thing Should Open Out Of Another," covers The Voyage Out, some short stories, and Jacob's Room, and is a somewhat rote restatement of conventional wisdom concerning her evolving style. The second, "A Sister, Less Smiling, More Formidable," is a dense, close, arguably impenetrable reading of Mrs. Dalloway which argues that the theme of military dominance in society is crucial to the novel. Bradshaw's favorite, probably correctly, was "Was It That You Were Suppressed When You Were Young?" which teases ambitious and subtle feminist content out of The Years and Between The Acts. These are probably some of the most tightly-edited things I've ever written, in deference to Bradshaw's brutal (but constructive!) critiques. Creative Writing Class Assignments: 2001. As you can imagine, I wrote a lot of terrible poetry for this class, which was ably and amiably led by one Lew Klatt. Selected for online inclusion are a couple of pieces of dubious short fiction. Diary of the Flood is a strange little excursion that attempts to accurately pastiche my journalling style in the context of a bizarre flooded apocalypse. It's undoubtedly a post-9/11 piece; viewed much later in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and it seems particularly unrealistic and half-baked. The Man With The Glass Briefcase is my ridiculous response to a deliberately ridiculous assignment - "Write a ghost story. There are only two characters, you and the ghost. It is a real ghost, and the ghost carries a glass briefcase." I had a good time with it, although it's a little short on connective tissue on present-day reading.... |
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