Reading Ineffability and Realizing Tragedy in Stuart Moulthrop's <i>Victory Garden</i>

<p><em>Victory Garden</em>, Stuart Moulthrop’s 1991 classic hyperfiction, presents a nonlinear story of U. S. home front involvement in the First Gulf War in a way that facilitates confusion and mimics a "fog of war" sort of (un)awareness. Using Storyspace to build his complex narrative, Moulthrop incorporates poetry, fiction, historical references, and low-tech graphic novel type elements. Among the graphic components are all-black and all-white screens that function as variables. Overtly, these screens speak of closure and signify unconsciousness; however, their nonverbal role may also be linked to the ineffability trope as used by Dante Alighieri and re-interpreted by contemporary linguist Ruiging Liang. To date, critics and meta-readers have incorrectly assumed that the protagonist, Emily Runbird, becomes a fatality. By failing to read her life or death as undecidable, we deny the fiction its full power as a postmodern interpretive dilemma. This assumption plays into what might be posited as Moulthrop’s real thesis: syllogism in a corrupted (war time) information system is potentially tragic. A summary of theories and critical approaches relevant to the blank screen’s use as interstice together with sample engagements with relevant texts—reading <em>Victory Garden</em>, as per Wolfgang Iser’s phenomenological approach, Stanley Fish’s reader response theory, and Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction—prove <em>Victory Garden</em>, to be a challenging but consistent literary breakdown (staged malfunction of reading habits). Ultimately, ineffability is shown to be a reading strategy and the action Aristotle characterizes as key to the definition of tragedy is seen as performed by the reader. Moulthrop dangles the question about Emily’s demise as a critical reading moment prone to corruption. The classical anagnorisis is not Emily’s; the revelation Moulthrop intends is reserved for the reader and is precipitated by the need to resolve aporia.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Department of English

Year

2012

Author dc:creator

• Gray, Michael E.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Dr. Wes Berry (Director), Dr. Sandra Hughes, Dr. Alison Langdon

• literary breakdown
• First Gulf War fiction
• aporia
• Storyspace
• "fog of war
• " electronic literature
• hyperfiction
• English Language and Literature
• Modern Literature

Repository record dc:identifier

https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/1188

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:digitalcommons.wku.edu:theses-2191