Beyond Aurora

Wright State University CORE Scholar Browse all Theses and Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2011 Beyond Aurora Ryan Patrick Ireland Wright State University Follow this and additional works at: https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/etd_all Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Repository Citation Ireland, Ryan Patrick, "Beyond Aurora" (2011). Browse all Theses and Dissertations. 449. https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/etd_all/449 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at CORE Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Browse all Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of CORE Scholar. For more information, please contact [email protected]. BEYOND AURORA A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts By RYAN IRELAND B.A., Wright State University, 2008 2011 Wright State University COPYRIGHT BY RYAN IRELAND 2011 WRIGHT STATE UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL April 12, 2011 I HEREBY RECOMMEND THAT THE THESIS PREPARED UNDER MY SUPERVISION BY Ryan Ireland ENTITLED Beyond Aurora BE ACCEPTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF Master of Arts Erin Flanagan, Ph.D. Thesis Director Carol Loranger, Ph.D., Chair Department of English Committee on Final Examination Erin Flanagan, Ph.D. Nancy Mack, Ph.D. Scott Geisel, M.A. Andrew Hsu, Ph.D. Dean, Graduate School ABSTRACT Ireland, Ryan. M.A., Department of English Languages and Literatures, Wright State University, 2011. Beyond Aurora. Set in 1888-9, this historical fiction narrative chronicles the events leading up to, and following the Martin brothers’ failed quest for vengeance. The brothers work as mercenaries for a Plains sheriff before being sent into exile. They eventually part ways and each of them spirals into their own brand of madness. iv Table of Contents Preface .......................................1 Prologue .......................................7 Part I Chapter I.....................................12 II....................................40 Part II Chapter I.....................................66 II....................................76 III..................................114 IV...................................130 V....................................148 VI...................................171 VII..................................192 VIII.................................201 Part III Chapter I....................................209 II...................................229 III..................................253 IV...................................272 v V....................................288 VI...................................305 VII..................................329 VIII.................................344 IX...................................355 X....................................379 XI...................................390 Epilogue .....................................407 Works Cited....................................409 vi Preface Throughout Bahkitin’s essay about the novel in The Dialogic Imagination, he provides the reader with what appear to be multiple definitions of “novel.” When viewed as separate definitions, they seem to conflict with one another. He starts on page 261 by defining the novel “as a whole is a phenomenon multiform in style and variform in speech and voice.” On the next page he outright says a novel “can be defined as a diversity of social speech types and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized.” (This definition is preceded with a note that the “style of a novel is to be found in the combination of its styles.”) The combining of styles he contends, “[t]hese distinctive links and interrelationships between utterances and languages, this movement of the theme through different languages and speech types, its dispersion into the rivulets and droplets of social heteroglossia, its dialogization—this is the basic distinguishing feature of the stylistics of the novel.” (263) Within three pages, Bakhtin manages to define, re-define and refine his notion of a literary tradition that arguably dates back to Robinson Crusoe. ! 1 By the essay’s end it becomes apparent that Bakhtin is actually building a continuous and ever-more-complicated definition of the novel. His definition is fluid, much like the utterances he describes as being a product of place and time. As a writer, it is easy to agree with this developing notion of what an extended narrative is defined as. My style (and my stylistic choices) changed during the composition process, depending on the situation and the speech of not just my characters, but also of myself. The voices changed with plot dynamic. Authorial intonation fluctuated as my relationship with the text itself developed. It’s hard to find fault—or conflict—with Bakhtin’s morphing definition of the novel. The dialogic nature of the novel in general is born from a network, the inherent heteroglossia of the genre, as well as the multiple voices the author inhabits. In Beyond Aurora, dialogues between the authorial selves are no different from any other novel. What differentiates my novel—and most novels written since the advent of digital multimodalism—from novels written twenty years ago is born from how society and community are presently formed. Perhaps the biggest departure from the Bakhtinian model of dialogism is derived from the ecology from which this ! 2 particular novel was born. Even now, Bakhtin’s definition of novel can continue to change with the development of new media. Indeed, in what is termed by composition scholar Henry Jenkins as convergence culture, it has become increasingly difficult to limit the influence of one genre on another. The novel, like the other aesthetic forms that came before it, cannot exist in a vacuum. Just as the cacophonous choir of Bakhtin’s heteroglossic voices gives shape to the narrative of the novel, the other major storytelling genres of today continuously mold the modern novel. Similarly, literary genres are constantly reshaped by the effects of heteroglossia. Since the popularization of the Western as a literary genre, it has morphed due to societal climatology. As author and film professor Charles Derry noted during his lecture on stylized filmmaking in 2007, during the conflict in Vietnam, the Western notably shifted from a focus on achieving the American Dream through Manifest Destiny to illustrating specific social issues through metaphor. Additionally, Vietnam gave rise to the antihero as a viable protagonist. It is similar to the sudden change of film audience in the 1960s as described by Rose: “Studios were ! 3 still dominated by the men who had built them through the Silent Era and the Great Depression… These great enterprises were on the verge of collapse” (5). The only way the movie industry would be “saved” would be by the “rebel directors of New Hollywood.” The eclectic return to the Western in the last five years with films like No Country for Old Men, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and this summer’s Cowboys Vs. Aliens offer evidence of today’s post-literate, postmodern culture—a culture that values convergence of genre and media. As Cormac McCarthy, author of No Country for Old Men, noted in an interview with Wall Street Journal correspondent John Jurgensen, “Eight-hundred page books that were written a hundred years ago just aren’t going to be written anymore… I don’t care how good it is, or how smart readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different.” McCarthy, it should be mentioned, originally intended for No Country for Old Men to be a screenplay. So strong was the filmic aspect between the final novel and the screenplay that Ethan Coen admitted doing “nothing” to adapt the novel. Since Edwin S. Porter created the first film—a Western no less—in 1903 with The Great Train Robbery, cowboys and ! 4 their heroics have seemed naturally conducive to the big screen. Since the conception of film, literary devices have been translated into filmic techniques. The rhetorical move of adapting books to movies has not been fully reciprocated though. While many books are adapted into films, the effect of film on the creation of literature is rarely noted by composition scholars and creative writers. Author and creative writing professor, Robert Olen Butler notes the value of acknowledging film’s influence on the writing process by stating, “[b]ecause fiction writers are the writer-directors of the cinema of inner consciousness, you [sic] will need to develop the techniques of film as well” (64). The crossover from film into literature was not immediate though. Rose notes that it “took years for such [filmic] practices to become commonplace” (35). Up until D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, film emulated the conventions of the stage play. Directors, Rose says had yet to develop “a grammar of film… that took full advantage of the new medium’s possibilities” (35). Composition theorist John Golden echoes the sentiment by noting how film “has a way of putting conflicting images together in such a way that the students can easily recognize the director” (88). Rose continues on his delineation of mimickery from one ! 5 medium to the next. While I did not have the vocabulary to describe my stylistic choices when I began composing my novel, I can see now that my major decisions were actually a part of the complex heteroglossia of inhabiting a multimodal ecology. In short, the narration of my novel needed to derive from the camera. The camera, after

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