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Fomenting Paranoia: Hoaxes and Conspiracy Theories in the Digital Era Daniel Powell // University of Central Florida

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Fomenting Paranoia: Hoaxes and Conspiracy Theories in the Digital Era Daniel Powell // University of Central Florida Watermark accepts submissions annually between October and February. We are dedicated to publishing original critical and theoretical essays concerned with literature of all genres and periods, as well as works representing current issues in the fields of rhetoric and composition. Reviews of current works of literary criticism or theory are also welcome. All submissions must be accompanied by a cover letter that includes the author’s name, phone number, email address, and the title of the essay or book review. All essay submissions should be approximately 12-15 pages and must be typed in MLA format with a standard 12 pt. font. Book reviews ought to be 750-1,000 words in length. As this journal is intended to provide a forum for emerging voices, only student work will be considered for publication. Submissions will not be returned. Please direct all questions to [email protected] and address all submissions to: Department of English: Watermark California State University, Long Beach 1250 Bellflower Boulevard Long Beach, CA 90840 Visit us at www.watermarkjournal.com for more information. Watermark © Copyright 2013. All rights revert to contributors upon publication. Watermark vol. 7 Editor Lisa Brown Managing Editor Mary Sotnick American Literature Editors Rhetoric & Composition Editors Erin Arendse Sarah Hicks Corey Leis Ryan Roderick Dorin Smith Sarah Roussin British Literature Editors Medieval & Renaissance Studies Editors Alexandria Gilbert Jeremiah Allen Jenni Jensen Aly Yessaian International & Diaspora Literature Editorial Advisory Board Editors Nelly Brashear Christine Hill Danilo Caputo Kacie Wills Zach Mann Rusty Rust Gender Editors Kiki Shaver Jennifer Cantero Alexandria Gilbert Art Director & Webmaster Jax NTP Dean Tsuyuki Faculty Advisor George Hart TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 “I Like Not the Smell of this ‘Authority’”: The Hysterical Power of Language in Arthur Miller’s The CruCible Danilo Caputo // California State univerSity, long BeaCh 21 Re-Thinking “Melodramatic Simplification”: An Examination of the Deathbed Tableau Arrangements in Charles Dickens’s bleak house KaCie WillS // California State univerSity, long BeaCh 40 Thy False Brother: Domestic and Monarchical Loyalty in Shakespeare’s The TempesT KiKi Shaver // California State univerSity, long BeaCh 60 “Low spirits and melancholy forebodings”: Contacting Silence in Walden anDreW DaviD Stuart // California State univerSity, long BeaCh 80 “I Could Not Conceal My Disorder”: Roxana’s Mind-Reading in the South Sea Bubble Dorin Smith // California State univerSity, long BeaCh 100 “The Frailty of Everything”: Post-apocalyptic Dwelling in McCarthy’s The road Corey leiS // California State univerSity, long BeaCh 111 Mary Butts, British Modernist and Early Ecofeminist, Writes the “Cult of Nature” Katherine eCholS // univerSity of houSton 127 The Performance of a Wode Narrator: The Bodily Rhetoric of Chaucer’s Prioress CeCilia pareDeS // California State univerSity, long BeaCh 140 “The Medusa v. the Odalisque”: Veil, Visual, and Apparatus in David Foster Wallace’s infiniTe JesT Shouhei tanaKa // California State univerSity, long BeaCh 159 Fomenting Paranoia: Hoaxes and Conspiracy Theories in the Digital Era Daniel poWell // univerSity of Central floriDa 175 “A Geography of Disparate Spirits”: Interrogating Pathology as Oppression in “A Woman Is Talking to Death” and “Mental” ruSty ruSt // California State univerSity, long BeaCh 191 Floating Roots: Diaspora and Palimpsest Identity in Danticat’s breaTh, eyes, memory aShley greenWooD // California State univerSity, San Diego 204 Children of Exile: Cultural Influences for The TempesT’s Second Generation erin arendse // California State univerSity, long BeaCh 221 Can a Colonizer Be a Friend? The Case of Mrs. Elton & Jane Fairfax ChriStine hill // California State univerSity, long BeaCh 236 Interrogating the Ekphrastic Ambivalence in Angela Carter’s “Come unto These Yellow Sands” and Marosa di Giorgio’s poem on las meninas natalia font // univerSity of exeter 266 Playing with Fortune: The Body, Economics, and Boethianism in the miller’s Tale Dean tSuyuKi // California State univerSity, long BeaCh 283 How Did It All Fall Apart? Entropy and Apocalypse in California SioBhan White // California State univerSity, San Diego 301 Current Traditional Rhetoric and Definitions: A Second Look Brian le // California State univerSity, long BeaCh Editor’s Note: Following the 2012 launch of the California State University, Long Beach Department of English Graduate Student Interdisciplinary Conference, Re/Inventions, we were inspired to try something a little different forWatermark ’s seventh volume. Along with our usual call for papers across a variety of discursive categories, we also solicited submissions designed to coincide with the theme for Re/Inventions 2013: Hysteria. The response was considerable, with more than thirty submissions from across the United States and even across the Pond. The end result: An eclectic collection of burgeoning scholarship interrogating the canon from Geoffrey Chaucer to Edwidge Danticat and a plethora of stops in between. This year also marks the largest volume ofWatermark to date, thanks to the exceptional quality of submissions received. It is my sincere hope that 2014 brings with it an even stronger response from the academic community so that, as Managing Editor Mary Sotnick advances to the man the proverbial helm, she and her staff will be quite literally spoilt for choice as they determine the next lineup. This edition of Watermark, like its predecessors, could not have been gone to press without the tireless efforts of our readers and editors who so graciously volunteered their time to make this volume a reality. On behalf of the entire Watermark staff, I would also like to extend our heartfelt thanks to Dr. George Hart for championing the journal’s mission of providing a forum for students to present their scholarship; Dr. Eileen Klink for her visionary departmental leadership; Lisa Behrendt, Janice Young, Doris Pintscher, and Cortney Kimoto for all their hard work behind the scenes; Dean Tsuyuki for breathing life into Watermark with his keen eye for design; and all of the English Department faculty and staff, for continually motivating, inspiring, and mentoring students toward continued success. Lisa Brown Editor “I LIke Not the SmeLL of thIS ‘AuthorIty’”: the hySterIcAL Power of LANguAge IN Arthur mILLer’S the CruCiBle by Danilo Caputo The Crucible (1953), Arthur Miller’s follow-up to the wildly popular Death of a Salesman (1949) is a historiographical play centered on the Salem witch trials of 1692. When the play opened, audiences drew obvious parallels to the anti-communist witch-hunts taking place in the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s, propagated by Senator Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) at the height of Cold War anxiety. However, Miller’s play is more than an allegory of “the rise of McCarthyism,” as he notes in the introduction to his Collected Plays, “but something which seemed much more weird and mysterious ... it was the fact that a political, objective, knowledgeable campaign from the far Right was capable of not only creating a terror, but a new subjective reality” (39). He posits that the terror of evil lurking anywhere—even next door—was engineered, adding that “so interior and subjective an emotion could have been so manifestly created from without was a marvel to [him],” and “underlies every word of The Crucible” (40). This insight into Miller’s motives for writing The CAPUTO | 1 Crucible is quite illuminating, as it frames Miller’s representation of mass hysteria as being primarily concerned with dramatizing how such hysterias are created—how reality can be distorted and contorted to promote the power of a select few. The means by which this collusion is realized can, of course, be found in the discourse. The perceived threat of witchcraft in The Crucible is entirely abstract and has no grounding in reality, but the language used by the characters in the play transmogrifies this abstraction1 into a real and physical threat to the theocratic society of Salem, which warrants the authority figures to exercise their power over the townsfolk. This linguistic transmogrification constitutes a reification fallacy.2 Throughout The Crucible, characters rhetorically deploy the logical fallacy of reification in order to simultaneously strengthen and conceal their power as an artifice of language. The hysteria portrayed by the Salemites in Miller’s play is contingent upon and propagated by this illogical treatment of language. In the overture that begins the first act ofThe Crucible, the authorial voice (presumably Miller’s) claims that “it is still impossible for man to organize his social life without repressions, and the balance has yet to be struck between order and freedom” (7). Indeed, the first part of this statement rings true: how could it be anything but impossible for organization to occur without repression? The very act of organization brings a preliminary and natural state of disorder (chaos) into a structured order—confines the individual within an artificial system in which a societally-inclined superego is developed in order to repress the pre- linguistic desires3 of the host. In this sense, organization is synonymous with repression—society a pervasive panopticon which confines, surveys, and subjugates the individual perpetually. Therefore, the balance between order and freedom that the narrator desires appears
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