Browsing by Author "Marvin, Thomas"

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    Psychological Mirroring in Tana French's In the Woods and The Likeness
    (2021-12) Gott-Helton, Sarah Meghan; Marvin, Thomas; Layden, Sarah; Kirts, Terry
    Tana French’s work has been the subject of a number of recent scholars. Scholarship on French ranges from theories of liminality, to meditations on how French’s work explores the “Celtic Tiger” phenomenon in Ireland, to looking at her stories as new takes on old fairy tales. French’s work straddles the line between popular detective fiction and literary fiction, upending popular tropes and creating something wholly new. One issue that has not been explored is how French’s work fits into a Lacanian framework. The six novels in her Dublin Murder Squad detective stories are rife with issues of psychological mirroring, or doubling. As such, they take the typical mystery trope of pairing a detective with a case that alters and reflects back their own psychological traumas, and takes them to a new level. This work will address issues of French’s characters and how they fit into the theories of Lacan’s Mirror Stage, as well as the “Real,” “Symbolic,” and “Imaginary” realms that we human beings unconsciously construct for ourselves. This writing examines the first two novels of the series, In the Woods, and The Likeness, and analyzes them in light of these theories, showing how mirroring exists in nearly every aspect of each text.
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    Reading the Game: Exploring Narratives in Video Games as Literary Texts
    (2018-12) Turley, Andrew C.; Musgrave, Megan; Buchenot, Andre; Marvin, Thomas
    Video games are increasingly recognized as powerful tools for learning in classrooms. However, they are widely neglected in the field of English, particularly as objects worthy of literary study. This project argues the place of video games as objects of literary study and criticism, combining the theories of Espen Aarseth, Ian Bogost, Henry Jenkins, and James Paul Gee. The author of this study presents an approach to literary criticism of video games that he names “player-generated narratives.” Through player-generated narratives, players as readers of video games create loci for interpretative strategies that lead to both decoding and critical inspection of game narratives. This project includes a case-study of the video game Undertale taught in multiple college literature classrooms over the course of a year. Results of the study show that a video game introduced as a work of literature to a classroom increases participation, actives disengaged students, and connects literary concepts across media through multimodal learning. The project concludes with a chapter discussing applications of video games as texts in literature classrooms, including addressing the practical concerns of migrating video games into an educational setting.