Conference Presentations by Jennifer Gouck
This paper was given as part of the Child and the Book 2019 conference, University of Zadar, 8th-... more This paper was given as part of the Child and the Book 2019 conference, University of Zadar, 8th-11th May 2019
In his 2000 essay ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, Franco Moretti writes: “[T]he literature aro... more In his 2000 essay ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, Franco Moretti writes: “[T]he literature around us is now unmistakably a planetary system” (54). If literature can be considered “a planetary system,” it thus follows that a trope, such as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, can be understood in a similar way. I suggest in my paper today that the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is not purely an invention of the twenty-first century, but rather is a constellation of canonical literary tropes which have evolved through patriarchal storytelling practices over the course of hundreds, if not thousands, of years, echoing Stevie Simkin’s assertion that “representations in popular culture exist in a complicated, interactive network of relations to real life, and that network is traceable through … history” (10). I will argue that the Manic Pixie is flecked with the characteristics of the classical Muse and the Pygmalion myth, while maintaining, too, that the trope exhibits aspects of the femme fatale of the film noir and hardboiled crime releases of the 1930s and 40s.
This paper was given as part of the Popular Culture Association 2019 Conference in Washington, DC.
This paper was presented at QUB's Common Ground Symposium in 2016.
This paper was presented at the IAAS Postgraduate Symposium 2017.
In March 2017, Jay Asher’s 200... more This paper was presented at the IAAS Postgraduate Symposium 2017.
In March 2017, Jay Asher’s 2007 YA novel Thirteen Reasons Why was propelled into public consciousness by its high-profile Netflix adaptation, hailed by The Guardian was “too bleak to binge.” Reasons follows teenager Clay Jensen, who arrives home one day to find a shoebox filled with cassette tapes and an accompanying map propped against his front door. Clay quickly realises these tapes, each hand-numbered in blue nail polish, are from his recently deceased classmate, Hannah Baker. Each cassette details her experiences with thirteen people in her life; thirteen experiences, Hannah claims, that led to her suicide. Once a classmate has listened to the tapes, Hannah’s instructions specify that they are to be passed on to the next person on her list; if not, her appointed ‘guardian’ of the tapes will release them in a very public manner.
This paper seeks to explore the various strands of union and disunion woven throughout Reasons, such as the united front formed by the other recipients of the tapes in a desperate attempt to keep their secret. Clay instead, however, resists this union, forming a complex, problematic one with Hannah. How, I will ask, do these unions highlight and intersect with issues of power? What role does the blurring of temporality and perspective, particularly in the Netflix show, play? Moreover, how can we situate Thirteen Reasons culturally, particularly in the wake of its mixed critical and online receptions?
This paper was presented at QUB MA English Literary Studies Symposium 2016.
This is a paper given as part of the IAAS Annual Conference 2017.
In a 2007 article for The AV C... more This is a paper given as part of the IAAS Annual Conference 2017.
In a 2007 article for The AV Club, film critic Nathan Rabin famously coined the term ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’ (MPDG). For Rabin, the MPDG “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is an all-or-nothing-proposition.” From here, the MPDG trope began to take over popular culture, making further appearances in film, television, and literature, leading Rabin to publish an essay for Salon Magazine seven years later in which he outlines his regret in coining and identifying the “fundamentally sexist” trope that strips women of their autonomy.
This paper seeks to explore the ways in which the MPDG trope is manifested in contemporary American Young Adult (YA) literature and examine, a decade from its critical inception, the extent to which the term has evolved (if at all). How, this paper asks, are modern conceptions of masculinity and femininity situated in relation to this seemingly ubiquitous cultural trope? To what extent do these post-2007 fictions attempt to undermine and destroy this increasingly derogative trope? Indeed, are they successful in their efforts?
In order to answer these questions, I will explore key elements of three primary texts: John Green’s Paper Towns (2008) and Krystal Sutherland’s Our Chemical Hearts (2016).
This paper was given as part of the IAAS PG Symposium 2016.
Between 2012 and 2013, the so-called... more This paper was given as part of the IAAS PG Symposium 2016.
Between 2012 and 2013, the so-called ‘Steubenville Rape Case’ dominated the (American) media, placing an otherwise unremarkable town in Ohio in the world’s eye. On the night of 12th August 2012, a young girl, debilitated by alcohol, was raped by two boys on her school’s football team: Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond. The assault, of which the victim would later claim she had no memory, was recorded and distributed in both photographs and video via social media. In January 2014, Richmond was released from prison, while Mays was released in the January of the following year.
This paper seeks to offer a Trans-Atlantic reading of the ways in which the rape culture so evident in the Steubenville case is represented in Irish author Louise O’Neill’s 2015 novel, Asking for It. How, it will ask, does O’Neill map cultural debates from the United States onto twenty-first century Ireland? To what extent does place have a role to play in the rape culture depicted here? Indeed, what is (American) rape culture, and can it truly be defined? Rape culture takes on extra significance, I argue, due to the notoriety and increasing frequency of cases such as those in Steubenville, Maryville and, more recently, of Stanford swimmer Brock Turner. As such, the paper draws upon cultural, trauma, literary and visual scholars in order to explore the inherent resistances between these strands of theory and the apparent social progress O’Neill seeks to make, with varying levels of success, in her prize-winning second novel.
This paper was given as part of the Reading YA Symposium in 2018.
Becky Albertalli’s 2015 novel ... more This paper was given as part of the Reading YA Symposium in 2018.
Becky Albertalli’s 2015 novel Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda follows closeted teen Simon Spier as his emails to digital pen-pal Blue fall into the hands of classmate Martin Addison, who uses Simon’s hidden homosexuality as blackmail; Simon must help Martin get with Abby Suso, Simon’s friend, or he will expose his secret to the world. The novel’s adaptation, shortened to Love, Simon, hit the big screen courtesy of Fox in April of this year, acquiring the accolade of being the first film by a major Hollywood studio to focus on a gay teen romance. Directed by Greg Berlanti, famous for penning the first gay kiss to be shown on television in Dawson’s Creek, Box Office Mojo reports that Simon grossed approximately $40.7m in the US and Canada, with $16.4m made in other territories, cumulating in a worldwide total of $57.1m.
Despite such success, LGBTQ+ YA remains what Michael Cart terms a “literature in transition” (194). Although “no less than 319 [titles] [were] published [in the 00s], an average of more than 21 per year (compared with 1 per year in the 1970s, 4 in the 1980s, and 7 in the 1990s)” (Cart 191), the category has only just made its mainstream, pop-cultural cinematic debut in 2018 – a debut which, this paper will argue, is constrained by the indisputable (and, indeed, heteronormative) power of the commercial. Additionally, my paper seeks to explore how homosexuality is presented in Simon, asking how this relates to constructions and performances of identity and gender, both in life and on-stage. If, as Roberta Seelinger Trites claims, “Young adult novels are about power,” what power structures are at play throughout both the novel and its cinematic adaptation?
This paper was presented at the ISSCL 2019 conference (29th-30th March 2019 at Marino Institute, ... more This paper was presented at the ISSCL 2019 conference (29th-30th March 2019 at Marino Institute, Dublin). Reading Gretchen McNeil's 2016 novel 'I'm Not Your Manic Pixie Dream Girl' through the lens of makeover culture, the paper examines the novel's attempts to challenge the MPDG trope and considers the extent of its success in doing so.
Papers by Jennifer Gouck
The International Journal of Young Adult Literature, 2021
Coined in 2007 by film critic Nathan Rabin, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG) is a quirky, ethere... more Coined in 2007 by film critic Nathan Rabin, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG) is a quirky, ethereal figure who exists merely as a tool for self-actualisation and has no narrative purpose beyond that of enriching the life of an apathetic, White, male, cisgender, heterosexual, middle-class protagonist. Despite her pervasiveness across film and television, popular culture, and literature – particularly contemporary YA fiction such as John Green’s Looking for Alaska (2005) – the Pixie remains a wholly understudied figure. To address this gap in the field, this article offers a narrative model for a novel type I call ‘MPDGYA’, a pattern I have identified across YA texts, all either published or set in the US, in which the Pixie features. I argue that this five-stage model can not only be used to understand and analyse typical Pixie texts, but can also function, for example, as a means of assessing attempts to challenge or intervene in MPDG discourse. To demonstrate this, the article contains two case studies: Robyn Schneider’s The Beginning of Everything (2013), exemplary of a typical Pixie novel, and Gretchen McNeil’s I’m Not Your Manic Pixie Dream Girl (2016), an interventionist text. In engaging with two novels at either end of the Pixie discourse spectrum, my work here argues that the MPDGYA model lays important groundwork not only for research opportunities in the field of YA studies, but for the emergence of collaborative and intersectional approaches to the Pixie – and the texts in which she appears – across multiple disciplines
Irish Journal of American Studies, 2018
According to Thomas Mathiesen, “In a two-way and significant double sense of the word, we […] liv... more According to Thomas Mathiesen, “In a two-way and significant double sense of the word, we […] live in a viewer society” (219). This essay seeks to examine the ways in which Mathiesen’s claim is realised in Dave Eggers’ The Circle (2013) in what I have termed as ‘New Panopticism’. This model, I argue, stems from a natural progression from Jeremy Bentham, to Michel Foucault, to Gilles Deleuze’s models of Panopticism, and I will turn to define it momentarily. The essay will demonstrate that ‘New Panopticism’, in contradistinction to post-Panopticism, is a result of the contemporary conflation of the physical and the digital (although it is largely situated in the digital) and has subsequently influenced a new mode of surveillance which infiltrates the body and encourages behaviour as performance. Moreover, this essay will address cases in which both panoptic and synoptic surveillance prevail—a shift which, as Mathiesen also notes, demonstrates an “enormously extensive system enabling the many to see and contemplate the few” alongside the panoptical notion of the few observing the many (219). To what extent, this essay will therefore ask, does The Circle operate as a fusion of both panoptic and synoptic surveillance? And how, exactly, is this conflation of two modes of surveillance, in combination with an infiltration of the body, situated in regard to Transhumanism? In order to address these issues, my analysis will read Eggers’ novel through the lens of several key theorists. With Mathiesen’s The Viewer Society and the three theorists of Panopticism as its starting point, the essay will also particularly engage with scholarship from Sherry Turkle.
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Conference Presentations by Jennifer Gouck
This paper was given as part of the Popular Culture Association 2019 Conference in Washington, DC.
In March 2017, Jay Asher’s 2007 YA novel Thirteen Reasons Why was propelled into public consciousness by its high-profile Netflix adaptation, hailed by The Guardian was “too bleak to binge.” Reasons follows teenager Clay Jensen, who arrives home one day to find a shoebox filled with cassette tapes and an accompanying map propped against his front door. Clay quickly realises these tapes, each hand-numbered in blue nail polish, are from his recently deceased classmate, Hannah Baker. Each cassette details her experiences with thirteen people in her life; thirteen experiences, Hannah claims, that led to her suicide. Once a classmate has listened to the tapes, Hannah’s instructions specify that they are to be passed on to the next person on her list; if not, her appointed ‘guardian’ of the tapes will release them in a very public manner.
This paper seeks to explore the various strands of union and disunion woven throughout Reasons, such as the united front formed by the other recipients of the tapes in a desperate attempt to keep their secret. Clay instead, however, resists this union, forming a complex, problematic one with Hannah. How, I will ask, do these unions highlight and intersect with issues of power? What role does the blurring of temporality and perspective, particularly in the Netflix show, play? Moreover, how can we situate Thirteen Reasons culturally, particularly in the wake of its mixed critical and online receptions?
In a 2007 article for The AV Club, film critic Nathan Rabin famously coined the term ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’ (MPDG). For Rabin, the MPDG “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is an all-or-nothing-proposition.” From here, the MPDG trope began to take over popular culture, making further appearances in film, television, and literature, leading Rabin to publish an essay for Salon Magazine seven years later in which he outlines his regret in coining and identifying the “fundamentally sexist” trope that strips women of their autonomy.
This paper seeks to explore the ways in which the MPDG trope is manifested in contemporary American Young Adult (YA) literature and examine, a decade from its critical inception, the extent to which the term has evolved (if at all). How, this paper asks, are modern conceptions of masculinity and femininity situated in relation to this seemingly ubiquitous cultural trope? To what extent do these post-2007 fictions attempt to undermine and destroy this increasingly derogative trope? Indeed, are they successful in their efforts?
In order to answer these questions, I will explore key elements of three primary texts: John Green’s Paper Towns (2008) and Krystal Sutherland’s Our Chemical Hearts (2016).
Between 2012 and 2013, the so-called ‘Steubenville Rape Case’ dominated the (American) media, placing an otherwise unremarkable town in Ohio in the world’s eye. On the night of 12th August 2012, a young girl, debilitated by alcohol, was raped by two boys on her school’s football team: Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond. The assault, of which the victim would later claim she had no memory, was recorded and distributed in both photographs and video via social media. In January 2014, Richmond was released from prison, while Mays was released in the January of the following year.
This paper seeks to offer a Trans-Atlantic reading of the ways in which the rape culture so evident in the Steubenville case is represented in Irish author Louise O’Neill’s 2015 novel, Asking for It. How, it will ask, does O’Neill map cultural debates from the United States onto twenty-first century Ireland? To what extent does place have a role to play in the rape culture depicted here? Indeed, what is (American) rape culture, and can it truly be defined? Rape culture takes on extra significance, I argue, due to the notoriety and increasing frequency of cases such as those in Steubenville, Maryville and, more recently, of Stanford swimmer Brock Turner. As such, the paper draws upon cultural, trauma, literary and visual scholars in order to explore the inherent resistances between these strands of theory and the apparent social progress O’Neill seeks to make, with varying levels of success, in her prize-winning second novel.
Becky Albertalli’s 2015 novel Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda follows closeted teen Simon Spier as his emails to digital pen-pal Blue fall into the hands of classmate Martin Addison, who uses Simon’s hidden homosexuality as blackmail; Simon must help Martin get with Abby Suso, Simon’s friend, or he will expose his secret to the world. The novel’s adaptation, shortened to Love, Simon, hit the big screen courtesy of Fox in April of this year, acquiring the accolade of being the first film by a major Hollywood studio to focus on a gay teen romance. Directed by Greg Berlanti, famous for penning the first gay kiss to be shown on television in Dawson’s Creek, Box Office Mojo reports that Simon grossed approximately $40.7m in the US and Canada, with $16.4m made in other territories, cumulating in a worldwide total of $57.1m.
Despite such success, LGBTQ+ YA remains what Michael Cart terms a “literature in transition” (194). Although “no less than 319 [titles] [were] published [in the 00s], an average of more than 21 per year (compared with 1 per year in the 1970s, 4 in the 1980s, and 7 in the 1990s)” (Cart 191), the category has only just made its mainstream, pop-cultural cinematic debut in 2018 – a debut which, this paper will argue, is constrained by the indisputable (and, indeed, heteronormative) power of the commercial. Additionally, my paper seeks to explore how homosexuality is presented in Simon, asking how this relates to constructions and performances of identity and gender, both in life and on-stage. If, as Roberta Seelinger Trites claims, “Young adult novels are about power,” what power structures are at play throughout both the novel and its cinematic adaptation?
Papers by Jennifer Gouck
This paper was given as part of the Popular Culture Association 2019 Conference in Washington, DC.
In March 2017, Jay Asher’s 2007 YA novel Thirteen Reasons Why was propelled into public consciousness by its high-profile Netflix adaptation, hailed by The Guardian was “too bleak to binge.” Reasons follows teenager Clay Jensen, who arrives home one day to find a shoebox filled with cassette tapes and an accompanying map propped against his front door. Clay quickly realises these tapes, each hand-numbered in blue nail polish, are from his recently deceased classmate, Hannah Baker. Each cassette details her experiences with thirteen people in her life; thirteen experiences, Hannah claims, that led to her suicide. Once a classmate has listened to the tapes, Hannah’s instructions specify that they are to be passed on to the next person on her list; if not, her appointed ‘guardian’ of the tapes will release them in a very public manner.
This paper seeks to explore the various strands of union and disunion woven throughout Reasons, such as the united front formed by the other recipients of the tapes in a desperate attempt to keep their secret. Clay instead, however, resists this union, forming a complex, problematic one with Hannah. How, I will ask, do these unions highlight and intersect with issues of power? What role does the blurring of temporality and perspective, particularly in the Netflix show, play? Moreover, how can we situate Thirteen Reasons culturally, particularly in the wake of its mixed critical and online receptions?
In a 2007 article for The AV Club, film critic Nathan Rabin famously coined the term ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’ (MPDG). For Rabin, the MPDG “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is an all-or-nothing-proposition.” From here, the MPDG trope began to take over popular culture, making further appearances in film, television, and literature, leading Rabin to publish an essay for Salon Magazine seven years later in which he outlines his regret in coining and identifying the “fundamentally sexist” trope that strips women of their autonomy.
This paper seeks to explore the ways in which the MPDG trope is manifested in contemporary American Young Adult (YA) literature and examine, a decade from its critical inception, the extent to which the term has evolved (if at all). How, this paper asks, are modern conceptions of masculinity and femininity situated in relation to this seemingly ubiquitous cultural trope? To what extent do these post-2007 fictions attempt to undermine and destroy this increasingly derogative trope? Indeed, are they successful in their efforts?
In order to answer these questions, I will explore key elements of three primary texts: John Green’s Paper Towns (2008) and Krystal Sutherland’s Our Chemical Hearts (2016).
Between 2012 and 2013, the so-called ‘Steubenville Rape Case’ dominated the (American) media, placing an otherwise unremarkable town in Ohio in the world’s eye. On the night of 12th August 2012, a young girl, debilitated by alcohol, was raped by two boys on her school’s football team: Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond. The assault, of which the victim would later claim she had no memory, was recorded and distributed in both photographs and video via social media. In January 2014, Richmond was released from prison, while Mays was released in the January of the following year.
This paper seeks to offer a Trans-Atlantic reading of the ways in which the rape culture so evident in the Steubenville case is represented in Irish author Louise O’Neill’s 2015 novel, Asking for It. How, it will ask, does O’Neill map cultural debates from the United States onto twenty-first century Ireland? To what extent does place have a role to play in the rape culture depicted here? Indeed, what is (American) rape culture, and can it truly be defined? Rape culture takes on extra significance, I argue, due to the notoriety and increasing frequency of cases such as those in Steubenville, Maryville and, more recently, of Stanford swimmer Brock Turner. As such, the paper draws upon cultural, trauma, literary and visual scholars in order to explore the inherent resistances between these strands of theory and the apparent social progress O’Neill seeks to make, with varying levels of success, in her prize-winning second novel.
Becky Albertalli’s 2015 novel Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda follows closeted teen Simon Spier as his emails to digital pen-pal Blue fall into the hands of classmate Martin Addison, who uses Simon’s hidden homosexuality as blackmail; Simon must help Martin get with Abby Suso, Simon’s friend, or he will expose his secret to the world. The novel’s adaptation, shortened to Love, Simon, hit the big screen courtesy of Fox in April of this year, acquiring the accolade of being the first film by a major Hollywood studio to focus on a gay teen romance. Directed by Greg Berlanti, famous for penning the first gay kiss to be shown on television in Dawson’s Creek, Box Office Mojo reports that Simon grossed approximately $40.7m in the US and Canada, with $16.4m made in other territories, cumulating in a worldwide total of $57.1m.
Despite such success, LGBTQ+ YA remains what Michael Cart terms a “literature in transition” (194). Although “no less than 319 [titles] [were] published [in the 00s], an average of more than 21 per year (compared with 1 per year in the 1970s, 4 in the 1980s, and 7 in the 1990s)” (Cart 191), the category has only just made its mainstream, pop-cultural cinematic debut in 2018 – a debut which, this paper will argue, is constrained by the indisputable (and, indeed, heteronormative) power of the commercial. Additionally, my paper seeks to explore how homosexuality is presented in Simon, asking how this relates to constructions and performances of identity and gender, both in life and on-stage. If, as Roberta Seelinger Trites claims, “Young adult novels are about power,” what power structures are at play throughout both the novel and its cinematic adaptation?