William Nolen | Houston Community College (original) (raw)

Papers by William Nolen

The Artifice, 2019

An analysis of the Star Wars Prequel and Original Trilogies as a criticism of American history an... more An analysis of the Star Wars Prequel and Original Trilogies as a criticism of American history and its contemporary politics through a presentation of how democracy can be coopted on behalf of authoritarianism by the manufacture of consent through fabricated threats and conflicts.

Contextualizaciones Latinoamericanas, 2021

As Hernán Díaz points out in Borges: Between History and Eternity (2012), Borges wrot... more As Hernán Díaz points out in Borges: Between History and Eternity (2012), Borges wrote and thought prolifically about the literature, philosophy, popular culture, and history of North America: “from his first book of essays to his last [...] there is a vast Borgesian corpus dealing with the American tradition” (p.p.73-78). This paper will explore deconstruction-based theories of narrative construction of personal and collective history as a background for Borges’ short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”. I will discuss that the narrator Borges in the short story becomes one who “omit[s] or disfigure[s] the facts” of American history so as to “permit a few rea-ders [...] to perceive an atrocious or banal reality” revealed by the short story acting as a monstrous “mirror spy[ing] upon us”. Borges’ fusion of autobiography and fiction in the short story embodies the use of “false facts” to reveal the banal historical reality that the conspirators of Tlön symbolize the European thinkers and American political lea-ders that shaped America’s historical narrative. The result is a reading of Borges’ “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” as Marxist deconstruction of the American Dream.

Alienation and marginalization in our forefathers’ tradition, culture or people predate the found... more Alienation and marginalization in our forefathers’ tradition, culture or people predate the founding of the American colonies. Our very Statue of Liberty is inscribed with, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" Even our rich and powerful tycoons descend from the ignored and downtrodden, we are a country of the rejected. Alienated, though desperately in denial of this heritage, we struggle for Weber’s Puritanical success as validation of our own “elect-ness” and subjugate as a means of that same validation to this very day,
A society expresses itself positively in the mental illness displayed by its members, whether it places them at the center of its religious life, as is often the case amongst the primitive peoples, or whether it seeks to expatriate them by situating them outside social life, as does our culture. (Foucault 75)
America’s poets, springing often from the members we “expatriate,” act as America’s “center of its religious life,” and give a conscious/unconscious voice to the struggle we carry within: election versus rejection, unity versus alienation. The problem lies in that, despite the best efforts of our poets (even of the Transcendentalists) to find some unity or harmony, they and we remain fragmented, disenfranchised, isolated…in a word, alienated.

The prevalence of mutiny and caves in Poe’s version of the Pym narrative make one think of Plato’... more The prevalence of mutiny and caves in Poe’s version of the Pym narrative make one think of Plato’s Republic, arguably the most influential text in Western history. There is no research thus far in the way of connecting Pym to Plato’s Republic despite it seeming an obvious narrative and thematic framework adapted by Poe. Poe does admit in the June 21st 1845 issue of his Broadway Journal that Plato’s Laws is “inferior to the Republic” (393). The very conundrum of narrator-ial and authorial voices intermingling to the point of indistinguishability between Poe and Pym parallels a long debated dilemma in terms of Plato’s and Socrates’ ownership of theories found in the dialogues. The mutiny on the Grampus and its subsequent misadventures, as well as the Tsalalans’ mutiny of the Jane Guy, follow a surprising number of elements found in Plato’s ship of state parable in the Republic. Pym’s struggle in ignorance as to the fate of the crew on the Grampus within the darkness of the hold early in the novel echoes back unto Plato’s allegory of the cave, as does the later episode within the cave-ravine network within the Antarctic island of the Tsalal. In fact, a close examination of the plot in Poe’s Pym reveals a cyclical recurrent sequence: mutiny-exposure to the elements-mutiny-cave and then the cycle begins anew. The sections where the characters are exposed to the elements contrasted against the underground cave or darkness sections seem to reflect Plato’s two halves of his allegory: the sunlit world of Forms versus the underground cave of sense perception. The thematic preponderance of questions concerning what one can be certain of in the interplay between the senses, the reason, the imagination, and one’s material being (appetites and emotions) throughout Pym directly adapt the central figures and questions that Plato explores in the parable of the ship of state and the allegory of the cave in his Republic. A conversation between Plato and Poe will be explored in order to expose Poe’s struggle to reconcile modernity’s belief in the primacy of the material over the rational or ideal with a fear of the nihilism that would underlie this worldview and how this undermines the conventions utilized in authorial writing, narrator recounting, and audience reading. Perhaps, this will move criticism towards treating the Pym narrative as serious and complete a work as any Poe produced during his lifetime despite its satiric, parodic, and unfinished appearances.

Science fiction, whether of the dystopian or the apocalyptic variety (in contrast to the former u... more Science fiction, whether of the dystopian or the apocalyptic variety (in contrast to the former utopian trend in science fiction that “dreamt of new wondrous possible worlds’), has quickly gained prominence in print media as well as in film. James Gunn explains that science fiction now “concerns itself with scientific or technological change, and it usually involves matters whose importance is greater than the individual or the community,” whereas Darko Suvein adds that it is “a diagnosis, a warning, a call to understanding and action” (qtd. in Rea 266, 267). The general convention is that both apocalyptic and dystopian science fiction describe possible future technologies and/or scenarios based on scientific theories and present fictional dilemmas that somehow reflect social issues in the present, a Kassandra of fiction writing, if you will. Conversely, Jean Baudrillard goes a few steps further in fleshing out these trends in science fiction:
Gigantic hologram in three dimensions in which fiction will never again be a mirror held toward the future, but a desperate rehallucination of the past. We can no longer imagine any other universe […] the grace of transcendence was taken away from us in that respect too […] One does not see an alternative universe […] it is not about a parallel universe, a double universe, or even a possible universe – neither possible, impossible, neither real nor unreal […] something else altogether […] science fiction has always played on doubling or redoubling […] whereas here the double has disappeared, there is no longer a double, one is always already in the other world, which is no longer other, without a mirror, a projection, or a utopia that can reflect it. (123, 125).

Baudrillard here rejects Suvein’s idea of science fiction as social commentary, much less does he accept the possibility of it as impetus for social activism. The doubling or reflection upon society that science fiction was once capable of has now been shattered by an incapacity for the elevation transcendence once provided. Without this uplifting distance, no vantage point for self-reflection is possible. The “death of reality” Baudrillard is so famous for refers to our current recognition of the fact that the duality of the real and the appearance, the transcendent and the immanent, never existed. The result of this loss of our “noble lie” is that we live in the world of the simulacra, the pure simulacra that has no bearing to an underlying reality of any kind whatsoever (6). Empty shells that merely pantomime consciousness, we simply go through the motions of performing as if there were self-awareness, Academy Award worthy performances of existential method acting that convinces our most intimate of audiences, the mind-screen itself. Similarly, science fiction does not reflect reality back to us so that we may better see ourselves; instead, it replicates our simulated existence in such a way that we are “always already in the other world” that it posits but that is not really Other. Brian Aldiss’ short story, “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” perfectly epitomizes Baudrillard’s ideas of science fiction as a simulation of our own existential simulacra through its loss of doubling in juxtaposing humans and artificially intelligent androids and the loss of all contexts for “what it means to be real.”

The Artifice, 2019

In the end, we discover in the Star Wars prequel series that Anakin Skywalker began his journey t... more In the end, we discover in the Star Wars prequel series that Anakin Skywalker began his journey to become Darth Vader as an idealistic youth working towards order, peace, and stability for the democratic Republic he grew up in, that he sought more power out of a desire to protect those he loved, and that his gradual descent to the dark side of the Force symbolizes through science fiction cinema the corruption process Lord Acton of England described when he wrote in 1887, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” George Lucas’ admission that Darth Vader comes from Dutch and German for “dark father,” reveals that the transformation from Anakin Skywalker to Darth Vader parallels the corruption of empires that begin as paternalism (the belief that government should act as a father to the people, preventing them from unknowingly harming themselves) but end up as abuses of power. The tragedy of the Star Wars series is the tragedy of historical empire: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Deconstructing the superhero genre, exposing its roots in proto-apocalypticism, eutopianism, trav... more Deconstructing the superhero genre, exposing its roots in proto-apocalypticism, eutopianism, travel narratives, detective noir, science fiction, and other traditions and genres, Moore revolutionized the comic book industry, creating a new paradigm within the medium. Moreover, Moore and Gibbons rely on Nietzschean criticisms of Plato to launch an attack on Western eutopianism and American interventionism.

Books by William Nolen

This work begins by briefly exploring the historical, cultural, and economic factors springing up... more This work begins by briefly exploring the historical, cultural, and economic factors springing up from the rise of scientific and economic materialism in the crux of capitalism. It is argued that the bourgeois value system strangled the possibility of heroic action in the public arena and thereby eliminated the poet’s ability to find a heroic figure in nineteenth century America. The focus is then shifted to the Transcendentalist movement (Emerson, Thoreau and Fuller), who fear the loss of the hero as the loss of inspiration for mankind and the loss of subject matter for poets. The works and ideas of Emerson are interpreted as an attempt at inspiring individuals in the public to step forth into the spotlight of Western society in the hopes of counteracting the trends and forces in modernity that render the metropolitan citizen ineffectual and complacent. Thoreau’s experiments in Walden and civil disobedience are examined in the light of early efforts to find venues of political action in the private life of the everyday man as a possibility for heroism. Fuller is sketched as the prototype for modernized vates or prophet as poet/hero. It is argued that Fuller brings to life the dual role of hero and poet via the social activism she attempted in her use of the press in order to make the public aware of the ills in society as a means of mobilization and serving as an apocryphal propaganda. The extent to which each individual succeeded and/or failed is also to be described.

Thesis Chapters by William Nolen

ProQuest Dissertation Publishing, 2022

This dissertation suggests three revisions to current thinking about utopias and dystopias. First... more This dissertation suggests three revisions to current thinking about utopias and dystopias. First, given the Western literary canon’s historical impact on political and scientific aspirations towards perfecting society in history, the term “eutopia” (a project to build a good place) is more accurate rather than utopia (a project to build no place). Such a redefinition forces readers and scholars to confront the historically real train wreck of collateral damage triggered by the eutopian tradition of the Western canon. The second revision traces the “Western canon’s” roots back to a series of tropes and worldviews held among various ancient cultures surrounding the Mediterranean Sea that depict a dialectical history of eutopian promises, dystopian realities, and post-apocalyptic chaos in their epic poems, myths, and prophecies. The second revision redirects scholarship of the Western canon to recognize its origins in a “proto-apocalyptic” association of tropes and ideas that coalesced into the evolution of a eutopian worldview striving after authoritarian urban governance capable of molding human citizens it posits as sinful, appetite-driven animals into cog-like, rational conformists that efficiently fit into a mechanistic society. The third revision examines how the 19th and 20th Century’s exposed Western eutopianism’s underlying nihilism, misanthropic assumptions, authoritarian methods, and misleading goals, sowing the seeds of its destruction by producing a 20th century loss of faith. Nonetheless, after five thousand years, struggling to imagine something else, Western eutopianism and its ensuing despair persist in saturating every genre of its collective imagination with dystopian, cataclysmic, and post-apocalyptic narratives, tropes, and themes.

The Artifice, 2019

An analysis of the Star Wars Prequel and Original Trilogies as a criticism of American history an... more An analysis of the Star Wars Prequel and Original Trilogies as a criticism of American history and its contemporary politics through a presentation of how democracy can be coopted on behalf of authoritarianism by the manufacture of consent through fabricated threats and conflicts.

Contextualizaciones Latinoamericanas, 2021

As Hernán Díaz points out in Borges: Between History and Eternity (2012), Borges wrot... more As Hernán Díaz points out in Borges: Between History and Eternity (2012), Borges wrote and thought prolifically about the literature, philosophy, popular culture, and history of North America: “from his first book of essays to his last [...] there is a vast Borgesian corpus dealing with the American tradition” (p.p.73-78). This paper will explore deconstruction-based theories of narrative construction of personal and collective history as a background for Borges’ short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”. I will discuss that the narrator Borges in the short story becomes one who “omit[s] or disfigure[s] the facts” of American history so as to “permit a few rea-ders [...] to perceive an atrocious or banal reality” revealed by the short story acting as a monstrous “mirror spy[ing] upon us”. Borges’ fusion of autobiography and fiction in the short story embodies the use of “false facts” to reveal the banal historical reality that the conspirators of Tlön symbolize the European thinkers and American political lea-ders that shaped America’s historical narrative. The result is a reading of Borges’ “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” as Marxist deconstruction of the American Dream.

Alienation and marginalization in our forefathers’ tradition, culture or people predate the found... more Alienation and marginalization in our forefathers’ tradition, culture or people predate the founding of the American colonies. Our very Statue of Liberty is inscribed with, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" Even our rich and powerful tycoons descend from the ignored and downtrodden, we are a country of the rejected. Alienated, though desperately in denial of this heritage, we struggle for Weber’s Puritanical success as validation of our own “elect-ness” and subjugate as a means of that same validation to this very day,
A society expresses itself positively in the mental illness displayed by its members, whether it places them at the center of its religious life, as is often the case amongst the primitive peoples, or whether it seeks to expatriate them by situating them outside social life, as does our culture. (Foucault 75)
America’s poets, springing often from the members we “expatriate,” act as America’s “center of its religious life,” and give a conscious/unconscious voice to the struggle we carry within: election versus rejection, unity versus alienation. The problem lies in that, despite the best efforts of our poets (even of the Transcendentalists) to find some unity or harmony, they and we remain fragmented, disenfranchised, isolated…in a word, alienated.

The prevalence of mutiny and caves in Poe’s version of the Pym narrative make one think of Plato’... more The prevalence of mutiny and caves in Poe’s version of the Pym narrative make one think of Plato’s Republic, arguably the most influential text in Western history. There is no research thus far in the way of connecting Pym to Plato’s Republic despite it seeming an obvious narrative and thematic framework adapted by Poe. Poe does admit in the June 21st 1845 issue of his Broadway Journal that Plato’s Laws is “inferior to the Republic” (393). The very conundrum of narrator-ial and authorial voices intermingling to the point of indistinguishability between Poe and Pym parallels a long debated dilemma in terms of Plato’s and Socrates’ ownership of theories found in the dialogues. The mutiny on the Grampus and its subsequent misadventures, as well as the Tsalalans’ mutiny of the Jane Guy, follow a surprising number of elements found in Plato’s ship of state parable in the Republic. Pym’s struggle in ignorance as to the fate of the crew on the Grampus within the darkness of the hold early in the novel echoes back unto Plato’s allegory of the cave, as does the later episode within the cave-ravine network within the Antarctic island of the Tsalal. In fact, a close examination of the plot in Poe’s Pym reveals a cyclical recurrent sequence: mutiny-exposure to the elements-mutiny-cave and then the cycle begins anew. The sections where the characters are exposed to the elements contrasted against the underground cave or darkness sections seem to reflect Plato’s two halves of his allegory: the sunlit world of Forms versus the underground cave of sense perception. The thematic preponderance of questions concerning what one can be certain of in the interplay between the senses, the reason, the imagination, and one’s material being (appetites and emotions) throughout Pym directly adapt the central figures and questions that Plato explores in the parable of the ship of state and the allegory of the cave in his Republic. A conversation between Plato and Poe will be explored in order to expose Poe’s struggle to reconcile modernity’s belief in the primacy of the material over the rational or ideal with a fear of the nihilism that would underlie this worldview and how this undermines the conventions utilized in authorial writing, narrator recounting, and audience reading. Perhaps, this will move criticism towards treating the Pym narrative as serious and complete a work as any Poe produced during his lifetime despite its satiric, parodic, and unfinished appearances.

Science fiction, whether of the dystopian or the apocalyptic variety (in contrast to the former u... more Science fiction, whether of the dystopian or the apocalyptic variety (in contrast to the former utopian trend in science fiction that “dreamt of new wondrous possible worlds’), has quickly gained prominence in print media as well as in film. James Gunn explains that science fiction now “concerns itself with scientific or technological change, and it usually involves matters whose importance is greater than the individual or the community,” whereas Darko Suvein adds that it is “a diagnosis, a warning, a call to understanding and action” (qtd. in Rea 266, 267). The general convention is that both apocalyptic and dystopian science fiction describe possible future technologies and/or scenarios based on scientific theories and present fictional dilemmas that somehow reflect social issues in the present, a Kassandra of fiction writing, if you will. Conversely, Jean Baudrillard goes a few steps further in fleshing out these trends in science fiction:
Gigantic hologram in three dimensions in which fiction will never again be a mirror held toward the future, but a desperate rehallucination of the past. We can no longer imagine any other universe […] the grace of transcendence was taken away from us in that respect too […] One does not see an alternative universe […] it is not about a parallel universe, a double universe, or even a possible universe – neither possible, impossible, neither real nor unreal […] something else altogether […] science fiction has always played on doubling or redoubling […] whereas here the double has disappeared, there is no longer a double, one is always already in the other world, which is no longer other, without a mirror, a projection, or a utopia that can reflect it. (123, 125).

Baudrillard here rejects Suvein’s idea of science fiction as social commentary, much less does he accept the possibility of it as impetus for social activism. The doubling or reflection upon society that science fiction was once capable of has now been shattered by an incapacity for the elevation transcendence once provided. Without this uplifting distance, no vantage point for self-reflection is possible. The “death of reality” Baudrillard is so famous for refers to our current recognition of the fact that the duality of the real and the appearance, the transcendent and the immanent, never existed. The result of this loss of our “noble lie” is that we live in the world of the simulacra, the pure simulacra that has no bearing to an underlying reality of any kind whatsoever (6). Empty shells that merely pantomime consciousness, we simply go through the motions of performing as if there were self-awareness, Academy Award worthy performances of existential method acting that convinces our most intimate of audiences, the mind-screen itself. Similarly, science fiction does not reflect reality back to us so that we may better see ourselves; instead, it replicates our simulated existence in such a way that we are “always already in the other world” that it posits but that is not really Other. Brian Aldiss’ short story, “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” perfectly epitomizes Baudrillard’s ideas of science fiction as a simulation of our own existential simulacra through its loss of doubling in juxtaposing humans and artificially intelligent androids and the loss of all contexts for “what it means to be real.”

The Artifice, 2019

In the end, we discover in the Star Wars prequel series that Anakin Skywalker began his journey t... more In the end, we discover in the Star Wars prequel series that Anakin Skywalker began his journey to become Darth Vader as an idealistic youth working towards order, peace, and stability for the democratic Republic he grew up in, that he sought more power out of a desire to protect those he loved, and that his gradual descent to the dark side of the Force symbolizes through science fiction cinema the corruption process Lord Acton of England described when he wrote in 1887, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” George Lucas’ admission that Darth Vader comes from Dutch and German for “dark father,” reveals that the transformation from Anakin Skywalker to Darth Vader parallels the corruption of empires that begin as paternalism (the belief that government should act as a father to the people, preventing them from unknowingly harming themselves) but end up as abuses of power. The tragedy of the Star Wars series is the tragedy of historical empire: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Deconstructing the superhero genre, exposing its roots in proto-apocalypticism, eutopianism, trav... more Deconstructing the superhero genre, exposing its roots in proto-apocalypticism, eutopianism, travel narratives, detective noir, science fiction, and other traditions and genres, Moore revolutionized the comic book industry, creating a new paradigm within the medium. Moreover, Moore and Gibbons rely on Nietzschean criticisms of Plato to launch an attack on Western eutopianism and American interventionism.

This work begins by briefly exploring the historical, cultural, and economic factors springing up... more This work begins by briefly exploring the historical, cultural, and economic factors springing up from the rise of scientific and economic materialism in the crux of capitalism. It is argued that the bourgeois value system strangled the possibility of heroic action in the public arena and thereby eliminated the poet’s ability to find a heroic figure in nineteenth century America. The focus is then shifted to the Transcendentalist movement (Emerson, Thoreau and Fuller), who fear the loss of the hero as the loss of inspiration for mankind and the loss of subject matter for poets. The works and ideas of Emerson are interpreted as an attempt at inspiring individuals in the public to step forth into the spotlight of Western society in the hopes of counteracting the trends and forces in modernity that render the metropolitan citizen ineffectual and complacent. Thoreau’s experiments in Walden and civil disobedience are examined in the light of early efforts to find venues of political action in the private life of the everyday man as a possibility for heroism. Fuller is sketched as the prototype for modernized vates or prophet as poet/hero. It is argued that Fuller brings to life the dual role of hero and poet via the social activism she attempted in her use of the press in order to make the public aware of the ills in society as a means of mobilization and serving as an apocryphal propaganda. The extent to which each individual succeeded and/or failed is also to be described.

ProQuest Dissertation Publishing, 2022

This dissertation suggests three revisions to current thinking about utopias and dystopias. First... more This dissertation suggests three revisions to current thinking about utopias and dystopias. First, given the Western literary canon’s historical impact on political and scientific aspirations towards perfecting society in history, the term “eutopia” (a project to build a good place) is more accurate rather than utopia (a project to build no place). Such a redefinition forces readers and scholars to confront the historically real train wreck of collateral damage triggered by the eutopian tradition of the Western canon. The second revision traces the “Western canon’s” roots back to a series of tropes and worldviews held among various ancient cultures surrounding the Mediterranean Sea that depict a dialectical history of eutopian promises, dystopian realities, and post-apocalyptic chaos in their epic poems, myths, and prophecies. The second revision redirects scholarship of the Western canon to recognize its origins in a “proto-apocalyptic” association of tropes and ideas that coalesced into the evolution of a eutopian worldview striving after authoritarian urban governance capable of molding human citizens it posits as sinful, appetite-driven animals into cog-like, rational conformists that efficiently fit into a mechanistic society. The third revision examines how the 19th and 20th Century’s exposed Western eutopianism’s underlying nihilism, misanthropic assumptions, authoritarian methods, and misleading goals, sowing the seeds of its destruction by producing a 20th century loss of faith. Nonetheless, after five thousand years, struggling to imagine something else, Western eutopianism and its ensuing despair persist in saturating every genre of its collective imagination with dystopian, cataclysmic, and post-apocalyptic narratives, tropes, and themes.