This page is the culmination of my Autumn 2021 semester, English 2201 class with Dr. Karen Winstead, and TA Meaghan Pachay. Our final project assignment is to creatively convey what we’ve learned about each of the four literary time periods we studied, and for my project, I opted to create a mock pop-culture website modeled after Rolling Stone. Everything you see here — from the artist interviews to the political piece to the product reviews — is a take-off on the sort of thing you’d actually find on their site or in their magazine.
Perhaps a few more explanations are in order. In case that’s the case, below I’ve created annotations for each piece, to make it a little bit easier to understand.
“ThatGirl talks through her new EP, he doesnt even know my name.”
This one is an homage to Eliza Haywood’s spectacular novella, Fantomina, following a nameless young woman who adopts a number of different personas in order to exact revenge on a man who sexually assaults her.
I asked myself what sort of musical artist might tell a story like that now, and I immediately thought of musicians like Fiona Apple, Sky Ferreira, Lorde, and Billie Eilish — they all have a rather pessimistic, outcast aesthetic, and all have sung about the darker side of being a young person. Thus, the ThatGirl persona is a nod to those artists; the album title’s styling — all lowercase and devoid of punctuation — is also a nod to the aesthetic associated with those artists, particularly Eilish.
“Consumer Guide: Pope’s Cave of Spleen”
This is the cheekiest of the entries. In his seminal work “The Rape of the Lock,” Pope writes of the ”Cave of Spleen,” a place in which people morph into half-human, half-object monstrosities. It was imagery replete with exciting possible interpretations, whether on materialism, gender roles, cultural values, or simply a nightmare-inducing motif.
However, I got to thinking: although the setting was obviously symbolic, what if readers took it wholly at face value? What if their reaction, instead of “I wonder what that means,” were “What good are those objects? You can’t even use them!” The latter reaction is the one we receive from Margaret Upton, the “interior design expert” who tests and is decidedly displeased by the items when she buys them. Since this story is so facetious, I ended up having this be the second piece to pay homage to the fourth and final period of the class, “The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century.” (The less irreverent ThatGirl piece also fulfills the Part IV focus.)
“Trailer: Riddle Me This”
In the first portion of our course, we extensively studied riddles in two forms. First, we studied the straightforward sort, “What am I?”-style puzzlers from the Exeter Book, and then we studied elegies, which offered a world more meaning and perhaps a more specific style… but were still riddles unto themselves, at least in the sense that they remained ambiguous and left it up to the reader to discern the ultimate meaning.
Riddles seem like a popular topic for game shows, so I wondered: What if they had made a game show based on the riddles of that era? Riddle Me This was born. Each bit of the trailer is a reference to something from the class. The first two pairs of interpretations are nods to conflicting answers we came up with in an early discussion board to a couple of particularly ambiguous riddles; the third is a reference to “Wulf and Eadwacer” and “The Wife’s Lament,” the elegies we attempted to decode in the next discussion board. After that, I composed my own “library” riddle in the style of the Exeter ones. In the article accompanying the trailer, I also nod to the fact that the Exeter Book never actually included the answers to its riddles, so all of our “Answers” really depend on the interpretations of scholars!
“Preview: Miss Big Creature’s Autobiography is a Tale for the Ages”
Margery Kempe was one of my favorite figures we studied this semester. I loved what a walking contradiction she was: deeply religious and committed to her beliefs, and very outspoken, but also fond of flamboyant dress, impulsive, sometimes tactless, and aware of her own shortcomings. I also loved her “virtual piety,” as Dr. Winstead put it: believing the true key to piety wasn’t actually being pious, but rather trying to be pious. She was one of those “stranger than fiction” figures.
For some reason, her attitude made me think of some pop singers and rappers whom I listen to, the sort who delight in shocking people and who know how to get attention. And so, I imagined that her autobiography was also a sort of audio-biography, a set of glitzy dance tracks where Kempe brags about her accomplishments and concedes her shortcomings. The stage name “Miss Big Creature” refers to the way that, in her autobiography, she always referred to herself in the third person — as “this creature” — instead of in the first person.
“Satan & his allies are smooth, but don’t let him fool you…”
In Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Devil isn’t portrayed as some nasty old, freakish-looking monster; he’s instead portrayed as someone who’s able to persuade people, manipulate them, get his way without dramatic violence. He sounded almost like a politician to me, in the way he spoke to rally the troops and project optimism even when prospects looked bleak.
And so, I imagined him as an actual politician, turning his same maneuvering techniques to winning office rather than for building support for covertly “defy(ing) God” rather than declaring open war. What might that look like — and what might be said by those who saw through it? Here, I hope, is the answer.
Thank you for visiting! I hope you have as much fun reading all of this as I did writing it.
Nigel Becker
rollingshawmmag.wordpress.com 