christopher b. wachal

Department of English
Loyola University Chicago
6525 N Sheridan Rd.
Chicago, IL 6062
Office: Crown Center 418 (Hours by appt.)
Email: cwachal@luc.edu

ONGOING PROJECTS

Cultural Studies in the Composition Classroom
This website, designed for first-time instructors of freshman composition, provides an introduction to cultural studies theory, pedagogy, and current debates. It also reviews a number of readers and writing manuals, determining which ones are best for a composition classroom using a cultural studies model. The site, produced by a collaboration among a number of graduate students, can be found here.

PAST PROJECTS

Holy Ground: Selections from Oscar Wilde's Prison Correspondence, September 1896-May 1897
This collection of letters documents Wilde's prison life during the composition of De Profundis, his book-length epistle to former paramour Alfred Douglas. His correspondence with close friend More Adey reveal Wilde obsessed with the economic fallout of his divorce and the pain of losing friends who exploited his imprisonment. The goal of the collection is to document the period surrounding one of Wilde's most profoundly personal works and to recast the author as the populist and celebrity he was.

'You, young man, you have it in your pocket.' - Sainthood in Two Kurt Vonnegut Novels
This paper traces Vonnegut's concept of modern sainthood as 'ordinary people behaving decently in an indecent society' in two of his earlier novels, The Sirens of Titan and Mother Night. The Christian concept of kenosis (the emptying or self-giving of oneself) figures prominently in both novels. I argue that Vonnegut's portrayal of ordinary people becoming modern saints in a theologically orthodox way problematizes more conventional interpretations that foreground the author's professed humanism and agnosticism.

No Place for In-Betweens - Women and Racial Politics in Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven
No Telephone to Heaven describes the struggles of Kitty and Clare Savage, a Jamaican mother-daughter pair whose family immigrates to the US. My paper argues that the Savage women survive in the US and Britain by refusing to embrace the reductivism and binarism of Anglo-American racial politics. As women of 'mixed-race' they are able to enact a radically subversive identity that exists between established racial norms. When they cling firmly to alterity - in this case blackness - I argue that Kitty and Clare lose the ability to speak out as radical critics. Instead they become tragically silenced symbols of the internalized hierarchies which dominate racial discourse.

'Catholics see Mary. Protestants see UFO's." - Flannery O'Connor and the Catholic Supernatural
The extent to which O'Connor can be labeled as 'Catholic' depends largely on how one interprets the meaning of that term. In this paper, I use the work of theologians David Tracy and Bruce J. Malina to define 'Catholic' by its relationship to the supernatural. By representing the supernatural and the Divine in human form, O'Connor participates in an orthodox Catholic tradition. I argue, however, that her use of disfigured persons ('A Temple of the Holy Ghost') and others marked by difference as symbols creates a space within orthodoxy for O'Connor's meditations on identity politics.

The Fearful Jesuit as a Young Man: Stephen Dedalus and Catholic Education
This paper examines the role Catholic education, particularly that conducted under the Jesuits, plays in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I am especially interested in how the novel represents changes in Catholic theology and ecclesiology during the late 19th Century. It is when the Jesuits seek to define Stephen, I argue, that his turn from religion begins.

Overlapping Magisteria: Science and Religion in Dr. Faustus
The late Harvard biologist and philosopher of science Stephen Jay Gould conceived of the relationship between science and religion as that of "non-overlapping magisteria." That is, they are fields that answer different questions and contribute in distinct ways to complete world-views. Gould argues that this understanding of the two fields has a long history. This paper is my attempt to place Christopher Marlowe in that history. His Tragical History of Dr. Faustus dramatizes the downfall of a scientist who tries to subject the Divine to scientific rationale. Faustus' damnation, I argue, is the result of his attempt to mix science and religion - an effort which limits the possibilities of both fields.

The People Under the Stairs - Silenced Voices of Globalization
Homi Bhabha has theorized the exchange between cultures as a meeting on a staircase connecting two very different levels of meaning. The image is stark and emphasizes both the awareness of difference that attends such exchanges and the hybrid nature of the products of cross-cultural communication. In an age of globalization - an era of trans-national capitalism - what are we to say of those "beneath the stairs," those with no access to the cosmopolitan world of cultural understanding and global capital? Here, I argue that we must begin a new focus on those silenced by the elitist tendencies of globalization, looking primarily at the challenges to popular globalist narratives in Mohsin Hamid's Moth Smoke.

"This England they tell me about..." - The Trans-Atlantic Definition of Whiteness in Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea.
Postcolonial criticism demands that Wide Sargasso Sea challenges Western imperialist racial discourse. Here, I argue that Rhys' novel does little to dissolve Western racial binaries. Instead, it establishes a new definition of whiteness - one based on mobility and trade. It is the titular body of water where white and non-white, transient and local identities become confused and seem to dissolve.

The Queer Pacific - Sexuality, Something, and Transnationalism in Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy
Description of this paper.

FUTURE PROJECTS