Dissertation

Illuminating the Dark Carnival in American Fantasy

Cox, Jennifer K

2020

Overview

Over the last century, popular US culture has produced multiple variations on a story about a mysterious traveling carnival that arrives in a small, rural town and disrupts normal ways of living. A lack of clear scholarship on the concept, combined with its frequent recurrence, presents a deficit in understanding “the Dark Carnival” as a discrete, recognizable literary concept. This dissertation strives to fill that lacuna by describing the Dark Carnival as a category of American fantasy stories that offer cohesive narrative explanations in times of social upheaval. Identified by a specific ambience, or narrative affect, of wonder and dread, Dark Carnival stories employ a portmotif (i.e., portmanteau + motif) to transport composite carnivalesque structures and content (e.g. settings, characters, objects, and themes) across genres and modes that work to invert and pervert social norms. This storytelling tradition incorporates and reframes the Midwestern pastoral mythology to thwart happy endings as a social critique; protagonists struggle with invasive magical forces in texts that resist, revise, or reinforce dominant discourses and interrogate concepts such as “home,” “family,” and “Americanness.” I employ George Lakoff’s cognitive-based categories in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (1987) to evaluate Dark Carnival stories based on their similarity to central prototype texts, or best examples (e.g. Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes [1962]). As a radial structure, the prototype is positioned at the category’s center and surrounded by linked extensions, or deviations, chaining out from the central case. In this study, Stephen King’s The Shining (1977), represents a metaphoric extension of the Dark Carnival prototype, and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (1999) exemplifies a metonymic extension, but all remain linked to Bradbury’s prototype by Wittgenstein’s concept of “family resemblances.” This analysis offers a non-hierarchical framework for understanding textual variations and adaptations in contemporary popular cultural, and how they relate or react to inverted social energies.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: American literature / Literature
• ISBN: 9798380088800