Papers by David J . Muldoon
Miscelanea a Journal of English and American Studies, 2012
Constructing Selves: Issues of Gender, Age, Ethnicity and Nation, 2014
This paper looks at the division of the representation of the short musical life of Joy Division ... more This paper looks at the division of the representation of the short musical life of Joy Division front man Ian Curtis. It analyses his alternative masculinity represented in a documentary by Grant Gee where most of the commentary about Ian comes from musicians, managers and other people surrounding him in the music industry, the movie biopic Control, where certain cinematographic conventions play a part in his narrative, and an autobiographical book written by his wife Debora Curtis. These three different bodies of work all address Ian's body language as part of a historic moment in music, a bridge between 70s punk and 80s industrial pop. His epilepsy and eventual suicide are explained relative to this historical moment as if his body was bigger than life, a common representation of musicians and masculinity. It is as if his body were a sacrifice to the historical moment, a Hegelian response to a masculinity that could not be explained by the people surrounding him due to his particular modes of personal control.
14th Annual Culture and Power Conference University of Castilla- La Mancha, Ciudad Real, Spain, 2010
Taking on a biopic with a frontal assault on the narrative may seem like a masculine approach to ... more Taking on a biopic with a frontal assault on the narrative may seem like a masculine approach to an analysis of masculinities. That would mean following the story line to unman the gendered relationships between places and people, and looking at what is left behind. Starting from what is left behind, from the unsaid in the movie Walk the Line about country stars June Carter and Johnny Cash it will become clear that Johnny Cash tried to walk the line between two different productions of masculinity, the working class hero and the self made man. If host and female country singing legend June Carter plays the Scarlett O'hara role on stage than Johnny Cash is the musical equivalent of Clark Gable's Rhett Butler. Many of the scenes cut from the movie due to time constraints were scenes where the realistic, naive and artistic side of Cash, the Gablesque side, was supposed to be developed through dialogue that proved to be flattening and slow for the pace of the film. These silenced scenes show Cash's suffering, the basis for his working class hero status. However, Cash's masculinity is more closely represented as a version of the self made man: A man who worked his way up from the farming flat lands of the mid west, through the American military barracks abroad, eventually becoming the head of one of the most successful southern musician families, the Carter family.
Drafts by David J . Muldoon
A reading of Gramsci, Machiavelli and Tupac Shakur. Claremont Graduate University
By omitting the word "death" from his elegy titled "The Passing of Frederick Douglass," W.E.B. Du... more By omitting the word "death" from his elegy titled "The Passing of Frederick Douglass," W.E.B. Du Bois has posited and questioned the nature of the event of death. Reading Du Bois' poem through Plato's dialogue of the death of Socrates can provide a meaningful analysis of the way he views and uses death, and how he comes to the 'soul,' a word that would eventually be used in his career launching book The Souls of Black Folks. With the breaking of literary and biblical narratives, W.E.B. Du Bois represents the death of Frederick Douglass as a series of Platonic forms that leave him as the problematic prophet of blackness.
This paper was written for a class taught by Avital Ronnell at New York University on Walter Benj... more This paper was written for a class taught by Avital Ronnell at New York University on Walter Benjamin.
This paper looks at the biopic The Doors by Oliver Stone through the theory of Masochism as elabo... more This paper looks at the biopic The Doors by Oliver Stone through the theory of Masochism as elaborated by Gilles Deleuze.
Uploads
Papers by David J . Muldoon
Drafts by David J . Muldoon