The UNDEAD

Katie D.

February 28, 2009 - 11:15 AM

This spring I am participating in the Comparative Literature program's NOMAD undergraduate magazine. An essay of mine was published with them my freshman year but NOMAD was different back then. At that point the magazine was a compilation of essays written for comparative literature classes that were submitted for publication by professors. While I was honored to have my essay published in the magazine, I felt no real connection to that piece that I had, after all, only written because I had to for a class.

The graduate student editors of the NOMAD magazine decided to change the format because of people like me who sort of forgot to even pick up a copy of the publication they had contributed to. Now it is a huge process, a project separate from any class assignment and accomplished with the help of graduate student mentors. The essay topics coincide with the theme of the year, for which they also have speaker nights and events.

Last year's topic was TV series. While I did not participate in that project, it did sound like a very successful and entertaining series of writers, speakers, and events. The COLT (comparative literature) people are so funny: they can choose any topic to have undergraduates write serious papers on, and they chose TV. Then the undergraduate students who decided to participate wrote 8-10 page essays, participated in a conference to read their essays, and were helped along through the whole process by graduate student mentors.

When I heard they would be doing this writing project again this year, I was excited to participate. It's exciting to have another publication on my resume, and also to have the opportunity to work closely with a graduate student to improve my writing and the process of researching and writing a serious scholarly essay. I have also been looking for an opportunity to become more involved with my major and with my fellow COLT students. People who major in COLT rather than English Literature generally fall into two categories: they are either students who are deeply involved with the literature of a second literary tradition (you have to take literature in a second language to graduate with a COLT major), or they are simply the most nerdy of the people who would usually major in English. That's just an opinion, but it's based on experience in COLT classes as well as in my own life. People who are going to bother with a larger and more demanding major like COLT do it because they really love talking about books. And that's the kind of community I want to be writing, researching, and eating pizza with.

So perhaps you are wondering about the topic of this year's NOMAD magazine, maybe even with a discerning and concerned eye toward the title of this week's blog. Yes, friends and readers, that is correct. Out of all of the scholarly topics under the sun, this year's topic for undergraduate research and speaker series is the Undead. That means zombies, ghosts, robots, vampires, and any other being that has somehow been designated between the living and the dead. So from horror to folklore to comedic sketches, our group of ten or so undergraduate participants in the NOMAD magazine will be picking some literary undead figure and writing our hearts out.

Our topics are a great combination of genres, undead creatures, and focuses. We'll be looking at topics from Edgar Allen Poe to Shaun of the Dead, Sweeney Todd to Twilight to zombies and capitalism. Some proposed overarching themes include: displacement, identity, corporeality, the uncanny, feminism and nationalism. It will be, in short, a fabulous and possibly unique assembly of the undead joined together to teach us about our literary truths.

And so I will be working with a ghost who becomes more and more interesting the more I learn about her. Her name is La Llorona, or The Wailing Woman, and she is a Central American ghost who possibly dates back before the conquest of the Americas. Her story is traditionally told along the basic frame of a beautiful young lower class woman who marries a rich and handsome man. They have children and are perhaps happy for a time, but then the woman begins to feel that the man has begun to stray. When confronted by her husband's infidelity and disinterest she responds by drowning their children. And when she eventually dies she finds that she cannot enter heaven without those children, so she haunts waterways wailing for her dead children and searching for others to drown as well.

What originally interested me was hearing about her from my friend Sonya, who grew up in New Mexico and heard this story as part of her childhood in a white, middle class area. I was immediately interested in how the folktale has expanded across the border between nations, ethnicities, and class.

As I read more and more about this figure, I am encountering more and more interpretations of this ghost as a means of both maintaining and altering the culture of Hispanic women living in the United States. La Llorona is a figure from their country of origin, but is also a figure whose wailing voice can also cry out against the multiple layers of oppression that this population faces. Chicana literary leaders like Cherrie Moraga and Sandra Cisneros have written reinterpretations of this figure, as have many other authors in various ways and with various intentions.

So I will be examining La Llorona in the context of a folklore tradition intended both to maintain a group's cultural identity and to serve as an engine of social change in the world. I have an opportunity to use my Spanish skills, to work with the literature of a community I am deeply interested in, and get to know this ghost a little better.

I'll keep you posted. But for now, mark your calendars. There will be a formal conference on May 16th, and the whole array of undead figures and their undergraduate interpreters will be there.

Join us...if you dare.