Project Proposal -- Voices of the Creators in House of Leaves and Haunted

House of Leaves/Haunted Proposal

              

               My final project will pick up where my most recent blog post left off with discussion on the voices present in House of Leaves compared to the voices of Haunted. I will continue to discuss how the female voice is suppressed in HoL, but is assertive in Haunted. My argument is under development, but will focus on why recognizing these voices helps to understand each piece individually, and the reasons that the siblings created the pieces. This will especially examine the role that their father’s death and their family life in general influenced the works. A counterargument to this would be that, each sibling created unique artwork that have similar topics and feelings, but speak about different themes.

Generally, I will take some of major points of my previous paper and expand on them. I plan to go deeper into analysis of Haunted by commenting on most, or all songs, and House of Leaves with the new reading. For the remainder of the songs on Haunted, I plan to analyze and explain some of the more personal songs like “House of Leaves” and “If You Were Here” to discuss Poe’s motives in more depth. As I wrote in my short blog this week, the interview with Karen is remarkable for understanding how the female is suppressed, but gaining a voice as she is the editor Navidson’s life and work. Because of a certain amount of ambiguity about Zampano’s repression of his female visitors, I will attempt to give more evidence of this. I will include relevant examples from the final week of reading of House of Leaves as well.

I found the Marcuse’s concept of estrangement to be useful. It would be beneficial for my essay to discuss how, when analyzed together, the works estrange the audience to show the truth of the siblings’ motivations. I will discuss the ways in which the works estrange the audience, through methods like the competing voices and references back and for between works.

For my initial use of sources, I will use:

House of Leaves – for discussion on the masculine voice, how it polarized with Haunted, and why Mark would use the masculine voice and suppress the feminine in order to demonstrate his life with his father/family

Haunted – similar idea as HoL, but with the feminine voice as dominant and masculine as suppressed and why Poe would choose this method

One-Dimensional Man – Using the idea of estrangement to understand the siblings motivations

What’s beneath the Floorboards: Three Competing Metavoices in the Footnotes of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves by Michael Hemmingson – a scholarly article that discusses the three masculine voices of HoL and what the interactions between voices mean

Interview with Poe from Hip Online – Use to understand some of the family history from Poe’s perspective and some support for my own analysis of her songs.

(Possible… still searching): Some work by their father to understand what he was like and what impact he would have had on the siblings