This work started as an alternative to the required essay response for a graduate class, registered as L657, that covered new materialism and the related literary theory. I wanted to write something campy and fun as a reaction to how surreal it feels to take a philosophy class in the FAKE NEWS era, and I also wanted to write something that blurred the lines between an essay and an unrealized material object. I was reading Prometheus Unbound at the time, and I got the idea to write a screenplay in verse that would be impossible to perform, if that’s even possible, in which the main character (being a generic signifier for the modern grad student) would travel around New York City looking for answers to a question he doesn’t know how to ask with the help of the philosophers and literary theorists we were reading at the time.

I divided the work into rounds, which are based on the rounds of books we read and wrote on in the class. This first round, sort of a background round, covers works by Freud, Lacan, Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari. The most important works of literary theory and philosophy to keep in mind are D&G’s A Thousand Plateaus and Derrida’s White Mythology.

Despite the philosophical context, I hope that this work can be enjoyed by anybody interested in urban fantasy, poetry, and drama. One thing I want to point out is the function of the PROFESSOR in the work. I wrote that character in without any lines, but with places for her to speak, to allow for my professor to comment on the work by participating in the work, and I’ve chosen to leave these spaces blank in this posting to encourage that same type of dialog.

I’m very open to any type of criticism, and I’m looking forward to seeing what you have to say about my project. Thanks for reading!

The picture used to create this cover was taken from commons.wikipedia.org and is being used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. This picture was produced by Paolo Monti. A citation is listed below.

Monti, Paolo. “Photographs of Cats by Paolo Monti.” Wikimedia Commons, 31 Dec. 1951, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Photographs_of_cats_by_Paolo_Monti#/media/File:Paolo_Monti_-_Serie_fotografica_(Venezia,_1952)_-_BEIC_6346762.jpg.