Guess who's going to San Diego?

Okay, so it's not for a while yet, but that's good, because that way I'll have time to write the paper that I've proposed to present at the 2005 PCA/ACA Conference. But I'm psyched anyway! It's always cool when you get a paper accepted, even when you know the competition wasn't that stiff.

This was the abstract I submitted:

Roland the Gungslinger’s Generic Transformation

In the Afterword of The Gunslinger, Stephen King describes how Robert Browning’s poem “Child Roland to the Dark Tower Came” was his inspiration for Roland the Gunslinger. In the Dark Tower series, King transposes Roland from this eighteenth-century Romantic poem to a twentieth-century dark fantasy. Across genres, the details of the story change as do Roland’s responses to those elements, and thus the character himself changes as he moves from one genre to the next. While the family resemblance may be indefinite at times, Roland is old; the knight Roland in the eleventh century French epic The Song of Roland is a stalwart knight, whose actions speak louder than his words. In Orlando Furioso in the fourteenth-century, he follows conventions of the Romance to become a chivalrous but love-stricken madman.

Through each change, Roland’s character is transformed. These changes as Roland is transposed from genre to genre reflect the demands and conventions of those genres, the expectations of their audiences across the centuries, and the changing values that the hero embodies in each culture. Heroes of stories are heroes because they embody particular characteristics and it is these characteristics that the culture relating the story values most. The hero of the story is a model and performs a pedagogical function in holding up a mirror of what that culture values. In Stephen King’s incarnation of Roland, the character reflects the values of contemporary Western culture, just as each Roland before has embodied his culture.

[This does however mean that I should read the last two novels in the series, The Talisman (which explains about the levels of the tower) and maybe even Black House before writing the paper. !!! ]

Not only am I presenting a paper, but because I'm presenting a paper, I can get funding to offset the cost of the trip. If I can get a hostel and crash as many 'hospitality' suites as possible, my only out of pocket expenses might be souveniers. Bonus!

The best part about doing this is that the paper will give me a venue to make a kind of trial run with some of the theories I've been reading this year in Narrative Theory (a study that I haven't really had much experience with before) - I'm hoping the paper will let me get my sea legs so to speak in this area. Particularly since I'm trying to revise a paper I wrote for a class last year, with narrative theory in mind, for publication - which is a far bigger challenge than presenting at a conference.

Either way, it's probably a good bet that the weather in California for that weekend in March will be nicer than in New England!