I am a freelance copyeditor and proofreader specializing in academic publications in the humanities, social sciences, and international law. I have degrees in English Literature from York and Oxford and pursue a wide range of research subjects in my spare time, including Burma studies, the art of writing, philosophy, politics, and culture. I upload here a selection of unpublished papers I wrote at university on themes within literary studies in the hope that they may encourage debate and prove useful reading to others. If you wish to reference any of my papers in your own work, please follow COPE's Guidelines on Good Publication Practice.
This unpublished BA degree short essay rereads Foucault's 'What is an Author' through the lens of... more This unpublished BA degree short essay rereads Foucault's 'What is an Author' through the lens of Jorge Luis Borges' 'Borges and I'.
Submitted as my BA dissertation at York, this paper revisits two key literary texts that are seld... more Submitted as my BA dissertation at York, this paper revisits two key literary texts that are seldom analysed together in order to draw out some key themes and influences in the representation and depiction of Burma and the Burmese subaltern subject. With the ongoing fundamental changes that are occurring in contemporary Burma, it is now an urgent matter for the field of literary postcolonial studies to begin to draw Burma and Burmese literature into the critical fold, from which it has been relatively absent. As a corollary, those texts produced in the West that have in some way depicted or ‘imagined’ Burma should be re-examined and this paper focuses on a novel produced in the ‘colonial’ period – George Orwell’s Burmese Days (1934) – and a literary work produced almost seventy years later – Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace (2002). The driving force of this analysis is the concern with how each text interacts with the realities of colonialism in Burma and their effect on the consciousness of the human subject, on the lives of ordinary individuals; be they European, Burmese or Indian. It also marks out a surprising influence upon Ghosh’s work which originates from Burma itself – Mya Than Tint’s On the Road to Mandalay: Tales of Ordinary People (1996) – and which is suggestive of a potential future methodology in drawing Burmese literature into the critical fold. I argue that it is through a concern for the power of communication and an interest in the everyday lives of ordinary people that both Ghosh and Tint figure human resistance to overbearing political structures, and that it is in this same arena that the poignancy of Orwell’s tragic hero’s failure is felt in its fullest force.
This unpublished master's degree paper rereads V.S. Naipaul's 'Finding the Centre' through the th... more This unpublished master's degree paper rereads V.S. Naipaul's 'Finding the Centre' through the theoretical framework of relational life-writing developed by John Paul Eakin with the view of understanding what Naipaul's text does with the 'relational life' to generate different kinds of insight and how it might complicate or expand aspects of Eakin's developmental model. Whereas Eakin focuses on the therapeutic and developmental aspect of relational life-writing, its emphasis on the physiological dimensions of selfhood, and its assumptions about the uses of the biography of the other for the autobiography of the self, Naipaul's text refashions the genre in order to generate insights concerned with the nature of decolonisation, the world of migration and diaspora, and the distinction between the representation of a life lived and of a writer’s life.
This unpublished master's degree paper examines the founding moment of Routledge's book series on... more This unpublished master's degree paper examines the founding moment of Routledge's book series on literary theory and criticism, the New Critical Idiom, looking specifically at the institutional, material and commercial factors at play in how the book series functions. The paper seeks to open up wider questions about the canonisation of critical works, the professional status in the academy of the published book, and how a book series, as a unique construction which is both professionally and commercially motivated, might reify discursive categories and privilege certain interpretative practices.
This unpublished master's degree paper examines how the reader is both implicated in the invisibl... more This unpublished master's degree paper examines how the reader is both implicated in the invisible violence from which the novel derives its energy and denied the spectacle of terror in the disavowal of narrative closure. Providing a counterbalance to the one-sided and monumentalising tendencies of news media and American public rhetoric, the novel resituates the events of 9/11 in a wider context of historical violence and exposes the neo-imperialist features of American ideology in a globalized world. It draws out the structural violence inherent in such a system and paints the portrait of a man humiliated by his own complicity. Through the staging of a mimetic standoff at the culmination of a monologue underscored by the perpetual creation of "suspense effects", The Reluctant Fundamentalist locates the true "terror" in the anticipation for bloody resolution, an anticipation rooted in the blurring of the real and the imaginary in the terrible spectacle. The paper concludes by proposing that by being suspended in a realm of possibility, the reader is reconnected to the possible modes of resistance to the totalising effects of terror from both external and internal forces.
Submitted as my master's thesis at Oxford, this paper addresses a lacuna in contemporary postcolo... more Submitted as my master's thesis at Oxford, this paper addresses a lacuna in contemporary postcolonial and world literary scholarship by focusing on the under-articulated area of Burmese representation in the novel form during the post-British empire period. Focusing on two novels of modern Burma produced in two different historical and literary contexts by Ma Ma Lay and Wendy Law-Yone, my analysis draws on the theoretical frameworks of Partha Chatterjee and Walter D. Mignolo to identify how multiple iterations of Burmese modernities and identities have been imagined and produced in negotiation with dominant discourses of Western hegemony and the versions of history they promulgate.
This unpublished BA degree short essay rereads Foucault's 'What is an Author' through the lens of... more This unpublished BA degree short essay rereads Foucault's 'What is an Author' through the lens of Jorge Luis Borges' 'Borges and I'.
Submitted as my BA dissertation at York, this paper revisits two key literary texts that are seld... more Submitted as my BA dissertation at York, this paper revisits two key literary texts that are seldom analysed together in order to draw out some key themes and influences in the representation and depiction of Burma and the Burmese subaltern subject. With the ongoing fundamental changes that are occurring in contemporary Burma, it is now an urgent matter for the field of literary postcolonial studies to begin to draw Burma and Burmese literature into the critical fold, from which it has been relatively absent. As a corollary, those texts produced in the West that have in some way depicted or ‘imagined’ Burma should be re-examined and this paper focuses on a novel produced in the ‘colonial’ period – George Orwell’s Burmese Days (1934) – and a literary work produced almost seventy years later – Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace (2002). The driving force of this analysis is the concern with how each text interacts with the realities of colonialism in Burma and their effect on the consciousness of the human subject, on the lives of ordinary individuals; be they European, Burmese or Indian. It also marks out a surprising influence upon Ghosh’s work which originates from Burma itself – Mya Than Tint’s On the Road to Mandalay: Tales of Ordinary People (1996) – and which is suggestive of a potential future methodology in drawing Burmese literature into the critical fold. I argue that it is through a concern for the power of communication and an interest in the everyday lives of ordinary people that both Ghosh and Tint figure human resistance to overbearing political structures, and that it is in this same arena that the poignancy of Orwell’s tragic hero’s failure is felt in its fullest force.
This unpublished master's degree paper rereads V.S. Naipaul's 'Finding the Centre' through the th... more This unpublished master's degree paper rereads V.S. Naipaul's 'Finding the Centre' through the theoretical framework of relational life-writing developed by John Paul Eakin with the view of understanding what Naipaul's text does with the 'relational life' to generate different kinds of insight and how it might complicate or expand aspects of Eakin's developmental model. Whereas Eakin focuses on the therapeutic and developmental aspect of relational life-writing, its emphasis on the physiological dimensions of selfhood, and its assumptions about the uses of the biography of the other for the autobiography of the self, Naipaul's text refashions the genre in order to generate insights concerned with the nature of decolonisation, the world of migration and diaspora, and the distinction between the representation of a life lived and of a writer’s life.
This unpublished master's degree paper examines the founding moment of Routledge's book series on... more This unpublished master's degree paper examines the founding moment of Routledge's book series on literary theory and criticism, the New Critical Idiom, looking specifically at the institutional, material and commercial factors at play in how the book series functions. The paper seeks to open up wider questions about the canonisation of critical works, the professional status in the academy of the published book, and how a book series, as a unique construction which is both professionally and commercially motivated, might reify discursive categories and privilege certain interpretative practices.
This unpublished master's degree paper examines how the reader is both implicated in the invisibl... more This unpublished master's degree paper examines how the reader is both implicated in the invisible violence from which the novel derives its energy and denied the spectacle of terror in the disavowal of narrative closure. Providing a counterbalance to the one-sided and monumentalising tendencies of news media and American public rhetoric, the novel resituates the events of 9/11 in a wider context of historical violence and exposes the neo-imperialist features of American ideology in a globalized world. It draws out the structural violence inherent in such a system and paints the portrait of a man humiliated by his own complicity. Through the staging of a mimetic standoff at the culmination of a monologue underscored by the perpetual creation of "suspense effects", The Reluctant Fundamentalist locates the true "terror" in the anticipation for bloody resolution, an anticipation rooted in the blurring of the real and the imaginary in the terrible spectacle. The paper concludes by proposing that by being suspended in a realm of possibility, the reader is reconnected to the possible modes of resistance to the totalising effects of terror from both external and internal forces.
Submitted as my master's thesis at Oxford, this paper addresses a lacuna in contemporary postcolo... more Submitted as my master's thesis at Oxford, this paper addresses a lacuna in contemporary postcolonial and world literary scholarship by focusing on the under-articulated area of Burmese representation in the novel form during the post-British empire period. Focusing on two novels of modern Burma produced in two different historical and literary contexts by Ma Ma Lay and Wendy Law-Yone, my analysis draws on the theoretical frameworks of Partha Chatterjee and Walter D. Mignolo to identify how multiple iterations of Burmese modernities and identities have been imagined and produced in negotiation with dominant discourses of Western hegemony and the versions of history they promulgate.
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