Academic work.

I argue that we are able to discover new meanings in, and form new interpretations of, a literary text because all literary texts share a common feature— generative ambiguity. This form of ambiguity is not merely something the reader may find in a given work of literature. It is necessary to all literary texts and is part of the foundation upon which the literary text is built, the hallmark of what makes works of literature unique. Drawing on both structural and narrative examples from my trans-historical novel, as well as sources such as Derek Attridge, Umberto Eco, Wolfgang Iser, and Louise Rosenblatt, I explore the ways in which generative ambiguity is a critical and necessary feature of the literary text. I also explore the act of reading a literary text and argue that the transactive relationship between reader and text offers a profound and vital contribution to social space and explains why engaging with the ambiguity of the literary text can make a vital contribution to a just society.

(Dissertation for PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Aberdeen, 2023).

This chapter introduces a useful modernity into the elegance of the steam era. While Wells and Verne conceived of a futuristic world in the mode of the Victorian era, the neo-Victorian can bring the twenty-first century back into the past and make it run on steam, gears, and strange chemistry. In an era that embraces imprisoning the ghost in the machine, hiding the mechanics behind slick, slim boxes, where the smaller, lighter, less imposing is king. The rise of neo-Victorian literature and, with it, the steampunk movement, seems to be a reaction to the post-Victorian attempt to box and bury the ghost in the machine. Children are drawn to a today in which there are dinosaurs or automatons. Dinosaurs are as real as dragons or automatons, and anything is possible in the mind of a child. The desire to reveal and remain hidden continues to battle for dominance.

(The Victorian Era in Twenty-First Century Children’s and Adolescent Literature and Culture, 2018).

This thesis contends that ambiguity in meaning performs an essential role in the reader’s response to literature. Ambiguity is not simply an incidental or marginal feature of literary texts but relates in basic ways to the reader’s experience of literature. It is the still point around which a literary text revolves. In examining the function of ambiguity in literary texts, I will show how ambiguity both defines a text as literary and allows it to live and grow through time. The notion of a text is meaningless apart from the reading of it, and, ambiguity, in the unchanging presence of the words, allows for the meaning of the text to evolve with every reading of it. Discussions of Aristotle, Saint Augustine, and Wolfgang Iser bring together the historical and modern understanding of literary texts. Through the examples of Sophocles’s drama, Oedipus the King, T. S. Eliot’s poem, Burnt Norton in Four Quartets and Henry James’s short novella, The Turn of the Screw, I demonstrate how the reading of a text allows literature to become an evolving experience into which the reader breathes life, so that literature can unfold as an unending history of meanings.

(Master's Thesis for MA in English & Comparative Literature from the American University in Cairo, 2013).