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Mharlyn Merritt

Fairleigh Dickinson University, Creative Writing, Alumna

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Mharlyn Merritt has an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Fiction and Poetry from Fairleigh-Dickinson University where she served as a fiction reader for The Literary Review. She also served as a first-round reader for the 2017 Community of Literary Magazines and Presses' Firecracker Fiction Awards.

Mharlyn was a Poet-of the Week at PoetrySuperhighway.com and was a semi-finalist in the 2016 Kind of a Hurricane Editor’s Choice Awards. Mharlyn's poetry has been published in various publications including the War, Art and Literature Journal and Scotland's The Poet's Republic.

Her work as a features writer has appeared in Examiner.com, The Philadelphia Daily News and The Village Voice. She was nominated by the University of Pennsylvania for the International Year of Women’s Print Feature Writing Award.

Mharlyn was a judge at the 2003 Philadelphia Film Festival and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Jazz Performance. She was living in London when she wrote her first novel THE ACTOR. She currently lives and writes in Philadelphia where she is at work on her second novel, The Rachel Montoya Story.

Blog: www.wordsmithinthefilmpool.com
Music website: www.mharlynmerritt.com
Supervisors: David Grand, Walter Cummins, and Rene Steinke

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Papers by Mharlyn Merritt

Close Reading of Nabokov's The Real Sebastian Knight

Nabokov’s first novel in the English language is an amazing biography within a novel about a biog... more Nabokov’s first novel in the English language is an amazing biography within a novel about a biography. It is just as much about the art of writing as it is about those who practice it; the unknown quantity of the equation being “the soul buried with Sebastian.”
As the novel commences, novelist Sebastian Knight has been dead for two months. Understanding that “deep still apparatus” is what Sebastian’s younger half brother, the narrator “V” of the novel, strives to do as he gathers information for his biography entitled: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.

MerrittClose Reading, City of Glass.docx

The author of City of Glass introduces the protagonist Daniel Quinn, the focal character Manhatta... more The author of City of Glass introduces the protagonist Daniel Quinn, the focal character Manhattan and the intimate relationship between the two early on through Quinn’s walks through the City. It is through Quinn’s relationship with Manhattan that existential themes such as nothingness and the search for identity and meaning are explored in City of Glass.

The Character of Oedipa Maas

Between the opening scenes of domesticity and the closing scenes of the "crying" of Lot 49, Oedip... more Between the opening scenes of domesticity and the closing scenes of the "crying" of Lot 49, Oedipa is like the hero in a book of "The Faerie Queene," tempted from her human virtues while on a quest that takes her through all manner of seemingly prearranged weirdness and monstrosity, all kinds of foreign "systems" thriving within an America which is itself "a grand and so intricate enigma. "-Richard Poirier, New York Times Book Review, May 1, 1966

Wordplay as a comedic device in the novel, The Information by Martin Amis (First Vintage International Edition, March 1996)

There is certain lugubriousness to Martin Amis’s writing (e.g. London Fields) that taints even th... more There is certain lugubriousness to Martin Amis’s writing (e.g. London Fields) that taints even the funny bits with an undercurrent of antipathy, but then there are the funny bits. The Information’s basic premise is laugh out loud hilarious: Robert Tull, a writer whose talents and career have gone down the toilet, incensed at the seemingly undeserved literary success of his best friend, Gwyn Barry, goes on a mission to “fuck him up.” This mission goes horribly awry, it must go horribly awry, for therein lies the stuff of comedy.

The Function of Form in, The Seven Ages by Louise Gluck (Harper Collins, New York, NY 2011)

Rene Magritte's Treason of Images: This is not a painting - it's a linguistic manifesto

Memory, Authenticity and the Unreliable Narrator in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel When We Were Orphans (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2000)

British author Kazuo Ishiguro’s fifth novel, When We Were Orphans reveals the unreliability of it... more British author Kazuo Ishiguro’s fifth novel, When We Were Orphans reveals the unreliability of its narrator through the intratextual device of memory. This craft essay explores Ishiguro’s failure to fully utilize phrasal verbs, (so prevalent in every day English) which renders the narrator unreliable in a way that is probably unintentional.

How sexual objectification is used to cast the victimizer as victim in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (The Annotated Lolita, Vintage Books, 1991)

By sexually objectifying his prey and re-classifying them as inhuman creatures with preternatural... more By sexually objectifying his prey and re-classifying them as inhuman creatures with preternatural powers, Humbert Humbert, the protagonist in Nabokov's ground-breaking novel LOLITA, is able to then cast himself as victim. This craft essay examines how Nabokov achieves this deception by inventing the “nymphet.”

How place defines the intersection of the personal and the political in Ronen Bennett’s ZUGZWANG (Bloomsbury Publishing, London 2007)

St. Petersburg, Russia during the legendary 1914 Chess Tournament is the chessboard where Ronan B... more St. Petersburg, Russia during the legendary 1914 Chess Tournament is the chessboard where Ronan Bennett situates his characters in the novel ZUGZWANG in order to explore, through place, the intersection of the personal and the political by using, staging, voice and patterning. This craft essay evaluates the literary tools Mr. Bennett uses to effectively construct this novel.

Drafts by Mharlyn Merritt

This is not a Painting.docx

One of the key elements of a paradox is that the point in question leads to a contradiction, whic... more One of the key elements of a paradox is that the point in question leads to a contradiction, which defies intuition. The premise appears not to be true or all the elements cannot be true together. This is the world of Rene Magritte where paradox reigns and the habitual and commonplace go out the window. Many of Magritte’s images and their juxtapositions are rooted in his knowledge and respect for the work of linguist/semiotican Ferdinand de Saussure. But primarily Magritte’s goal was to call into question bourgeois notions of reality.

From the Sublime to the Meticulous:Close Reading of Gore' Vidal's Myra Breckenridge.docx

In the hands of a lesser writer, the story of Myra who began life as Myron, would be trashy, lasc... more In the hands of a lesser writer, the story of Myra who began life as Myron, would be trashy, lascivious and unintentionally funny, sort of like a Jaqueline Susann novel (of whom Gore Vidal reputedly said” She doesn’t write - she types.”) However, this tale of sexual liberation in the extreme was in the hands of a master: one who had the depth of knowledge about culture, human nature, and language to use Bathos in Myra Breckenridge incisively as a tool to challenge social norms and attack societal hypocrisies while giving the reader a good laugh.

" Irrational urges " in Eleven, a collection of short stories by

A close reading of Patricia Highsmith's short story collection ELEVEN reveals the author's use of... more

Close Reading of Nabokov's The Real Sebastian Knight

Nabokov’s first novel in the English language is an amazing biography within a novel about a biog... more Nabokov’s first novel in the English language is an amazing biography within a novel about a biography. It is just as much about the art of writing as it is about those who practice it; the unknown quantity of the equation being “the soul buried with Sebastian.”
As the novel commences, novelist Sebastian Knight has been dead for two months. Understanding that “deep still apparatus” is what Sebastian’s younger half brother, the narrator “V” of the novel, strives to do as he gathers information for his biography entitled: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.

MerrittClose Reading, City of Glass.docx

The author of City of Glass introduces the protagonist Daniel Quinn, the focal character Manhatta... more The author of City of Glass introduces the protagonist Daniel Quinn, the focal character Manhattan and the intimate relationship between the two early on through Quinn’s walks through the City. It is through Quinn’s relationship with Manhattan that existential themes such as nothingness and the search for identity and meaning are explored in City of Glass.

The Character of Oedipa Maas

Between the opening scenes of domesticity and the closing scenes of the "crying" of Lot 49, Oedip... more Between the opening scenes of domesticity and the closing scenes of the "crying" of Lot 49, Oedipa is like the hero in a book of "The Faerie Queene," tempted from her human virtues while on a quest that takes her through all manner of seemingly prearranged weirdness and monstrosity, all kinds of foreign "systems" thriving within an America which is itself "a grand and so intricate enigma. "-Richard Poirier, New York Times Book Review, May 1, 1966

Wordplay as a comedic device in the novel, The Information by Martin Amis (First Vintage International Edition, March 1996)

There is certain lugubriousness to Martin Amis’s writing (e.g. London Fields) that taints even th... more There is certain lugubriousness to Martin Amis’s writing (e.g. London Fields) that taints even the funny bits with an undercurrent of antipathy, but then there are the funny bits. The Information’s basic premise is laugh out loud hilarious: Robert Tull, a writer whose talents and career have gone down the toilet, incensed at the seemingly undeserved literary success of his best friend, Gwyn Barry, goes on a mission to “fuck him up.” This mission goes horribly awry, it must go horribly awry, for therein lies the stuff of comedy.

The Function of Form in, The Seven Ages by Louise Gluck (Harper Collins, New York, NY 2011)

Rene Magritte's Treason of Images: This is not a painting - it's a linguistic manifesto

Memory, Authenticity and the Unreliable Narrator in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel When We Were Orphans (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2000)

British author Kazuo Ishiguro’s fifth novel, When We Were Orphans reveals the unreliability of it... more British author Kazuo Ishiguro’s fifth novel, When We Were Orphans reveals the unreliability of its narrator through the intratextual device of memory. This craft essay explores Ishiguro’s failure to fully utilize phrasal verbs, (so prevalent in every day English) which renders the narrator unreliable in a way that is probably unintentional.

How sexual objectification is used to cast the victimizer as victim in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (The Annotated Lolita, Vintage Books, 1991)

By sexually objectifying his prey and re-classifying them as inhuman creatures with preternatural... more By sexually objectifying his prey and re-classifying them as inhuman creatures with preternatural powers, Humbert Humbert, the protagonist in Nabokov's ground-breaking novel LOLITA, is able to then cast himself as victim. This craft essay examines how Nabokov achieves this deception by inventing the “nymphet.”

How place defines the intersection of the personal and the political in Ronen Bennett’s ZUGZWANG (Bloomsbury Publishing, London 2007)

St. Petersburg, Russia during the legendary 1914 Chess Tournament is the chessboard where Ronan B... more St. Petersburg, Russia during the legendary 1914 Chess Tournament is the chessboard where Ronan Bennett situates his characters in the novel ZUGZWANG in order to explore, through place, the intersection of the personal and the political by using, staging, voice and patterning. This craft essay evaluates the literary tools Mr. Bennett uses to effectively construct this novel.

This is not a Painting.docx

One of the key elements of a paradox is that the point in question leads to a contradiction, whic... more One of the key elements of a paradox is that the point in question leads to a contradiction, which defies intuition. The premise appears not to be true or all the elements cannot be true together. This is the world of Rene Magritte where paradox reigns and the habitual and commonplace go out the window. Many of Magritte’s images and their juxtapositions are rooted in his knowledge and respect for the work of linguist/semiotican Ferdinand de Saussure. But primarily Magritte’s goal was to call into question bourgeois notions of reality.

From the Sublime to the Meticulous:Close Reading of Gore' Vidal's Myra Breckenridge.docx

In the hands of a lesser writer, the story of Myra who began life as Myron, would be trashy, lasc... more In the hands of a lesser writer, the story of Myra who began life as Myron, would be trashy, lascivious and unintentionally funny, sort of like a Jaqueline Susann novel (of whom Gore Vidal reputedly said” She doesn’t write - she types.”) However, this tale of sexual liberation in the extreme was in the hands of a master: one who had the depth of knowledge about culture, human nature, and language to use Bathos in Myra Breckenridge incisively as a tool to challenge social norms and attack societal hypocrisies while giving the reader a good laugh.

" Irrational urges " in Eleven, a collection of short stories by

A close reading of Patricia Highsmith's short story collection ELEVEN reveals the author's use of... more