A&S Researcher of the Month: Kelly Marsh
Kelly Marsh
The College of Arts and Sciences at Mississippi State has named Kelly Marsh, an associate professor in the Department of English, Researcher of the Month for September.
Marsh’s research is in feminist and rhetorical narrative theory, which explores how narrative structures are constituted within and constitutive of the rhetorical and historical situations in which they function.
Marsh’s forthcoming book, The Submerged Plot and the Mother’s Pleasure from Jane Austen to Arundhati Roy, explores how the unnarratable can be communicated in fiction and expands our understanding of narrative progression. She analyzes novels of motherless daughters over two centuries from the U.S., England, Ireland, and India, including Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina.
She finds that the familiar, overt plot of the motherless daughter growing into maturity is accompanied by a submerged plot that has multiple consequences for the overall narrative progression. As the daughter approaches adulthood and marriage, she seeks validation for her sexual pleasure in her mother’s story. However, because the mother’s pleasure is taboo under patriarchy and is therefore unnarratable, the daughter must seek her mother’s story by repeating it. These repetitions alert us to the ways the two plots are intertwined, and they alter our perception of the narrative progression.
The book will be part of the Theory and Interpretation of Narrative Series at Ohio State University Press. Her work on Jane Eyre (which won South Atlantic Review’s essay prize) will be reprinted in the forthcoming critical edition of the novel published by W.W. Norton & Company.
Marsh’s work has also appeared in journals including Narrative, Journal of Narrative Theory, Studies in the Novel, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. She is a faculty associate with MSU’s Center for Teaching and Learning, and she has been the recipient of the Outstanding Honors Faculty Award and the Mississippi Humanities Council Teaching Award. She has served as director of undergraduate studies in English and as acting department head.
Editor's note: The Arts & Sciences Researcher of the Month is provided by the College of Arts and Sciences at MSU. For additional information, please see www.cas.msstate.edu/research or contact Karyn Brown at kbrown@deanas.msstate.edu or 662-325-7952.
