Matt Fulton | Writer + Filmmaker

Cosmic Horror in Contemporary Films attempts to explain a rather tricky subset of the genre, that is, how filmmakers can create monsters on screen that are, by their very nature, unknowable and indescribable. I first discuss a general overview of the history of Lovecraftian horror, attempted to explain what it is, and then devoted time to how Bird Box, Annihilation, and True Detective all handle aspects of Lovecraftian horror in different ways.

The Death of Deterrence: The Utility of Nuclear Weapons in Age of Fearless Foes explores the role of mutually assured destruction (MAD) doctrine in discouraging direct conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War and asks whether MAD can continue to be effective against contemporary adversaries who do not fear, in some cases even await, their own destruction.

This original version of this paper was presented at the 2010 Naval Academy Foreign Affairs Conference in Annapolis, Maryland on a roundtable entitled, “Weapons of Mass Distraction?: An Examination of Global Nuclear Relationships.”

How Kubrick’s Paths of Glory Turns the “Anti-War” Film Inside Out analyzes this early work by Stanley Kubrick in the 1950s and describes how it establishes a unique anti-war sentiment that builds in several of Kubrick’s later films. Essentially, the thesis of the paper is that Kubrick’s anti-war message isn’t that, “War is bad, it hurts people, and you shouldn’t do it,” but that, “War is sometimes necessary and serves a purpose; the problem is when arrogant get in the way to the detriment of the men they’ve been sworn to lead.”

The Liberation of the Artist from Neoclassicism to Aestheticism examines these popular literary-critical theories and demonstrates how two marginalized English writers in their time, Aphra Behn and Oscar Wilde, harnessed their tenets to push back against bigotry, chauvinism, and elitist notions of what constituted worthy forms of art. In so doing, one can see how the phrase “art for art’s sake,” at its core, reaches back to the fundamental human desires for freedom of expression, to be able to live authentically and to share that authenticity of self with the world through art.

On the Nature of Violence in the Táin examines the savage depictions of early-medieval warfare in this epic Irish tale and explains the enduring post-colonial resonances of its demigod protagonist.

The Nature of Madness in King Lear is a concise paper that questions if King Lear in Shakespeare’s play was, in fact, mad or not, an aspect of his character that has been long debated. I don’t offer a clear yes-or-no answer in the argument, mostly because textual evidence in the play does not offer one, but I also suggest that such clarity is unnecessary to understanding the character; I’m suggesting that the whole debate is irrelevant.

Sympathy for the Devil: An Analysis of Mephistopheles in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is an analysis of the demonic character Mephistopheles in Christopher Marlowe’s sixteenth-century play, Doctor Faustus. Marlowe’s tragedy is likely also my favorite play, and I wholly enjoyed the opportunity to talk about how the writer created this flawed, even sympathetic demonic character who maintains nefarious hidden motives throughout the story.

This paper was published in the Spring 2018 edition of the Scarlet Review at Rutgers University–Camden.

W.B. Yeats’s Rehabilitation of the Dead compares the treatment of two Irish historical figures—Charles Parnell in the 1914 poem “To A Shade” and Jonathan Swift in the 1930 play The Words Upon the Window Pane—to the political beliefs and personal grudges held by this giant of 20th-century literature, examining how Yeats conjures the ghosts of these men to redress what he feels to have been egregious wrongs.