Grotesque Bodies: Hybridity and Focalization in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris

This chapter argues that Victor Hugo’s historical Gothic novel Notre-Dame de Paris (1831)—especially in its popular English translation, Hunchback of Notre Dame (1833)—set a precedent in Victorian fiction for investigating the disabled body through narrative form and focalization. The chapter shows how Hugo uses external focalization from a perspective outside the narrative action to portray the disabled body as grotesque and thus inherently deviant but uses strategic internal focalization through characters inside the narrative to destabilize the boundaries between normalcy and abnormality. In particular, focalizing externally on Quasimodo, Hugo separates reader empathy from him and dehumanizes his body; but focalizing through Quasimodo forces readers to share his embodiment, removing the distinction between self and other. Moreover, the chapter contends that the novel’s structural hybridity, which combines disparate genres, enables the dialogic conflict of these two opposing voices and so provides a structural prototype whereby Victorian novels approached disability.

Mixing and Mingling Queerly: The Activist Sociality of Mentoring in the Personal Narratives of Coloma and Lorde

Edward Chamberlain takes on the pressing need for mentorship for queer youth, in particular queer youth of color. Addressing a dearth in both studies on and commitment to the wellness and flourishing of queer youth of color in institutions of higher learning, Chamberlain turns to what is in some respects both a traditional and nontraditional archive of resources: personal narrative writing by queer people of color. Taking up both Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name and Roland Sintos Coloma’s “Fragmented Entries, Multiple Selves,” Chamberlain argues that the structural hybridity of these narratives serves as a formal model for a queer mentoring methodology, and delves into the texts themselves for examples of how to mentor queer youth of color in and beyond the academy. Chamberlain’s intervention is at the same time vitally theoretical and practical; sources such as those that he analyzes may be nontraditional to institutions of higher learning, but are often circulated informally for the precise purposes Chamberlain describes.

Structural hybridity and supernumerary chromosomes in a diploid Tradescantia hirsuticaulis

Cytological study of a diploid (2n = 12) population of Tradescantia hirsuticaulis Small from Stone Mountain, Georgia, revealed striking variation in four plants growing in a cluster, indicating that they constitute different genotypes. The occurrence of B chromosomes, fragments, and aneusomaty in the plants is associated with structural hybridity in the chromosomes. Two plants were homozygotes with simple meiotic pairing, one was heterozygous for a reciprocal translocation, and the other was a heterozygote for two interchanges as well as for inversions. The behavior and the origin of B chromosomes, fragments, and structural hybridity are discussed.