ashley's bio

I'm from San Diego (specifically Encinitas which is in north county). From my room I can see the ocean and there are these four palm trees on the horizon that I'm obsessed with, just these four straight palm trees almost always silhouetted rising up from the beachfront apartments and bushes and stuff. I'm a senior English major with a focus in Philosophy. I'm working on a thesis on Virginia Woolf (which makes me barf a little - I would've wanted to be someone writing about Dostoevsky or Eliot or Kubrick, someone edgier) and intersections of neuroscience and narrative theory, particularly with respect to how knowledge of self/other is accessed. Theater is the thing I do. I'm currently devising a freakyyyyyy adaptation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, which I fully hope is gonna scare the shit out of Stanford. It's ultra violent and it's gonna be out on the Lake and other wild parts of campus and the audience is going to hold flashlights and that'll be the main source of light and all the characters' storylines are going to unfold simultaneously so you can follow around whoever you want, and basically it's gonna be pretty sick. This summer I'm going (back) to Berlin to intern at ArtLaboratory, which is a cool exhibition space, and next year I'm studying dramaturgy (I think of it as the intersection of English Literature and Theater) at Yale Drama. Oh and funny fact: my family is Korean but most people assume we're Chinese because of the Chang, and my dad's been trying to get us to change our last name to Garcia or Beethoven to get rid of all confusion, plus it'd only take some paperwork and a small fee, and I'm pretty down with either of those but my mom and little brother aren't really having it, and the dog is abstaining. I don’t think that there’s such a thing as a new story now. Of course every newly conceived story is new in the sense that it is comprised of a different set and ordering of words and events. But in the context of this question, I prefer to think of stories more broadly, as stories of, for example, war or love, because I don’t think a story is reducible to its technical, literal content. A story isn’t merely what’s on the page; it’s greater than the sum of its words. A book is the sum of its words (and pages and publishing information and so on). So on my view, a book may contain several stories, all housed by the same narrative structure and all combined in some special way into some kind of über-story. I’ll distinguish between stories and books from now on, stories being fluid entities that may be considered identical even if the words used to tell them differ, and books being concretely manifested entities that may only be considered identical if all the words used to make them up are the same. I realize that there are flaws in this way of thinking. But I want to hang on to the intuition that one story could be told in different ways. And this is at the core of my view that there are no new stories. I don’t know how many stories there are because I’m just one individual, and maybe I’ve heard them all and maybe I haven’t. I don’t know if it even can be known how many stories there are. But for the sake of my argument I think I have to commit to the idea that there is some finite number of stories. They just exist in different forms. Maybe at the beginning of civilization there were new stories. Maybe new stories exist but haven’t been discovered yet. These are possibilities, but I don’t think they contradict what I’m saying. I also want to say that under my view, originality is still possible, not through innovations in story-content (remember that I mean story in a loose sense) but through innovations in story-form, in storytelling. So I think that there are such things as new books and that new books are continuously being produced. And these books have different content from one another and from everything that came before and are original precisely for the content of their new content. A recent book on sex trafficking is new. But the stories, however specific to a prominent sex worker’s clientele or to an abducted girl’s childhood, contained within that book are (probably) not new. They’re probably stories of love and horror and innocence lost, and we’ve probably heard iterations of those stories before. I should clarify my definitions of content and form. I wouldn’t consider the content of the sex trafficking über-story to be the stuff about the sex worker and the abducted girl. I would consider the stuff about them the form. The content of the sex trafficking über-story is the compilation of the stories of love and horror and innocence lost. So whereas the content of the sex trafficking book could be the stuff about the sex worker and the abducted girl, the content of the sex trafficking über-story is more than that. The stuff about the sex worker and the abducted girl is reduced to the level of form. This way, I can say that Paradise Lost tells some of the same stories but makes use of different forms.