Toward an Ever-new Horizon: A Metacritical Analysis of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room

Master of Arts (English) candidate: Nico Hernando

4 December 2026

2:30 PM Atlantic

Hybrid Defence

KCIC Meeting Room

Join: https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/2865399645368980?p=0qyaxbxIbxaWCqeVtm
Meeting ID: 286 539 964 536 898 0
Passcode: sc7mM9C8

Thesis Committee

Dr. Lisa Narbesbuber, Supervisor
Dr. Lance La Rocque, Internal Examiner
Dr. Rohan Ghatage, UNB, External Examiner
Dr. Nandini Thiyagarajan, Acting Head of Department
Dr. Jesse Carlson, Chair of the defence

Abstract

This thesis ventures to extend, revise, and transpose Pekka Kilpeläinen’s seminal understanding about how the concept of utopia operates in James Baldwin’s novels. The thesis extends Kilpeläinen’s understanding by examining how it operates in Giovanni’s Room – a novel that lay beyond the scope of this project. In examining how utopia operates in Giovanni’s Room, the thesis simultaneously revises Kilpeläinen’s ideas by incorporating Hans Robert Jauss’s “horizon of expectations” to foreground a feature of Baldwin’s utopia that receives only a brief treatment in the conclusion of Kilpeläinen’s work – its essential mutability. Finally, in what is its most original contribution to existing research, the thesis transposes the mutable utopia Baldwin develops in Giovanni’s Room. It draws on the insights of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Jauss, and Bruno Latour to construct a critical analog of Baldwin’s utopia, before finally applying the critical utopia it constructs as a subjective, historiographical lens for examining the criticism that has been written about the novel. In doing so, the thesis embodies Mayanthi Fernando’s sense of “critique as care,” developing its methodology and approaching critique from the perspective of the text which it critiques.

About Nico…

Nico Hernando is a Master of Arts student in the Department of English and Theatre at Acadia University. Prior to attending Acadia, he graduated with bachelor’s degrees in science and education at Brandon University, where he received the Lieutenant Governor’s Gold Medal and a Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence. His current research largely centres around mid-century American literature but has recently expanded to include Canadian works of the same period. In October, he presented his paper, “Primitivism and the Postmodern in Leonard Cohen’s A Ballet of Lepers” as a part of the international Leonard Cohen conference which took place at Ghent University in Belgium. His master’s thesis examines the utopian impulse in and reception of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and was awarded a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship.