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2006 Southwest Graduate English Symposium
Paper Abstracts
(If your abstract does not appear here, and you would like it to, please email Micheal.Bolton@asu.edu)
Baddar, Maha: " The French Ambivalent Transculturation"
One aspect of the colonial situation that is quite often overlooked, however, is how the colonizer is ambivalently transculturated through being exposed to the culture of the colonized. Drawing on the work of postcolonial critics, this presentation covers how the French sense of identity was transformed at an ambivalent level during their presence in Egypt. Using theoretical work on representation, ambivalence and hybridity, I argue that while the French assumed a position of knowledge and power over the Egyptians, their sense of identity was transformed at an unconscious level as evident in the hybrid artifacts they produced.
Bledsoe, Hedra: “Connection, Conditioning and Confrontation: Women and Web-based Technologies”
Women have been marginalized within physical society for millennia, and yet many are carving our strong foundations for themselves within cyber culture. This paper will discuss how women can increase both their individual and group force through becoming active in cyberspace. Key issues to be explored include participation within virtual communities (such as discussion lists), and the resulting addition to or detraction from a woman’s identity; the strength of “cyber self” versus “physical self,” and whether the two can be truly interwoven into one; and the question of (dis)embodiment on the Internet. The research is mainly directed at a scholarly audience consisting of both genders, specifically those who are familiar with the Internet and its various uses (and abuses) and resulting cultural implications. Specifically, I wish to show how the Internet can dramatically affect a woman’s perception of life both on and off the “connection.” Indeed, it is my hope that this essay will help promote awareness as to how the Internet can shape a woman’s identity, regardless of age, socio-economic status, or education. I will also discuss the astounding number of women who are unable to access the realm of cyberspace for these same reasons. Unfortunately, the key to a cyber feminist force is accessibility, and far too few of the world’s women are afforded access to “low” technology, let alone computers and cyber communities. Is there a solution that doesn’t verge on utopic? Is it possible to shape this technology so as to form greater female strengths and identities? Such key issues necessitate exploration.
Bose, Dev, John Hsiao, and Daniel Peterman, California State University Long Beach , “Identity, Revolution, and the Discourse of Resistance”
Our panel will focus on topics of identity, resistance to dominant discourses, possibilities for resistance, and the discourse of revolution. The unifying principle to our panel is the way in which people respond to power structures and the various strategies for dealing with them. These power structures can take the form of cultural expectations, complicated by issues of gender, methodologies of resistance, such as those found in postcolonial theory, as well as an exploration of the potentialities and dangers inherent in revolution.
Bose, Dev : “Dominant Discourses and the Re-establishment of Grand Narratives in Foucaldian Theory”
This paper focuses upon how Foucault’s ideas are centered on the idea of resisting dominant discourse. It analyzes the theories of Edward Said, Deleuze, and Guattari. Said’s discusses postcolonialism and the effects of cultural imperialism, while D/G discuss minor literature through the lens of Kafka. This section emphasizes the influence that Foucault has had on their ideas, showing how resistance has created the tendency towards oppositional thought. It also determines how his ideas have unintentionally become the new grand narrative of the age. It includes the formation and reinforcement of grand narratives, citing Lyotard and Baudrillard through their work in postmodernism and the simulacrum. The principle criticisms of Foucault will be analyzed here, some of which include an unclear methodology for resistance as well as lack of clarity of the reasons for the resistance. The focus will then shift to how the work of Said and D/G have become grand narratives, as a result of the encapsulating theories of Foucault .
Calamity, Aretha: “American Indian Rhetorics: Communicating as Pan-Indian and as Traditional”
Due to acts of colonization, the oral traditions of many American Indian nations have become extinct or are endangered. Oppression through forced assimilation and urbanization during early 20 th century America resulted in Pan-Indian movements. Pan-Indianism or the sharing of cultures and traditions created strength and resistance for the marginalized American Indian. This hybrid culture informed the way that American Indian peoples think and communicate in a contemporary society. The pan traditions served during the civil rights movement to unite Indian peoples across America; they are based on survival, resistance and activism. Understanding the oral tradition and pan-tradition reveals a distinct American Indian rhetoric.
Callaway, Micheal: “Laughing at Lakoff: Subversive Language of Female Comics”
Comedy can be used to critique social inequity. It is my contention that female comedians cloak subversive ideas about gender roles in their comedic performances. Because comedy acts as a form of entertainment, people deem it safe and the are of security makes it ideal as a potential site of resistance. When barriers are taken down, all sorts of ideas that would normally be challenged can pass unquestioned. According to Joanne R. Gilbert, comedy can be transgressive because it politicizes the public through the constant forming and dissolving of alliances “via the one-up/one-down positioning intrinsic in a well-placed one –liner” (14). I will be focusing using theories from the field of linguistics to examine socio-cultural change and change in discourse. Comics are able to say outlandish things and brush them off with, “I was just kidding.” The language that we use to talk about gender in turn, constructs how we view gender. If women comics are able to get their voices heard, and many of them do, they are also contributing the continual re-writing of gender in our society.
Chappell, Drew , “A Museum In a Book: Teaching History and Culture Through Artifact”
When introducing history to young people, in order to create a material link with the past, teachers often rely on historical artifacts housed in museums, and reproductions of these artifacts in textbooks and reference materials. Through contact with these cultural traces, students gain a common historical vocabulary as well as a physicalization of the past, making abstract notions of people and places concrete. Historians hold the original artifacts up as primary sources, authoritative remnants of the time in which they were created. In this paper, I will investigate the construction of artifacts as authoritative, as their representations are used in a reference book series to teach children about cultures different from their own. These subject matter texts foreground visual content, creating “museums in a book” that construct cultures as static pasts rather than dynamic presents. In the case of history-focused guides, the “pictures” are photographs or other reproductions of artifacts, primary sources that have been preserved across time and space. The foregrounding of the artifacts is similar to what a child might expect to find on a guided tour of a natural history museum. I ask, what are the books specific strategies for framing artifacts? How do the books construct narratives about cultural groups, borders, and difference? What are other modes of involving children in living cultures rather than consigning them to history and the study of the past?
Patterns of meaning in language and the arts are “embodied acts of identity” (Schecter and Bailey, 2002). These performances are a space of negotiation and potential redefinition of culture through intertextual references that form and reform who we are. This paper explores my arts-informed research on Spanglish and border politics stemming from an in-depth interview with Alberto Rios, a border writer and professor at Arizona State University .
To express my findings from thematic analysis of Rios’ interview and a larger investigation of border identity issues in the literature, I chose to create a collaged artist book, incorporating Eubanks’ (2003) concept of “artistic codeswitching” in which I move in and out of an oral or written critical mode of analysis during the art-making process, exposing the “messiness of translation.”
In this paper I explore inquiry as an arts-informed process and product, finding an epistemology for the research, the process of developing an artful representation through an artist book, the transactional and relational nature of interacting with arts-informed research as an audience member, and some pedagogical implications for utilizing arts-informed research as inquiry about identity and cultural narratives.
Cheloha, Hannah: “Male and Female Collecting in the Light of Socialized Gender”
In western society the amount of credibility given to male collecting versus female collecting reflects the larger scale of male patriarchal dominance and female subjectivity and marginalization in western society as a whole. One way to avoid essentializing is to abandon the idea of “natural” and “essential characteristics” that Susan Pearce advocates in the above quotation. Instead, focusing on the differences between male and female collecting as culturally constructed behaviors individuals are socialized to perpetuate. For example, men often find the things women collect speak about their femininity and vice versa. Hence, people benefit from perpetuating these stereotypes because they secure one’s position within a sex and encourage the attraction of the opposite sex. I will examine collecting for men and women focusing on the act of collecting (including the nature of the collected objects), the problems with the psychological theories of collecting (including how aura influences fetishistic collecting), and how society defines these very different modes of collecting through gender stereotypes and expectations. In this way collecting becomes a vehicle for transporting and actualizing ideas about how gender is played out in western society.
Many theorists are concerned with the social meaning related and attached to objects. The meaning of objects changes with function and context as well as how these changes influence and are influences by the ideas pushed forth by the dominant culture. Overall, the meaning of objects can be defined not only by the society they exist in, but more importantly by the culture of that society and by the personal responses a culture incites in the possessor. Also, the meaning of an object changes hinges not only on culture but on how an object is utilized or preserved. Objects infiltrate all different aspects of life and in so doing carry with them endless interpretation.
Colvin, Tracey: “Disabling the Canon”
The literary canon is considered by many to be a collection of the finest pieces of literature ever created. The canon is composed of resonant pieces of literature, works that help us to refine and distill the essential elements of human experience; the canon allows us to define ourselves as we were, as we are, and as we hope to be. This collection of texts has been under scrutiny for many years, its exclusion of almost every marginalized group questioned and interpreted. In the 1970’s, many women, among them theorist Annette Kolodny, demanded that the canon be adapted to include the work of previously disregarded female writers, arguing that these voices had been purposefully barred and that “What was at stake was not so much literature or criticism as such, but the historical, social, and ethical consequences of women’s participation in, or exclusion from, either enterprise” (499). Building on Kolodny’s claims, I add to the voices of dissention another group of marginalized, excluded authors: the disabled. If the canon represents the most significant works that best articulate human experience, the absence of disability within this framework is both startling and appalling.
This paper seeks to explore the nature of handicap and the reasons for its exclusion from one of the most significant collection of texts in existence. To assist in our understanding of disability, I will review Lennard J. Davis’ concept of “Constructing Normalcy,” in which non-handicapped people (those coined “normates” by disability studies scholar, Rosemarie Garland Thompson), ridicule and spectaclize the handicapped body in an attempt to reaffirm their idealized sense of “normal” selfhood. I will explore the concept of “literary contagion” that existed in the eighteenth century, during which many believed that handicap could be “spread” through literature. Additionally, I will review some of the more malevolent representations of disability in the literary canon (Captain Ahab, Long John Silver) and will attempt to provide alternatives to these inaccurate portrayals of disability. I will conclude by asking for a re-visioning of the literary canon that allows us to proffer a more appropriate representation of disability to scholars and students.
De Senso, Justin: “The Fallacy of Identity: How Theories and Ideas about Identity Ignore the Chaotic Nature of Reality”
Original ideas and views of the self are collective, meaning an individual understands himself through association with others, i.e. families, clans, or towns. Autobiographical theorist Paul John Eakin, in his work How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves, adopts this collective view of self and calls it “relational identity.” Eakin argues that selves are constructed through the association and interaction with others; no self is a solo construct. His focus is autobiography, yet his idea of relational identity is manifest in all literatures. Furthermore, borrowing from 18 th Century German thought (Goethe’s “organic development” and Herder’s “vital organic force”) I demonstrate that Eakin’s theory is incomplete, for it ignores elements of the inherent self: the “non-relational identity.” To illustrate this identity dichotomy, I use various literatures, a critical essay (Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”), drama (Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession and Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest), poetry (Whitman’s “Song of Myself”), and autobiography (Richard Rodriguez’s The Hunger of Memory and Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life).
These works show relational and non-relational identities co-existing. I call this “chaotic identity,” for how can one have two conflicting identities? Is one more relational than non-relational? Where does the relational and non-relational begin or end? Is not the self an ever changing entity because of relationships with others coupled with the ephemeral nature of the self? All of this not only challenges Eakin, but also calls into question the entire concept of identity. My essay confronts these and other issues of identity.
Dickson, Vernon: “‘Suit the Action to the Word’: The Roles of Rhetoric and Emulation in Hamlet ”
ABSTRACT: Part of a larger work examining the role of emulation, especially within the reception of ancient theory by and through early modern dramatic, rhetorical, and educational practices and theories, “Suit the Action to the Word” examines Shakespeare’s informed critique of ancient and current cultural appropriation and emulative theory in Hamlet.
Building on powerful cultural beliefs about the uses of the stage and the individual and aggregate playing of social roles, Hamlet inspects many ways in which emulation is understood in the early modern period. Through matrices of modeling (political, familial, cultural, religious, among others), Shakespeare explores the social processes of role appropriation and too frequent link between modeling and rivalry, including socially destructive acts of imitation often turned to elimination.
Interestingly, Shakespeare also links his critique of emulation to an examination of inappropriate aesthetic judgment (powerfully depicted in earlier work on Titus Andronicus), drawing connections between socially appropriate (decorous) uses of emulation and the stage, linking the moral (ethic) and the dramatic (aesthetic) in the shaping of cultural character.
ABSTRACT (larger project): “Emulation hath a thousand sons” details the interaction of Renaissance drama with ancient and Renaissance rhetorical texts, particularly analyzing the conflicted use of emulation (including rhetorical imitatio and humanist notions of exemplarity). Conflicts concerning emulation are crucial to understanding Renaissance culture, not only because rhetorical training was the core of humanist education but also because questions about the imitation of exemplary precedents lies at the heart of key Renaissance debates about ethics, politics, psychology, and history. Exploring the ways that dramatists enact, appropriate, and refigure rhetorical and social theory and practice on the English stage, this project examines the problematics and divisive uses of rhetorical and social patterning in what is ultimately a culture of emulation.
Do, Tom: “Moving Towards Social-Expressivism”
Traditional orientation of written discourse, beginning from the late 19 th century, sought to narrowly prescribe a single, highly structured order to ENDA, the four genres of discourse (exposition, narrative, descriptive, and argument), where writers adhere to a sustained formulae that briefly introduces the author’s topic and thesis, provide “three highly prescribed paragraphs of support,” and a conclusion (Crowley 94). Current-traditional rhetoric (CTR), as the method aforementioned, maintained its rhetorical dominance up until the early part of the 1960s as a result of contrastive rhetoric’s empirical research suggesting its efficacy in its linear, and thus logical, rhetorical progression.
First introduced as a graphic representation of different rhetorical paradigms or cross-linguistic and cross-cultural thought patterns, Kaplan’s Contrastive Rhetoric Hypothesis (CR) was influential in writing instruction by emphasizing a form-focused discourse. The hypothesis figured nicely with current-traditional rhetoric of the 1960s, which dictated students’ writing behavior to diminutive, “prescribed formulae” (Ferris & Hedgcock 7). Students were expected to focus on paragraph and sentence level organization to satisfy and meet the direct, English rhetorical paradigm.
However, current-traditional rhetoric and empirical research suggesting its efficacious effects seem to completely disregard and even undermine both the social constructionist’s view of language, whereby the “audience or discourse community largely determines knowledge, language, and the nature of discourse, both spoken and written” (Ferris & Hedgcock 5), and the Expressivist’s notion of self-exploration and self-discovery of the sovereign self.
Extending on Macrorie, Elbow, Berlin , and Bakhtin, I argue that the act of writing is a harmonic dissonance, or more appropriately an interplay, between the social epistemological and expressivist’s view of language and written discourse. That is, the activity of writing is a negotiation between the social and individual voice. The social and private languages do not necessarily have to live in a truculent relationship. In order to assess and locate my argument within the binary opposites—between the social and individual voice—succinctly, a brief introduction stating the central contentions of each theory is necessary to reveal the limitations of a strict adherence to either paradigm. Such theoretical foundation will provide the context for the paradigmatic shift towards social-expressivism.
Duvall, Addrienne: “ Colonial Refashioning in The Female American”
The Female American is an eighteenth century text narrating the story of Unca Eliza Winkfield, the daughter of an English colonist and a Native American princess. Like Robinson Crusoe, The Female American centers on Unca Eliza’s experience on a desert island. However, Unca Eliza inhabits a radically different subject position and therefore has an entirely different experience of colonialism. Instead of adopting a masculine position of power like that of a patriarch or a governor, Unca Eliza presents herself as a prophet tasked by providence to deliver the message of Christianity to a nearby indigenous community.
Although her role is clearly missionary, Unca Eliza works alongside established native beliefs rather than asserting domination over others or condoning violence. When she converts the neighboring islanders, Unca Eliza speaks to them in their own language, and carefully preserves the religious practices of the community as long as they do not directly contradict Christian principles. In doing so, Unca Eliza consistently represents herself as a spiritual guide and not a secular leader; she joins the tribe as an equal member. Unca Eliza’s island experience differs from that of Robinson Crusoe because it focuses on community-building and intercultural exchange.
In this characterization, the anonymous author of The Female American relies on stereotypes of feminine identity. Unca Eliza asserts her submissiveness to male authority and her role as a mediator rather than a leader. Nonetheless, scholars have argued that the novel progresses a feminist revision of colonialism. Joe Snader asserts “According to [The Female American] women must take the lead in diverting the colonial project from aggression to conversion” (198). The message of The Female American could have the potential to change how we understand eighteenth-century colonialism. This is not an unambiguous message, however, since Snader also recognizes that “the mixed-race daughter represents an idealized if bizarre mediator between cultures as well as a compromise between female aggression and female passivity” (198). I will explore this compromise of feminine identity and colonial ideology, operating under the assumption that The Female American revises or challenges dominate ideas about colonialism, which I will locate in Robinson Crusoe.
Estrella, Kristen: "The Inescapable State of Disgrace"
As a text enmeshed in the colonial system, J.M. Coetzee’s novel, Disgrace, explores the possibility of justice for those burdened with a sinful state of past disgrace due to a patriarchal revocation of female agency. Coetzee puts forth the troubling proposition that justice is unachievable, as seen through the sexual dominance exerted over women and the shifting power among races in post-apartheid South Africa. The novel depicts the circular path made in the attempt for justice and retribution by showing a shift in power and the private nature of suffering. This paper will analyze the circular path that is created due to the failure of retribution and justice and posits, perhaps paradoxically given the colonial context, that compassion emerges as the corrective to post-colonial turmoil. In this view, justice may be a “vast circulatory system,” as Coetzee writes, though in the center is the bold, beating heart of compassion that sustains humanity.
Eyre, Pauline: "Christa Reinig’s Extraordinary Journey"
This paper uses current PhD research into the difficulty of embedding a disabled subject in narrative, where the disabled subject eludes fictional representation except through his/her own voice. He/she may resort to testimonial account of disabled life, evoking a queasy sense of over-involvement for the ‘normal’ reader. Alternatively, he/she may choose to conceal the disability within a more digressive, fragmentary account, of which Christa Reinig’s Die himmlische und die irdische Geometrie (Heavenly and Earthly Geometry) is a fascinating example. Reinig was a prominent woman writer who moved to the west from the German Democratic Republic in 1964, and Geometrie is her first literary project after a four year silence following a permanently disabling accident in 1971. Previous investigations of the text have largely overlooked its disabled perspective, viewing Reinig as feminist and/or GDR author.
My methodology draws on the work of Paul John Eakin, working at the intersection of disability studies and autobiography theory, in order to show that Reinig’s disability is the engine which drives this autobiographical project to ‘reconstruct’ an identity. The impetus to affirm a sense of self is fraught with the danger which always attends the disabled: a potentially essentialising sense of Otherness. It is this awareness of the compromising nature of disability self-narrative which leads Reinig to disguise her project, burying the lived reality of her disability within a multi-layered text which, in ten discrete sections, juxtaposes an eclectic range of anecdotal memoir, fictional asides, and difficult reflexive passages, subverting any attempt to read a linear account of the self. Indeed the text starts with reflections on death and ends with a string of fragments of childhood memory.
My paper will test the hypothesis that the notion of patterning implicit in the novel’s title is of prime importance for an understanding of Reinig’s attempt to reconstruct herself whilst eluding definition, and will proceed by analysis of narrative structure.
Frost, Wende: “Frak, Frell, and Tanj – Layered Restricted Codes in Future Fictional Environments”
Creating realistic discourse communities with unique restricted codes is essential for a fictional environment wishing to display realistic characterization. As in reality, restricted code is simple linguistic shorthand to separate “us” (the restricted code community) from “them” (the entire speech community). Distinctive lexical and semantic characteristics should be evident in internal and external dialogue to identify the discourse communities. Unlike other forms of fiction, restricted codes used by authors in settings far removed from present day reality, such as in science fiction, will unavoidably be wholly a creation of the writer.
To study the characteristics of created restricted code, six example media in the science fiction genre were analyzed. Two major layers of restricted code were found: the external layer differentiated the created universe from our reality, and the internal layer used for discourse communities within that universe. A focus was placed on the method of neologism formation, with a secondary emphasis on other syntactic and semantic features. The three criteria for choosing media were as follows: no more than thirty-five years from publication date; a corpus of at least 500 pages; and a significant proportion of the work spent aboard a spaceship. The assumption that the enclosed environment of the final criterion would automatically produce a discourse community was later shown to be fallacious. The six media chosen in order of first publication were, “Ringworld,” “Ender’s Game,” “This Alien Shore,” “Farscape,” “Firefly,” and “Battlestar Galactica.”
The greatest impact on neologism creation was the cultural and political setting of the created universe. Universes with an emphasis on military life or war had the largest proportion of neologisms from clipping, particularly from abbreviation, those with alien life had the greatest proportion of coinage, and those illustrated as having many technological advancements had the highest percentage of neologisms due to compounding. Neologisms were used in the external layer, while syntactic changes and code-switching took place in the internal layer of restricted code. An interesting secondary finding was additional layers of restricted code used to communicate extratextual information with the audience of the piece.
Gallagher, Sharon: "Peer mentoring groups as spaces for creatively exploring ways of re-conceptualizing the self"
This paper examines how useful a peer mentoring group can be for undergraduates with disabiity/health issues in re-conceptualizing ‘broken selves’ and aiding their learning. The paper is based on a qualitative study of the support experiences and requirements of students with disabilities, including language issues such as dyslexia, and physical and mental health problems. The preliminary findings draw on fifteen participants, who completed semi structured questionnaires on support experiences and requirements and then participated in a weekly peer mentoring group for three months. Participant observation records were kept of all sessions by the two peer mentors. The majority of participants have chronic illness and/or mental health issues; some have physical disabilities. The paper examines how the group has sustained an eclectic approach to coping strategies (Lazarus 1976) that includes dealing with the uncertainties of their conditions and coping with loss of self (Charmaz 1983:168). The group’s various interpretations of coping, suggest that the interaction of needs in the group is a valid means of support, endorsing other studies on the use of self help groups (Coppa and Boyle 2003:18)
The notion that there was an ‘invisibility of disability’ within this group is explored. The majority of group members had no visible sign of their disability and had difficulty in conceptualizing themselves within socially constructed notions of disability, as if they resided in the land between the kingdoms of the healthy and the sick (Sontag 1979:3). The paper looks at the stigma that was nevertheless strongly felt by undergraduates with disabilities, especially those with mental health issues. The undergraduates with chronic illnesses tended to focus in the group on finding inclusive ways of reading their variable body idioms.
The study suggests that the group has opened up a holistic psychosocial approach to the problems faced by undergraduates with physical/mental disability and health issues. The evidence so far suggests that this group has given the undergraduates a means to explore a more creative approach to understanding a self that may feel broken. This space can allow them to negotiate more useful conceptualizations of selves within the academic world.
Goswami, Uddipana: “ Cutting Identity To Size: Why Ethnic Conflicts Persist in Assam ”
India's Northeast frontier has been characterised by a postcolonial history of identity formation and ethnic upsurge. I take the case of Assam – one of the seven federating units (or state as these units are called) of Northeast India – to study this phenomenon and question an important facet of it.
The paper aims to analyse how state policies have encouraged formation of smaller and smaller ethnic identities in Assam to the extent that every group of a few thousand people today lays claim to a distinct identity, and on the basis of that identity, claims political rights to self-determination. The result is a mad rush for more power and factionalism, leading to inter- and intra- ethnic conflict. The case of a group of people – called the Thengal Kacharis – who have recently been accorded an autonomous council by the state and of whose numerical strength, territorial location, cultural distinctiveness nor political status anybody – including the state administration – is aware, is an extreme case of ad hocism in ethnic identity formation, actively abetted by the state. Such formations not only defer the process of peace-making indefinitely, they also make a mockery of universal tenets like peoples’ power and right to self-determination.
I would like to take the particular case of the Bodo – an ethnic group constructed as the autochthons of Assam – and follow the genesis and development of their ethnic consciousness since the colonial period to the present. The aim is to see how state policies have affected, at various points of time, the formation of ethnic identity in their particular case and the concurrent changes that have taken place in the definitions of Bodo nationality/identity/ethnicity. Ad hoc alterations to fit ethnicity to size has obviously led to a lot of animosities and conflicts between communities – one of the most prominent in the case of the Bodo being that with the Koch Rajbongshis, ethnologically comprising, for the most part, of Hindu converts from Bodo or Kachari.
Seen in this light, the Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC) formed after the Bodo accord signed in 2003 appears not so much as a reflection of the state’s recognition of peoples’ right to self-rule as an ad hoc apparatus to suit an ad hoc ethnic construction, which construction was in turn formulated to suit ad hoc state apparatuses. Indeed, dissenting voices and different constructions of Bodo identity, as well as divergent claims for and definitions of self-determination still persist.
Graham, Nicole: “Conspiracy Rhetoric: An Introduction to Negotiated Identity”
Conspiracy rhetoric is often pushed to the margins because of its association with aliens, abduction and right wing extremists. This marginalized position has allowed conspiracy rhetoric to enter common discourse, outside the realm of politics, unchecked. However, we must first acknowledge the infiltration it has had in society and the negative consequence of negotiated identity. The acceptance of conspiracy rhetoric in everyday discourse has allowed for the conforming nature of conspiracy rhetoric to remain unquestioned. This paper provides an overview of current conspiracy rhetoric theory and contemporary examples of conspiracy rhetoric in society as a means to provide everyday discourse users with the understanding and information to question the conforming nature of conspiracy rhetoric, to stop allowing their identities to be negotiated.
Hopwood, Mahlika: “Song and Silence: Hildegard’s Musical Theology and Augustinian Vision Theory”
This paper attempts to shatter and reforge the critical lens through which we have traditionally viewed the works of the masterful twelfth-century abbess, mystic, and composer, Hildegard of Bingen. Augustinian vision theory influenced approaches to piety and revelation throughout the middle ages, and continues to shape our critical approaches to mystical texts. Certain texts, however, offer implicit resistance to the model. The texts of Hildegard of Bingen, in particular, resist Augustinian vision theory on account of their theology. Augustine posits a model of intellectual, spiritual or imaginative, and corporeal vision, privileging the intellectual, which exists beyond language and representation, in the region of negative space, over spiritual vision, which involves sensory representations and communicable signs. The model affects epistemology in grave ways, as the concept of intellectual vision presupposes a barrier between representation and truth. Both Augustine and Hildegard desire divine truth, and view the human soul in a role of loving submission towards God. For Augustine, loving submission entails silence and listening. Augustine’s theology reinforces the privileging of intellectual vision and apophatic mysticism, which offer neither utterance nor representation of the divine. For Hildegard, loving submission entails participation in divine creativity and communicable response, most often represented in musical terms. Her musical theology centered on response and communication demands the spiritual vision of cataphatic mysticism, as only this mode of vision involves utterance. I wish to argue, simply, that Hildegard’s theology of communication demands an expressive mode of vision, and, therefore privileges cataphatic mysticism, defined by sensory representations, over apophatic mysticism, defined by negative space. Such a theology subverts Augustinian vision theory. The argument begins with a synopsis of Augustinian semiotics and vision theory, then moves through the musical and communicative aspects of Hildegard’s theology, particularly the organic unity of the cosmos, the nature of the Fall of humankind, the demand for response, participation in divine creativity, and the musical nature of the Creator Himself. We arrive, ultimately, at a theological vision which bridges the divide between representation and truth, through creative response and communicative unity.
Hart, Nicholas: “ Foucault & the Pulpit: A Textual Analysis of the Homily and Power”
This paper seeks to examine Foucault's ideas of power and knowledge in relation to the Catholic homily. The homily is the part of Mass where the priest speaks to the audience and discusses the Gospel reading of the day, current events within the Church, or relating events in people's lives to the Gospel reading. The Latin root of the word homily translates to "conversation." However, I find this definition problematic, because a conversation involves two people in the discussion. A homily has one person speaking to a group. The group does not have a chance to directly respond to the homily, whether they wish to ask questions or to disagree. Currently there is not enough research done on the homily. I insist that there are important power relations occurring within a homily. Foucault says that power produces knowledge. When a priest speaks to an audience he is transmitting knowledge, but not power. I think that power is granted to a priest based upon his years of training in theology, writing and philosophy. Besides his ideas of power being relevant to this study, I also chose Foucault because he was greatly interested in Christianity, specifically the act of confession, "the disclosure of self-disclosure." This disclosure was manifested in a number of ways: Jesus of Nazareth confessing himself to God, or the act of reconciliation, the oldest form of penance for sins. The parrhesia, or "personal relationship to truth" is what especially fascinated Foucault, not so much from the Ancient Greek perspective, but rather from the mystic, Christian ideals. I hope to have a comprehensive, complete paper discussing these ideas of Christianity and power through a Foucaultian lens in relation to the homily itself. This paper will be part of a larger thesis study to be defended in April of 2006.
Kumar, Malreddy Pavan: "From Minor Literature to Post-literature: The Poetics of defeatism in the work of Franz Kafka"
Deleuze and Guattari’s work Franz Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature has ushered a new era of literary and political criticism into the community of Kafka’s readership. However, since Hannah Arendt’s commentaries on Kafka in the 1960s, many political theorists have attempted to portray Kafka as the fabricator mundi of resistance and revolution, and even furthermore as an exemplar of emancipatory thinking. Though such messianic readings of Kafka are instrumental to Deleuze and Guattari’s work on Kafka, albeit passive in nature, I suggest that Dueleuze and Guattari’s politicization of Kafka negates the aesthetic interior of what I call the poetics of defeatism in his literature. By rejecting as well as extending Deleuze and Guattari’s operational concepts on minor literature, I suggest that Kafka’s work is characterized by a series of hierarchies of defeatism in which every fable proliferates to an infinitival narrative by virtue of its enigmatic writing technique and literary theme. Invoking the connections between his parables and the extension of these parables into longer narratives, I aim to demonstrate how Kafka’s narrative theme is characterized by an almost mystic force of incompletion – an incompletion that always marks the passing of defeatism in each narrative. And this principle of incompletion, in turn, forges the means of imagined inaction of the narrative theme that is prolonged to infinity, transcending Kafka’s work from minor literature to a literature of marginal, even invisible force of revolutionising text, or post-literature. By rejecting the emancipatory readings of Kafka, of both passive and active enunciation, I seek to argue that the political nature of Kafka’s work is merely metaphorical and textual in character, owing largely to the poetics of defeatism inherent within his work.
McKenzie, Ada : “Murderous, Martyred Saints: The Latina Body at the Rhetorical Crossroads of Violence, Religion, and Nationhood in Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre.”
As we enter into the thirteenth year of unsolved murders of women in the border city of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, my attention is called to the manner in which the Latina female body has been construed as a sacrificial entity since the inception of the European colonization of the Americas five centuries ago. Many of the female icons of the New World are rooted in a paradigm of feminine self-abnegation, in which the female body must be sacrificed and/or violated in order to pave way for the creolized nation to emerge, literally and figuratively, from the womb of the transgressed feminine. Within the New World, the paradigm of feminine sacrifice is articulated through the iconic figures of saints and martyrs. Yet, the violent trespassing of the borders of the feminine also engenders resentment and resistance, which are rendered apparent by the prevalence of angry female spirits that linger within many New World cultural imaginaries.
In the 1989 English-language film Santa Sangre, Chilean-born director Alejandro Jodorowsky narrates a circus of horrors in which a martyred, saint-like mother, Concha, turns into a murderous, tyrannical force in the life of her only son, Fénix. Both lives of mother and son are indelibly marked by religious fervor and sexual passion, the latter of which gives the film an Oedipal dimension. However, the genesis of the sexualized violence is locatable in Orgo, husband of Concha, and father of Fénix, as well as an expatriate gringo circus leader who indelibly leaves his sadistic mark upon the bodies of his Mexican wife and son. Therefore, Santa Sangre is also a film about the transgression of multiple borders involving race, nation, and the feminine body.
In Santa Sangre, sadistic, sexualized violence is overdetermined, as are the vulgarity and exploitation that characterize the gringo-run circus. Moreover, the theatricality of the murder sequences are suggestive of a preexisting narrative that resurfaces continuously. In this essay, I will explore the overdetermination of the historical narrative that inexorably links sexual violence to the body of the Latina in the borderlands. In so doing, I will also consider the significance of the female martyr- turned-murderess, whose body is a testament of sacrifice and whose spirit evidences rage.
McGlynn, Aine: "Picturing the Family in the Frame of the Nation"
My paper will address how the reality of the family is shaped, constructed, framed and created in twentieth century photography. I will argue that the family is the nation in miniature and that nationalism is dependant on the image of the "traditional" family for its continuation. A distinction will be made between portraiture and more anthropological images of the family. The former is usually titled with the familial name and features a father figure around whom the family is arranged. In the latter, it is behavior, usually the depiction of affection, rather than positioning that is emphasized. Common to both is the depiction of an intergenerational relationship. The term "family" then only applies to situations wherein legacy (genetic, material, or cultural) is emphasized. Because continuation and legacy are at stake, the nation is interested in shaping the family around a patriarchal center. This ensures that the passing down to the next generation of ideas, materials and traditions will continue to reify and stabilize the organization of the nation state. The visual portrayal of the family reinforces a patriarchal model of the family which is reflected in the structure of the nation state.
The human drama of the family is based on codes of duty and deeply felt bonds which breed loyalty and conformity. These bonds are legitimized by feeling, and affection. It is affect which compels the family to remain together and connected to one another, yet it is the outside pressures of nationalism that arrange the family into conventional patriarchal structures. The contrast between portraiture and anthropological depictions of the family illuminates a fluctuation between the affect among family members and the effect of ordering principles of the nation.
Mehta, Bina : “Sainthood versus Culture: Exploring Contradictory Ideals in Middlemarch”
In constructing Dorothea Brook’s character and identity the text of Middlemarch seems obsessed with themes of eroticism and renunciation and in the end wrestles with the place and function of desire in Dorothea’s life. In this context, I argue that it debates the themes of sexuality and morality by situating them within the two formally unnamed, but clearly evident ideals of Sainthood and Culture where these two successively placed ideals for Dorothea are contradictory in their philosophy and aims. Whereas the first ideal of Sainthood privileges renunciation practiced through evangelical morality over sexual fulfillment, the second ideal of Culture advocates integrating sexual desire with moral goodness. While others have pointed to authorial ambivalence concerning Dorothea’s social condition, this essay locates the source of this ambivalence in the fundamental conflicts regarding the relationship between and functions of sexuality and morality by identifying two separate incompatible ideals presented to Dorothea.
To discuss my ideas I use Harpham’s views on Asceticism, Matthew Arnold’s idea of “Culture,” Freud’s ideas of unconscious and repression, James Kincaid and Barthes’ views on desire and its origins. I also use Kucich’ ideas on repression in Victorian fiction.
First I demonstrate that asceticism is a mediation on as well as an enactment of desire rather than a negation of desire, suggesting that eroticism and renunciation are two sides of the same coin, often inseparable. I also argue that Sainthood does not work for Dorothea because her sexuality is unconsciously rather than consciously repressed giving it a dangerous and uncontrolled hidden force. I argue that the second ideal of Culture is precisely brought in to complement Dorothea’s Hebraism with Will’s Hellenism. I highlight the authorial ambivalence and contradictions that at first the ideal of Culture is presented as an improvement on the ideal of Sainthood, and later it is depicted as failure of Sainthood. I bring out the paradox that while renunciation is professed as a lofty ideal and a moral, actually it is used as a device to heighten and enact eroticism.
Morris, Janice: Collapsingthe Borders of Singular Authorship: Collaboration and the Dialogic Imagination in Life Lived Like a Story”
Contemporary critics have increasingly asserted the fundamental instability of “author” and have gone to great lengths to challenge and deconstruct its status. In so doing, they foreground the pervasive Western acceptance of the self or subject as the individual cogito—the traditionally accepted source of all knowledge and, thus, social and cultural meaning/memory—and call into question the uncontested “obviousness” by which people are always already autonomous individuals possessed of subjectivity or consciousness. In dismantling the borders of individual cogito, Literary Studies has taken on the necessary added dimensions of devalorizing the individual-who-produces text and decentering the subject across discourses. In particular, theorists such as Michel Foucault underscore the post-structuralist importance of text as a zone of collapsed neutralities where no one genre or language is privileged, while Mikhail Bakhtin emphasizes context and the multiplicity of conditions which open up linguistic borders and make any word, phrase or utterance necessarily “heteroglossic.” This conference presentation will explore how, in denying the possibility of single-voicedness, authorship can thus be theorized as not only dialogic, but necessarily collaborative.
In particular, narrated by Athapaskan storytellers Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith, and Annie Ned and edited by Julie Cruikshank, Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders (LLLAS) embodies a cross-cultural exchange of performance, translation, and writing, while at the same time enacting the Bakhtinian and Foucauldian authorial utopia whereby “modes of existence,” “circulation,” and a range of “possible subjects” dialogically co-exist, converging and diverging in ongoing processes of (re)negotiation. Furthermore, as an ethical model, collaboration in LLLAS displays mutual processes of material, economic, and social contribution, recognition, and reward and brings into sharp focus the mediating layers inherent not only in oral life narratives, but all discursive discourses. By foregrounding these mediating layers as inherent to the dialogic mode, the authors of LLLAS move beyond the borders of a critical tradition that has preoccupied itself with reductive theoretical paradigms that focus misguidedly on assumed non-Native editorial omissions and/or misrepresentations and the obligatory Native authorial recuperation. By making central the dialogic interaction inherent to the formation of history, myth, and memory, LLLAS reveals “authorship” to be not a mark of the autonomous creative genius “who really speaks” (or writes), but rather the polyphonous, heteroglossic (read: collaborative) output of a multitude of shifting subjects.
Ortiz, Kathryn : “Generation 1.5 Students in the College Composition Classroom: Crossing the Border into Safer Writing Spaces”
Generation 1.5 pedagogical theory seeks to create safe writing spaces that encourage self-expression for those who have previously been ignored by mainstream and ESL composition curricula. These English speaking students, who are U.S. born or who immigrated here in early childhood, are a significant and growing population among U.S. college students. Unless they are welcomed, included, and subsequently successful in college writing courses, they are at high risk for dropping out of university. Too often they are misunderstood, undetected, ignored, and thought of as under prepared. The voices of these students will be silenced unless they are given the guidance necessary to learn the conventions of academic discourse.
Palazzolo, James: “ Investigations in Non-Traditional Research Tools & Methods”
The identity and culture of Rhetoric, Composition and Linguistics research (and researchers) has been complicated during the last decade. Knowledge is constructed differently due to the internet and, because of this, the academies must approach these paradigm shifts in research by 1) reconsidering traditional modes (“US”) and 2) offering new theoretical approaches to knowledge building on the Internet (“THEM”).
Wiki’s are meant to build a body of knowledge about a topic with several intentions:
The cost of publishing a Wiki is practically absent when compared to a book. Wiki’s only need a database to ‘house’ the information, a web-server to enable interaction, a community of individuals and word-of-mouth. The best ‘for-instance’ is http://www.wikipedia.org, a global e-encyclopedia referencing thousands of topics. Visitors are permitted to make changes to existing text in the pursuit of creating knowledge.
This paper will address the following questions:
How can we assimilate the two into the culture of knowledge building without an Us & Them situation creating strife in the field?
Pannabecker, Virginia : “Women’s voices inscribed: oral, religious, and family narratives in works of Edwidge Danticat”
In this paper I will explore the practices and perceptions of religion, spirituality, and the supernatural and their connection to identity, identity formation through oral traditions and family rituals in selected works of Edwidge Danticat. Two theoretical texts that will figure primarily in my analysis are Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation by Mary Louise Pratt, and Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere by Maria Pia Lara. One of premises is that Danticat’s works can be described as autoethnographic as defined by Pratt. Danticat writes in English, while including some phrases in Creole/Kréyol. In doing so she directs her works towards an English-speaking, primarily U.S. audience with at least one of her purposes being to rescue/recover perceptions of Haitians and Haitian-Americans in the United States. One focus of this recovery and description of Haitian, Haitian-American culture is the presentation of voodoo (rarely if ever directly named as such)—the practices and perceptions of voodoo in daily life. This theme in her works also connects in some ways to oral traditions and family rituals that act as ways to pass on family histories, and to self-identify as/with individuals and communities. In this respect there is also a significant focus on the experiences of and communication between women, and between women and their communities. For my analysis of this component in the paper I will consider Maria Pia Lara’s discussion of women’s narratives as illocutionary forces, as performances that, through their articulation in literature, bring issues of importance to women, the voices of women into the public sphere. Finally, I will conclude with suggestions as to how I may in the future extend topics discussed in this paper into a comparative study of Danticat within the context of folk tales and oral traditions in areas of Africa, and with the works, particularly C’est le soleil qui m’a brûlée, of Calixthe Beyala.
Pawlak, Kristy: “Embracing Fluid & Multiple Identities in Disability Studies and Beyond”
According to recent government statistics, approximately 20% of Americans are classified as “disabled.” In comparison, approximately twelve and thirteen per cent of Americans are classified as African-Americans and Hispanics, the nation’s most prominent ethnic minorities. So why is disability literature not studied systematically in our literature courses, as are African-American and Hispanic literatures? Disability theorists point to this discrepancy as an example of the tendency in even liberal academic institutions to disregard disabled people or to perceive disabled people in stereotyped terms. As well-known disability scholar, Lennard Davis states, “disability will have difficulty being seen as having a primary place in identity politics because most academics are deeply implicated in ableism without, of course, realizing it. Disability is still routinely ignored, marginalized, or patronized by the very people most active in identity politics” ( Davis 543).
However, a close look at actual works of literature reveals that rather than laying all the blame at the feet of academia, the very nature of disability and authors who represent it make it a particularly conflicted area of study. Significant underlying difficulties exist with including disability as a part of the established identity-politics triad of race, class, and gender. While many aspects of disability theory overlap with traditional minority studies, enough differences exist to frustrate the complete replication of the model. By examining current disability theory as well as several literary works of the last century depicting disability, this paper will show that while literature should strive to avoid clichéd and often harmful stereotypes of disability, the answer to studying disability in literature does not lie in creating yet another minority category within literature curricula. Rather, revising the way disability is studied in literature could provide a gateway to studying all characters as complex, multi-faceted individuals. Just as every reader is an individual, influenced by many genetic, cultural, and social factors, every character and every author is a product of many influences as well. Disabled characters—and all minority characters—should be read and written in a way that acknowledges and celebrates the fluid and multiple identities that define all individuals.
Peterman, Daniel: “So You Say We Need a Revolution? Whatever…”
My paper will examine Giorgio Agamben’s “whatever singularity” as it is discussed in his book, The Coming Community, and further developed in Means Without Ends and The Man Without Content. Specifically, I am interested in examining the persistently held notion found in Western culture that whatever power structure is currently in place is flawed and that the best remedy to the situation is a reversal of fortunes. This can take the form of a Marxist revolution or can be found on the opposite end of the binary for pleas to return to a more traditional way of life. I contend that what Agamben offers us in his idea of the “whatever” is more than a plea for indifference but instead a call to realize and focus upon whatever similarities there are that unify us as a community. Instead of reducing ourselves to a series of traits, Agamben has begun to formulate a way in which community acts as a singularity, similar to the multiplicities discussed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Furthermore, Agamben points out that the binary oppositions we have received as natural can often be traced back to a historical moment, showing them to be ingrained as opposed to inherent. We have learned to accept the terms under which we operate and revolution does little more than flip those terms. Agamben makes a call to abandon the binaries altogether.
Skipsey, Katherine: "Sick Roles: Temporary Invalidism in the Courtship Narratives of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice"
This paper, entitled “Sick Roles: Temporary Invalidism in the Courtship Narratives of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice”, examines the use of temporary disability as a narrative prosthesis which allows for successful courtship narratives to occur in Austen’s text. As discussed at length in conduct books of the late eighteenth-century, permanent invalidism, hypochondria, and delicate constitutions were attributes to avoid in choosing a potential mate. However, such attributes were also the mark of a higher class. Temporary invalidism is an interesting literary development that allows some of Austen’s eligible female characters to be marked as high class without having to succumb to permanent invalidism, thereby making these women very attractive as potential spouses. Jane Bennet, Elizabeth Bennet, and Miss Eliza de Bourgh each suffer from a form of invalidism, and it is their specific forms of invalidism that serves to make all three women sexually available. For both Jane and Elizabeth, the bouts of temporary invalidism allow their potential suitors otherwise impossible and inappropriate access. After the courtships have progressed far enough that marriage is the next logical step, both Jane and Elizabeth are returned to full health. This return to full health is, of course, in accordance with popular conduct book literature of the time. In this way, temporary disability acts as a narrative prosthesis within the text. Conversely, Eliza, due to her overbearing mother, is pampered into invalidism. As a cover for her lack of talent in the feminine pursuits (needlepoint, music, etc.), Eliza’s invalidism invites suitors keen to possess a very docile and sickly heiress. Her invalidism serves not only to infantilize her position as a young female heiress, but also to sexualize her disabled body. Despite her class status and sexual availability, her invalidism is permanent; therefore, she is excluded from a successful courtship. This is an act that is in accordance with the prevailing conduct book literature, which bluntly warned against marrying invalids. Jane and Elizabeth, through their use of temporary invalidism, end the novel married to their suitors, while the permanent invalid Eliza remains outside. Through these three eligible women, the importance of temporary invalidism as a narrative prosthesis in these courtship narratives can be plainly seen.
Spencer, Doug: “Finding a Feminist Voice in Christa Wolf’s What Remains and Divided Heaven”
This paper seeks to examine feminist voice and to question the construction and portrayal of gender relationships in two monographs of German feminist writer Christa Wolf, What Remains and Divided Heaven. The paper’s author seeks to answer the following question: Can What Remains and Divided Heaven be considered feminist works and if so, is their validity as such threatened by the social framework of patriarchal gender relationships? In order to adequately answer this question, the social context of Wolf’s work is examined. This paper is not only a critical analysis of the two monographs but also takes Wolf’s position as a socialist in the former German Democratic Republic into account.
Wolf’s works complicate the notion of “us” and “them” in a feminist context by idealizing traditionally patriarchal gender roles while simultaneously questioning the validity of male domination in literature. After analyzing the gender relationships and placing her works in the appropriate social and historical context, it is the author’s assertion that What Remains and Divided Heaven exemplify a strong feminist voice. The author rejects the notion that Wolf’s position as a feminist writer is compromised by the fact that many of her female protagonists are in socially subservient positions at times to the male characters. Wolf critically examines realistic relationships rather than inventing ideal ones. Although Wolf has denounced feminism in its radical form, her willingness to create a forum for female readers to engage in self-introspection and to question male authority, while refusing to forfeit their feminine qualities of love, humanitarianism and understanding, qualifies What Remains and Divided Heaven as literary works that advocate feminist values.
This paper is transdisciplinary in nature and discusses feminism in relationship to socialism in the former German Democratic Republic and blurs the boundaries between the disciplines of Gender Studies, German Literature and Political Science.
St. John, Leslie: "The Buckeye Nut and the Tattoo: Explorations of the Body Bendable"
On the night of July 4, 1997 , I attended a music concert during which the band threw free CDs from the stage. One struck my eye, and after three surgeries over a six month period, my eye was removed; I now wear a prosthetic eye. Through poetry and creative nonfiction, I explore the event of my injury and the reality of living with an absence—literally a hole in my face—in a society that not only privileges able-bodies but places particular importance on the face, the source of first impressions. While the prose pieces focus on the narrative of my injury and the fluxional process of physical, emotional, and psychological recovery, the poems deal more with moments in time where a single experience—applying the patch, cleaning the prosthesis, touching the mismatched eyes of a sculptural figure—conveys a universe of being. When patients lose an eye, they undergo a surgery in which they receive an implant in the eye socket and, after the socket has healed, a prosthetic eye. One major fear for most patients is that the implant will extrude, literally push through the tissue to exit the body. Eight years after my surgery, I find myself in this situation. I understand the notion of wearing a prosthesis to “pass” in society, and am uncertain about how to continue my professional and social activities without this mask. My current poetry embraces this uncertainty.
“I want to say to her, You are beautiful,
because it’s what I want to hear,
whether I’m wearing a prosthetic eye,
a patch, or nothing—I want to believe
that beauty is a rope
thick enough to sustain fraying and long enough
to pull me back to my seat in a café,
to a conversation at the next table…” (“Woman Entering Café,” lines 26-32)
In her essay “Poetry and Uncertainty,” published in the 2005 November/December issue of The American Poetry Review, Jane Hirshfiled writes, “Poetry comes into being as a response to a kind of fracture of knowing and sureness: from not understanding yet still meeting what arrives.” Whenever I write, I meet what arrives. And this engagement, somehow, brings me closer to accepting my body with its absence, and even my identity as a person with a flaw, not a flawed person. The creative nonfiction piece “The Buckeye Nut and the Tattoo” and poems such as “Eye Cleaning” or “Returning to the Arts Center” tether elements of biography, metaphor, and image to conceptualize the body as something bendable rather than broken.
Tomlinson, Nigel: “ Who's the Largest of the Small?: The Bigorexic Body in the Mirror of Empire”
Bigorexia (in medical patois, Body Dysmorphic Disorder) is a body image disease which entails an obsession with symmetrical muscle growth, with ever-expanding borders, and with the body as spectacle. The impossible task of becoming bigger than life—beyond measurement—is the very mechanism that enforces an increasingly debilitating awareness of one's smallness. As Sam Fussell explains in his book Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder: "The fact was I'd found shelter in a body too large to feel and aimed to find even more in a body that was bigger. It didn't occur to me then that too big might not be big enough" (86). What happens, then, is a split between the project of material, territorialized, body control (transcendent bodybuilding) and that of the deterritorialized immanence of spectacle. Moreover, the performance of masculinity produces other deterritorializations and hybrid identities which often are in direct contradiction to the builder's original intention: the male body constructed for display becomes increasingly infantilized, feminized and queered. Thus, the fear of crossing the exclusive hyper-masculine, hyper-hetero borders often perpetuates both more spectacular performances and anxious reinforcements.
This strikes an interesting accord with what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri identify as the "bio-political context" of Empire, in which hybrid identities are encouraged to proliferate even as they are segmented within a state of permanent crisis and are commanded by economies of fear. Just as Hardt and Negri point to the Los Angelesization of society in which a seemingly free internal space is created by enforcing an "impenetrable exterior" (the gated communities)—I would read Bigorexia through the Los Angelesization of the body (the metonymical relationship between iron and muscular definition—borders—and the reterritorializing response to the spectacle of immanence). Yet, since the Bigorexic body is a cultural mirror for reading Empire's contradictions, and since it is a body increasingly removed from productive/normative circulation, I would also read it as a potential site for rupture and transformation—an argument supported by the medical discourses of rehabilitation which almost always accompany it.
Urbina, Javier: “Beyond Taking a Picture”
In theory, the photographer looks for the selling of its products, so his/her actions are going to be oriented into obtaining the market, but observe that photography shapes our sense. In addition, technology has altered that procedure more into a higher dynamics; in which it is now easier for photographers to catch immediate actions because of innovative equipment; such as, digital cameras, Internet, and the public domain imaginary. Reality is shaped into what the majority of the people want to buy; because of a certain governmental freedom in the majority of states, the market is there for the people who want it. However, the privacy of the individual can be affected since the photographer can construct half of the reality but the consumer has the final word in that reality procedure. The number one position in the big cities is always in stake, since the formula involves competition; meanwhile the media plays a major role in determining how is the number one place obtained, the paparazzi always have a voice, since they take advantage of the public domain. Furthermore, the ramifications found within photography can be culture, race, and age. The body exists in the photography space but can be closely related to the age and beauty of the person within the photograph. Indeed, it is difficult to reverse a certain judgment, since it could affect the market but in order to make a judgment the other side has to be taken into account. In general, the press cannot be quite, the TV media and the press have to be able to see the reality of events, and that is where we find the case of responsibilities of photographers and the representations of their photographs in the context of sensitivity, censorship, ethics, and honesty. Therefore, photography can be an opinion and give a certain judgment; which becomes the basis for going beyond taking a picture. Globalization challenges can establish teaching value models that can exist in a culture where originality and participation can have the attention for the benefit of all the people.
Vieira, Katia : “A Reading of Langendonck’s Portrayal of Indigenous Women”
In nineteenth-century southern Brazil , Langendonck, a Belgium travel writer portrays the Indigenous women she encounters. Using Pratt’s concepts of contact zone and transculturation to understand how Langendonck construes Indigenous women, I introduce the term inverted transculturation to further analyze the colonizer’s point of view. In doing so, I argue on the importance of recovering European women’s travel accounts on Indigenous women’s lives as proof of Indigenous active participation in southern Brazilian history even in isolated European immigrant settlements.
Wadman, Carrie: "'High' Art Versus 'Low' Art: A Novel Phenomenon for Over Two Hundred Years"
The current academic issue of the “split” between “high” and “low” culture and art is hardly a new phenomenon; this question of where to draw the line has been around since the origins of the novel (which, at its inception, was not considered to be literature). This debate about what constituted high and low art is most famously illustrated by Matthew Arnold’s “Culture and Anarchy,” a manifesto of “high art” purists. What I propose to do in this paper is use the arguments of “Culture and Anarchy” as a means for discussing the nineteenth century gothic sensation novel and its longtime liminal status in the literary canon. The question at hand was whether or not the gothic novel was “serious” enough to count as literature.
This same debate presents itself in modern course selections: to what extent are, for example, the Harry Potter books (which are arguably a version of modern sensation novels) or works by Steven King (the modern gothic) ground for questioning/challenging the current debate as to the sorts of texts that constitute “suitable” course material. I wish, therefore, examine “Culture and Anarchy” and the debate over the gothic novel as the shadowy precursors to current popular literature and the scholastic debate that this literature has engendered, and why it is that the academy has been having the same debate, with different materials, without any sort of clear resolution.
Watson, Ryan : “ Fans, Femmes, Butches and Stars: Homosexual Desire, Fantasy and Melodrama in Meeting Two Queens ”
Cecilia Barriga’s Meeting Two Queens (1991) , a fourteen minute avant-garde video, is created by juxtaposing images of Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich that are culled from their many films. The images are constructed to form a melodramatic type of narrative structure that creates a fantasy lesbian text. Barriga appropriates the images and juxtaposes them in such a way that Garbo and Dietrich seem to encounter each other on screen, even though, in reality, they never starred in the same film. Read against the rumored lesbianism of both stars, as well as the implicit homosexual references in their films, the video creates an interesting, though somewhat ambiguous and fleeting space to both generate affect for fans and queer spectators and examine notions of queer identity. The paper examines notions of construction and piracy, the hollywood star system and gossip, homosexulaity and role playing as well as narrative structure. The paper is grounded in the work of Mary Desjardins, Judith Butler and Linda Williams, amongst others.