So, it’s conference time again…

This is the schedule for our English department conference at Monmouth tomorrow:

9:30am

• Opening remarks by Dr. Lisa Vetere
• Introduction of keynote speaker by William Patrick Wend

10am-10:45am

• Keynote by Dr. Kristin Bluemel “Inventing Intermodernism”

11am-Noon

• Rich Price “The Compelling Pain: An Examination of Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger and Guiding Readers Through its Pitfalls”
• Kelly Lorelli-Smith “Does Hamlet Hate Women?”

Noon to 1pm

• Break for refreshments, etc

1pm-2pm

• Dr. Liora Brosh “The Victorian Novel and Film”
• Dr. Heide Estes “Ecocriticism & Beowulf”

2:10pm-3:10pm

• Debra Pachucki “From ‘Charisma’ to ‘Cultism’: The Rhetorical Dangers of Messianic Language as Symbolic Action”
• Jack Kelnhofer “Cyber-plagiarism in Higher Education”

3:20pm-4:20pm

• Dr. Sejal Sutaria “I Remember When”: Affection, Malcontent, and Imperial Ambivalence for the Empire in the Indian Civil Service”
• Dr. David Tietge “the Conclusion to Rational Rhetoric”

4:30pm-530pm

• William Patrick Wend & Toni Magyar “What Is A Text? A Political History Of Texts From Gutenberg To Electronic Literature & Beyond”
• Sue Stever “The Liminal Landscape of the Misfit in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’”

5:30pm-6pm

• An open forum for graduate students to discuss their research and the MA thesis process hosted by Christopher Hankenson & Jana Phelps

& for good measure I’m going to go ahead and post the preliminary notes of my portion of my collaborative presentation in the graduate work section…

Certainly, University of Michigan professor David Halperin is fully aware of all the ho-humming that putting the words poetics+gay+culture together inevitably gives way to, but he handles the objections easily in his genre study in progress.

In the Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference’s keynote address at the University Wisconsin, Halperin told the audience that individual traits don’t lead to an understanding of shared culture; therefore, we refer to discourse, genre and convention. Halperin’s study of gay male culture concerns itself with generic classifications and thereby, poetics.

So as not to misrepresent Halperin any further than I may already have, I’ll just say that his use of genre criticism and discourse theory to theorize gay male culture is absolutely fascinating.

Keep your eyes peeled for How To Be Gay: Male Homosexuality as a Cultural Practice (forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press).

I am pleased to announce that my pal William Wend and I are organizing a Spring conference for the English Department at Monmouth University.

Last Fall we organized a small symposium for the M.A. program. This symposium, Hypothesis, entailed presentations of thesis work by current M.A. students. Due to the interest of faculty and students alike, we are planning a much larger, department-wide conference, The Annex Interjects, for April 4th. Dr. Kristin Bluemel has agreed to give the keynote address.

William and I also maintain a wordpress blog for these undertakings: Monmouth English Symposium.

I am looking forward to attending and presenting at “Living Remains,” the Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference at the University of Wisconsin, on February 15-16, 2008.

• Dr. David Helprin of the University of Michigan will be giving the keynote address, “Tragedy into Melodrama: Towards a Poetics of Gay Male Culture” at 3:30 on Friday, February 15.

• I will be presenting on the following panel from 3:15 – 4:45 on Saturday, Feb. 16:

Gender, Hybridity and Agency

Chair: Dr. Peter Paik, Comparative Literature

“‘Free will is making a comeback’: Adapting Social and Biological Inheritance in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex”

Toni Magyar—English, Monmouth University

“Disease, Madness, and Resistance in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ The Silent Partner”

Yanmei Jiang and Katie Danner—English, University of Wisconsin

“A Compositionist Living the Labored Remains of Femicide in Ciudad Juárez: Writing Against the Incorporation of Female Bodies in Maquiladoras and U.S. Universities”

Dani Goldstein—English, University of Wisconsin

In the Fall of 2007 I took Dr. Kristen Bluemel’s Intermodernism course. Because I am insane and very interested in cultural studies as well as the study of “middlebrow” literature. I read Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot as a signpost of Leavis’ minority culture. My prompt to do this was, first, recognizing the correlation; and second, when I considered that it seemed a strange thing to explore, the conclusion that I inevitably reached was that it really only seemed strange due to how embedded distinctions like middlebrow/highbrow and mass/minority really are. From there, I further considered how these categories affect the ways in which we portend to study, literature, culture, history, etc. are effected by these distinctions through time.

It is not something that I would ordinarily undertake, and for that reason (and the fact that it provided a good excuse to revisit a lot of Raymond Williams), it was a worthwhile undertaking. I also think I gained a better understanding about the theorization and possibilities of Intermodernism than I would have if I had taken a more “traditional” approach and wrote about people like George Orwell or Mulk Raj Anand.

So, another paper: “The ‘Minority’ Figure in ‘Mass’ Fiction: An Intermodern Reading of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot.” massminority.doc

Last Spring, in Dr. Lisa Vetere’s course, The Cultural Work of Early American Texts, I wrote my seminar paper on Susanna Rowson’s 1794 novel Charlotte Temple.

I was not terribly enthused with the primary texts in this course to be honest: “it just isn’t my thing;” however, the secondary and theoretical texts for this class were AWESOME. (This is a common experience for me.) I picked Charlotte Temple as my primary text for two very basic reasons: 1. It is a novel rather than a travel account, captivity narrative, autobiography, etc.; 2. The amount of existing criticism was substantial enough to give me something to work with, but not too overwhelming to negate the possibility of my being able to read and address it in the time and page #’s I had available to me.

Though it caused me a few headaches, I am pretty pleased with the result. Although there is neither quite enough theoretical muscle nor enough historical information to completely sustain the argument, for a seminar paper, it works because it identifies a formal element of the text, the analepses, which has not been addressed in criticism, and posits a social, historical and formal importance for that feature.

So, my first posted paper is “With Friends Like These: Authority and Analepsis in Charlotte Temple.” CHARLOTTE.DOC

* Papers posted on the blog, will also be added to the “Graduate Work” page*

The line-up for the Elizabeth Stoddard Society Panel for the 2008 American Literature Association conference:

Aesthetics and Ideology in the Writings of Elizabeth Stoddard

Organized by the Elizabeth Stoddard Society

Chair: Dawn Keetley, Lehigh University

1. “Escape from Market Relations? Elizabeth Stoddard’s Temple House and the Commodification of the Gothic,” Lisa M. Vetere, Monmouth University.

2. “Gender Scripts and Narrative Frames in the Novels of Elizabeth
Stoddard,” Toni Magyar, Monmouth University.

3. “”Elizabeth Stoddard, Bayard Taylor and Writing Travel,” Wesley
Atkinson, Lehigh University.

A lot of things could be written about Valentine’s Day; I’ll skip the obvious.

As I am almost positive that the recipient of my valentine’s gift will not see this, I’ll confess that I’ve done the cliche thing to do this year: I’ve purchased a copy of My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead, a collection of love stories edited by Jeffrey Eugenides .

While proceeds benefit 826 Chicago, I am generally a fan of Jeffrey Eugenides’ work, and I’m in a relationship with someone looking to renew their literary interests, it’s really the inclusion of Robert Musil’s Tonka that convinced me to make the purchase. Since reading Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless (Translated as The Confusions of Young Torless, The Confusions of the Young Cadet Torless and Young Torless) in an existentialism course as an undergraduate, I have been a huge fan of Musil. Reading Tonka again has made me commit to FINALLY finishing Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities).

Eugenides’ introduction is what you would expect: literary, thoughtful and humorous. While I like the distinction he makes between love and love story, the introduction and the stories included all boil down, for me, to what my grandmother told me about romantic relationships: “it’s always a form of insanity.”

So, in my particular state of insanity, with Valentine’s Day approaching yet again, and a tryst already penciled in for the 12th, it makes sense to re-read favorite stories, ponder and annotate them, and, finally, share the insanity.

I am revisiting Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World, over the next couple of days while reading Robinson Crusoe for Dr. Kristin Bluemel’s class on The Novel in English.

In particular, I plan to consider Trouillot’s first chapter, “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness.” In this chapter Troillot himself creates a pretty convincing narrative regarding the construction of the savage slot within “Western” Imperialism, how that slot was imagined and portrayed in literature (ahem… Robinson Crusoe), and finally how the discipline of anthropology later emerged as a “A Discipline for the Savage” and was institutionalized, along with many social sciences, as part of a nationalist project.

Of course, the basics of this argument seem old hat by now. And certainly there are striking parallels with the narrative of the “The Rise of English” that Terry Eagleton provides, but I hope that pairing Trouillot with Crusoe will illuminate my understanding of the development of the novel form specifically. Trouillot discusses literary content, but not form, while making essentially the same comparisons between literature and philosophy that Ian Watt does in The Rise of the Novel, but perhaps I can go in a slightly different direction by considering the “cultural” aspects of imperialism that Watt largely neglects and the form of the novel, which Trouillot is, of course, not addressing.

Dr. Lisa Vetere and I are organizing the Elizabeth Stoddard Society Panel for the 2008 American Literature Association conference. The Call for Papers for this panel is now posted at the Penn CFP site.