The Annex Interjects

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…

David Halperin, “Tragedy into Melodrama: Towards a Poetics of Gay Male Culture”

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).

The Annex Interjects

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.

Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference

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

American Literature Association Elizabeth Stoddard Panel

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.

Stoddard Call For Papers

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.