Samantha Joyce
Communication Studies Representing the Other in the Television Program CSI-Miami: Rio
In a 2006 study, CSI: Miami was named the world's most popular TV show, with fifty million viewers around the globe. In that same year one episode took place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This research examines how that country, commonly associated with stereotypes such as land of futebol, music, and violence, to mention a few, was portrayed. The major concern with the representation of stereotypes in television is that the result of these portrayals may be the acquisition of negative attitudes towards certain groups by the audience and the solidification of racial and sexual stereotypes. A semiotic analysis revealed how Brazilianess was portrayed in the episode: Three main themes were uncovered: Brazil as exotic and lawless ; the Us Vs Them Ideology ; and a Technologic Supremacy Ideology ; where the US s access to state of the art technology places it as modern and efficient against other primitive and retrograde countries.
Daniel Morris
Religious Studies John Dewey and the Inadequacy of Tolerance
Because religious pluralism is a characteristically American phenomenon, tolerance is critically important virtue for life in the United States. In this paper I turn to the work John Dewey perhaps the most quintessentially American thinker in search of a viable doctrine of tolerance. Setting Dewey’s position on pluralism of belief against that of John Locke, I argue that, despite obvious differences, Dewey’s pragmatic approach shares certain important commonalities with the classic Enlightenment conception of tolerance. Notably, both Dewey’s work and Locke’s canonical "Letter Concerning Toleration" regard the protection of dissent as a religious virtue. In the final analysis, though, I suggest that Deweyan pragmatism offers better resources to deal with pluralism in the modern world than does Locke’s Enlightenment stance.
Daigo Shima
Asian and Slavic Languages and Literature Songs My Mother Taught Me: The Intertwined Family Portraits in Mezon do Himiko
This essay seeks to evaluate the Japanese film entitled Mezon do Himiko (2005), which literally translates “The House of Himiko”, by focusing on the absence of a mother character, and the relationships between biological families and homosexual characters. Also, this essay consists of two sections, the first of which focuses on the depictions of homosexual people in Mezon do Himiko, trying to deepen our understanding of the uniqueness of this film. The second section mainly analyzes how the biological relationships are intertwined with the homosexual characters in this film. Biological family relations tend to be depicted to have nothing to do with homosexual relationships, but this film depicts their relationships as complexly intertwined, trying not to depict them as the simple binary oppositions. In conclusion, this essay will demonstrate that this film elevates a conventional love story into a unique story of human bonds.
Michael Baltutis
Religious Studies Imagined Community in Nepal: Royal Billboards, Temple Renovations, and the People’s Movement of 2006
In April 2006, a nation-wide series of peaceful demonstrations brought an effective end to Nepal’s monarchy, forcing the king to capitulate on national television. This paper will examine two Nepali-language texts composed towards the end of King Gyanendra’s reign that stake their claim to the religio-political field of modern Nepal. The first text is a volume of essays composed by local scholars commemorating the renovation of a temple to the deity Bhairav. The second is a series of billboards, installed by the royal government at major intersections throughout Kathmandu, proclaiming the king s support of multi-party democracy and his sympathy with the nation s struggling people. Though employing similar traditional South Asian rhetorical devices, they take quite different stances regarding the future of the Nepalese nation: whereas the king s messages work to support a moribund monarchy, these local authors provide an alternative vision to Nepal’s past and present.
Francesco Dalla Vecchia
Musicology Reading opera with the Enneagram: Metastasio's La clemenza di Tito
The Enneagram is a graphical device that summarizes a centuries-old theory about personalities. This theory is meant to reveal the essential qualities of a person and to help him/her find the most suitable path toward spiritual perfection. Allegedly, the Enneagram originated with the Sufi brotherhood in the Middle Ages; since the 1970s, the American Jesuits have revived it and used it as a helpful device for spiritual counseling. Like other theories in personality sciences the Enneagram is applicable to the study of opera characters. It indicates elements of the characters’ personalities, relations, and evolutions that are essential for performers’ interpretations and scholars’ hermeneutics. Pietro Metastasio s masterpiece, La clemenza di Tito (1734), in particular demonstrates the applicability of the Enneagram because Metastasio’s education was molded by Jesuits and because his work shows his concern with providing a model of Catholic morale.
Christine Darr
Religious Studies How Friends Can Combat Racial Injustice: Conceptions of Friendship and Selfhood
This paper argues that medieval ethicist Thomas Aquinas has articulated a model of what he calls the virtue of friendship, which holds great promise for combating racism in all its forms. First, we must examine how Aquinas understands the self and its relation to others. Then we will explore the qualities of this virtue in order to understand what responsibilities friends have to each other. Finally, we conclude that the enlarged perspective one gains in friendship can significantly contribute to the success of those working toward a racially equitable society.
Nathan Dickman
Religious Studies Take Action: A Critique of the Concept of Practice in Recent Ethical and Ritual Theory
The fact that "practice" is one of the most widely deployed terms in academic rhetoric provokes suspicion. It abounds in discourse about such topics as Buddhist meditative practices, gender constructing practices in the workplace, and practice as the context for defending classical virtues. This surplus seems to indicate we have reached methodological consensus across disciplines about the advantages of interpreting human activities as practices. The increase of a term's circulation, however, correlates to a decrease in semantic coherence. The ambivalence of "practice" is reflected in the competing discourses of Alasdair MacIntyre's "After Virtue" and Catherine Bell's "Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice." These offer radically different approaches to practices. I do not seek to demonstrate that one captures practice more precisely, claiming practice is more a matter of ethics than power, or vice versa. Instead, I seek to consolidate their accounts to generate a more comprehensive concept for analyzing specific activities.
Alina Haliliuc
Communication Studies The Facebook Between Carnivalesque and Baudrillardian Obscenity: Or An Attempt to Answer the Question Who Are These People?
The Facebook is one of the largest networking website, and the number one site for photos with 2.3 million photos updated daily, which places it ahead of even photo-only websites such as Flickr. This essay looks at the photographs uploaded on Facebook in order to attempt an answer to the question: how are student identities written into being as a result of the special dynamics between The Facebook, as a virtual carnivalesque space, and the mundane non-mass-mediated reality of college students? I argue that the type of performances that one sees on Facebook combined with the everyday use of / access to this network erase the boundaries between public and private, original and copy, carnival and mundane. Indeed, in trying to explain a phenomenon that can no longer fit the binary logic of private-public, taboo-accepted, real-fake, this essay recommends Baudrillard’s notion of obscenity as a more appropriate framework for understanding the identities under construction of college students. It also points at potential implications of the loss of the previously mentioned distinctions.
Alina Haliliuc
Communication Studies Gadjo Dilo: (Sub/Supra)National Encounters in (Non)Translation
The (re)construction of European identity after the fall of Communism and in the context of European Union’s subsequent enlargement is a vivid research topic for many disciplines. Through a close reading of the polyglot film, Gadjo Dilo, this essay interrogates how national, sub-national, and supra-national identities are constructed in relationship to each other. The underlying premise is that the genre of the polyglot film has unique potential to articulate messages about sub/supra/national identities, a potential that comes from treating language not as a self-effacing, transparent medium, but as a central element of the film. Who translates whom, to whom, who is refused translation, who is constantly mistranslated are the questions that will direct the central inquiry: how is European identity imagined? I argue that this identity is constructed through an encounter with Balkan subject positions, through the mobilization of the discourse of Balkanism when talking about populations in the Balkans. Through the French character’s inhabiting of such discursive space, the film means to redeem the hegemonic European subject from his Orientalist sins; such redemption, though, commits the renewed European identity to a discourse of what some scholars call postmodern racism (Rathzel) or racism of hybridity (Zizek).
Chiemi Hanzawa
Second Language Acquisition Choosing the appropriate Japanese demonstrative KO, SO, and A: Importance of shared knowledge
Japanese demonstrative words (e.g. this in English) Ko, So, and A are used to indicate something physically present (deictic use), as well as to refer to something in a discourse (anaphoric use). Although deictic use has been explained by the distance and the notion of territory, consensus has not been reached on the anaphoric use. This study compares Kuno’s (1973) notion of shared knowledge and Takubo & Kinsui’s (1997) Mental Space Theory and investigates which one can better explain the choice of anaphoric demonstrative. The results of the acceptability judgment test show that the notion of shared knowledge is the strongest factor when choosing the appropriate anaphoric demonstrative, but the possibility is not limited to one demonstrative in some contexts. The results of the same test by learners of Japanese did not show the similar patterns. Learners relied on neither of the factors, but heavily on their knowledge on the deictic demonstratives.
Gary Jarvis
History Of Vegetables and Virility: Vegetarianism and the Rhetoric of Masculinity in Britain and the United States, 1890-1910
A century ago, vegetarian advocates in the US and Britain seemed to have had quite a bit going for them. Vegetarian societies were flourishing, vegetarian restaurants were opening in dozens of cities, and new rationales for a meat-free diet were emerging as a result of evolutionary evidence suggesting that humans and animals were far more closely related than previously thought. Despite this apparent progress for their cause, however, dietary reformers found their efforts thwarted by a frustrating and intractable obstacle: the deeply-rooted cultural constructions of gender that associated meat with manhood and vegetarianism with weakness and effeminacy. In an era when many saw the big-stick-carrying, big-game-hunting Teddy Roosevelt as something of an ideal man, this was of no small concern. Drawing on a variety of contemporary vegetarian publications, I argue that vegetarian reformers embraced this challenge, and deliberately sought to undermine or even replace existing constructions by providing an alternative discourse of masculinity and diet in which vegetarian men were athletic and masculine, and in which being truly manly meant not causing harm to other sentient beings.
Douglas Jones
Religious Studies "Oh Let Me Not Serve So": Mysticism, Love's Idolatry, and the Iconoclastic Act in Early Modern England
Starting with a few well-documented instances of iconoclasm following the success of the English reformation, this paper will examine both the theological and literary heritage of such responses in the brand of Pauline interiority articulated by the twelfth-century nun Heloise in letters to her former lover, Peter Abelard. At issue in the letters is the seeming reversibility of cardinal virtues and carnal desire, in which the line between the love of the bridegroom in the mystic tradition and the love of Abelard grows perilously thin. I hope to show that anxiety over this reversibility resurfaces in the destruction of images. The demand that the mysterious reveal itself as a simple artifice of popish superstition, that it be stripped of its intended meaning, will be shown to reveal a fear, not only of all things Catholic, but of intensely liminal, mystical experience.
Dauna Kiser
History The Gift of Caritas: Un-gendering Medieval Theories
Caritas, or charity, is an important expression of compassion for one another in our modern society. It was also an important concept in thirteenth-century religious circles. This invisible bond between the human soul and the divine mind carried more than material benefits to other people. Medieval women and men learned to connect to the divine and teach others to do the same, yet we know very little about women theorists in the records of our educational history. This paper presents the theories on caritas as a gift in the theories of two women and two men, discussing this form of love as itself a gift and a carrier of other gifts from the divine. This paper argues that when gender is set aside, medieval theorists (women and men) have a surprisingly common understanding of what caritas is and how it relates in regard to both the divine and the human soul.
Lynne Larsen
Art History Marking Royal Territory, Asserting Kingly Power: Spatial and Visual Legitimization in the Palace of Dahomey
The Kings of the pre-colonial West African kingdom of Dahomey were wealthy and militarily powerful. In the center of their administrative capital, Abomey, lay the palace complex, rich with art objects. The ceremonial display of wealth allowed the king to authenticate his rule symbolically and economically to the citizens who viewed it. Human remains also functioned within the palace complex as religious symbols of sacrifice and the political symbols of victorious war, economic prosperity, and royal power over life. The palace complex of pre-colonial of Dahomey included spatial designations and visual elements that legitimized the king politically, through boundaries which kept him separate from others, socially, through the presence of wives, their power, and his control over them, economically, through the display of wealth and art objects, and militarily, through the display and use of human remains, slaves, and a powerful army.
Michael Lawrence
Communication Studies Lists of Loss: The Names of the Dead of 9/11
The list of names of the dead of 9/11 has become a pervasive memorial text, recited yearly at commemorative ceremonies, widely disseminated through newspapers and websites, and ultimately carved in the stone of local and national memorials. Though the list itself is generally understood as a neutral fact of history, I argue that the list of names is a rhetorical object that functions to construct a particular vision of great loss as both private and public, individual and collective, on a scale at once intimate and massive. The public discourse about the list of names ascribes to it a certain purpose and power while all the while covering over this dimension to insist on its mere facticity and purely referential function.
Barbaranne Liakos
Art & Art History The Civil War and Women's Rights: F.O.C. Darley's 'Michigan Bridget'
Until recently, few publications about the American Civil War have acknowledged the numerous women who engaged in active combat. The collective memory of Civil War battlefield engagements remains focused on masculine actions. However, during the late nineteenth century, some of these little known female soldiers emerged in visual imagery and in text. One of the most interesting of these was a print entitled "A Woman in Battle 'Michigan Bridget' Carrying the Flag" immortalized both by an artist, Felix Octavius Carr Darley, one of the most popular and sought after American book illustrators in the nineteenth century, and an author, Mary Livermore, a writer and important wartime Sanitary Commission agent. An investigation of the iconography contained in this print, Darley’s other images of heroic women, and Livermore s political ideals suggests that this image embodies a strong appeal for gender equity in the guise of a battle image.
Jill Allison Miller
Art History The Role of Orpheus on the Underworld Painter s Munich Krater
Orpheus, the celebrated musician of Greek mythology, frequently appears in red-figure Underworld scenes on fourth-century South Italian vases to retrieve his deceased wife, Eurydice. However, his iconographic interpretation remains controversial on a monumental funerary volute krater by the Underworld Painter (ca. 330-310 B.C.), now located in Munich. Although the Underworld Painter includes Eurydice s apparition on a similar vase, the Munich krater portrays him either performing alone for the Underworld rulers, Hades and Persephone, or conducting a family of Orphic initiates to paradise. Consulting both ancient and modern sources reveals that the Underworld Painter s composition may hold Orphic cult significance and link the musician to other afterlife beliefs and shamanistic traditions in the ancient world.
Cheyenne Nimes
English/Nonfiction Writing Program Terrorism & Global Warming: Prose Meditations
Hybrid, cross-genre nonfiction, poetry and fiction as a valid approachable form to convey information (without the limitations of straight, staid narrative) on relevant contemporary topics via pre-apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic tone, mood, and setting more akin to the non-linear way humans think and experience the universe; a systematic attempt via the urgency of language in the piling of images and short phrases that jump-cut to build accretions of meaning. Use of the second person and guest appearances of a phantom third person cause a non-exclusionary open narrative presence that does not resist the notational accretions; instead, it allows for more of an entering in. Clarity, precision, and beauty of the language juxtapose with etherealness in these tiny discrete pieces to birth less traditional connections, allowing my reader an opportunity to arrive organically at her or his own thoughts and feelings… reactions and conclusions not handed to one from a news report.
Michele Petersen
Religious Studies Absence as Presence: Silence, Reflexive Consciousness, and Transcendence in the Writings of Paul Ricoeur
Paul Ricoeur writes an elusive portrait of context as he constitutively forms the self through the movement of reflexivity. The relational realities of existence coincide in this interior space where reflexivity creates depth. By applying our moral creative capabilities in our interiorly lived reality, we can expand context which increases our ability to respond to others. I am phenomenologically thinking silence into our discourse as a communicative language of transcendence, a moral creative act whereby intentional silence is an action-intending action. As awareness of the non-coincidence of the finite and infinite poles of human existence heightens, a parallel unity occurs between finite opposites in realizing the one that I am here. And, in realizing the one that I am here, I am questioning myself as a thinking being.
Meryl Carlson
Communication Studies Vulnerability, Violence and Technology
As early as September 11, 2002, Time magazine’s Benjamin Nugent was asking, “Where’s the 9/11 Film?” With the premiere of United 93 at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 25 and the nationwide release on April 28, 2006, the counter-question became, “Are we ready for the 9/11 Film?” The emotional and communal response to the release of the film may open a renewed consideration of the status of 9/11 in collective memory, public discourse, and by extension public policy. Of particular relevance is the proposal by Judith Butler (2004) that melancholia can function productively rather than pathologically. I invoke Foucauldian technologies of power and signification to understand the work the film may accomplish towards recovery from collective trauma. Ultimately, I argue that in utilizing the sign system of the docudrama, and the disciplinary power of the theatre, the film is unlikely to foster the other-orientation needed for productive melancholia.
James Lambert
English Nick Bottom: Pyramus, Thisbe, Lion, Antitheatricalist, Ass
Critics date the first production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at around 1595, a time when the London pamphlet wars were raging. Antitheatrical prejudice had been granted a renaissance in the late sixteenth century, and several well-read tracts and treatises had recently denounced public playhouses. Antitheatric antics were especially proliferate just as drama itself was experiencing a surge of public interest and royal support. Many Elizabethan playwrights, Shakespeare certainly included, reacted with and against the sentiment. In my presentation, I will argue for a reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a direct response to many of the criticisms leveled against the stage in the late sixteenth century. I do this by presenting Bottom, who I consider to be the center of the play, as an embodiment of both the fears and the defenses of the stage. In several rigorous close readings of Bottom’s speeches, I will demonstrate his allegorical function as conflicted antitheatricalist.
Jeff Doty
English Shakespearean Popularity and the Early Modern Public Sphere
Post-revisionist historians Peter Lake, Steve Pincus, and others have recently turned to the sixteenth-century term "popularity" as an entry point into reconstructions of the public sphere in early modern England. They emphasize printed appeals to the public and the use of popularity as a pejorative for others’ appeals. This paper argues that Shakespeare’s representations of popularity enrich such a project by restoring the performative and performance aspects of cultivating popular affection. Rather than simply condemning or revering popularity, Shakespeare explores its instrumental use by politicians, its way of inviting the people to think of themselves as political agents, and its application as a rhetorical theme. The ambivalence of Shakespeare’s depiction of popularity stems from these threads, and it pushes his audiences toward cognitive rather than emotive reactions, foregrounding how players and playgoers might recognize themselves as a public and their own thought as being inherently political.
Claire Kovacs
Art History Luc-Olivier Merson's Je vous salue, Marie: Reading Tradition and Modernity in Religious Painting
Painter Luc-Olivier Merson approached his compositions through the manipulation of traditional Italian Renaissance constructs, coupled with the conscious insertion of these concepts into the milieu of contemporary society. In doing so, he invests his supernatural subject matter with a distinctly human quality. The possibility of creating authentic religious paintings in the nineteenth century was a point of contention, given voice by Hegel’s prediction that, in spite of the decline of religion in the general culture, painters would continue to paint religious pictures, but they will not force us to our knees. While it is impossible to state whether Merson recaptured the transcendental aura of the divine, Je vous salue, Marie (1892) expresses the work of a man attempting to combine two spheres of artistic influence: the impact of the religious paintings of the past and his desire to embody these influences in a contemporary Realist guise.
Sharon Meilahn Bartlett
French and Italian Haiti's Crisis of Masculinity and Rising Poto Mitan
Politicians like to describe Haitian women as the poto mitan of Haitian society after the central pole that holds the roof of Voodoo temples it also is an accurate description of the central role Haitian women play in Haiti’s society. Haiti’s Duvalier dictatorships, corruption, violence, and the arrival and exile of Jean-Bertrand Aristide all constitute what Kaja Silverman calls “historical trauma”. In the film Vers le sud (Heading South, Laurent Cantet 2006) the most apparent impact of the historical trauma is the destabilization of the male subject’s access to wealth. The purpose of my analysis is to establish the impact of wealth on the crisis of masculinity in this historical context, identify key instances of destabilized gender roles, and evaluate the claim of historians like Philippe Girard that Haitian women are assuming the prominent role in society as masculinity declines.
Matt Thomas
American Studies Moving Lips, Wagging Tails: The Dogville Comedies and Post-Synch Film Sound
The Dogville Comedies were a series of short films released by MGM between 1929 and 1931 featuring dogs walking upright, wearing clothing, and "talking." People dubbed the dialogue, their voices synched up with the dogs' moving lips. Film scholars have ignored these films, but I propose to take them seriously to ask how they might help us better understand Hollywood sound practices circa 1930. Sources from the period suggest that people were fascinated by their use of post-synchronous sound. Yet at the same time, people were highly suspicious of post-synchronous sound in general. My thesis is that the Dogville Comedies, in light of this dialectic, worked to allay people's anxieties about post-synchronous sound by transforming it into something to be laughed at. These films thus worked to pave the way for the acceptance of post-synchronous sound more broadly by transforming it into something that one could and should take pleasure in.
Erica Bazemore
English "A Different Kind of Jazz: Rereading the Skyscraper City as Visual Text"
In her essay, Skyscrapers, Airplanes, and Airmindedness: The Necessary Angel, Ann Douglass explores the influence of jazz culture in Manhattan during the decades of the 1920s and 1930s. This period came to be known as the “Aerial Age” because it was associated with the commodification of the air as a marketable product manifesting itself in the form of radio frequencies, airplanes, and skyscrapers (Douglass 196). What is largely missing from Douglass’s celebratory reading of the city is a discussion of the migration of African Americans during the Great Migration which was concurrent with the incipient stages of the Jazz Age and the Aerial Age. I would like to complicate Ann Douglas’s reading of the city by drawing upon other ways in which we can reconstruct the urban narratives during the emergence of both the rising skyline and the Jazz Age.
Heidi Bean
English The Hope and Failure of Amiri Baraka's Black Nationalist Poet's Theater
With its unusual mix of absurdist language, jazz aesthetics, and Black Nationalist politics, Amiri Baraka’s 1968 play Home on the Range baffles most contemporary critics. But in its own era, it seemed destined for an auspicious career, with several key performances and publication in the nation s top avant-garde theater journal. This essay explores both the promise and eventual failure of the play, linking its much-maligned textual aesthetics to Baraka’s larger political program of cultural performativity as well as to American theater history of the 1960s. More than most plays, this essay argues, Home on the Range is both product and victim of its historical and aesthetic moment--a clash of pro-textual experimental theater, 1960s anti-textual ritualism, Black Nationalist ideology, and the emerging sense of cultural performativity championed by the new social movements, all coming together at a particularly activist moment in African American cultural history.
Adam Bradford
English "Hard and Patient Labor:" Cable's "The Grandissimes" and the Problem of Social Progress
Without question, the 19th Century Republican ideology that wedded labor and social progress marked one of the key points of disagreement between the North and the South leading up to the Civil War. For many Northern individuals a social system based on “free” (as opposed to "slave") labor represented a mode of life that promised both a sense of personal nobility gained through one's actions as a laborer and opportunities for social mobility and economic growth. This presentation investigates why this distinctively Northern ideology of labor appears to have been ironically attractive to an affectively loyal Southerner, George Washington Cable, during the era of Reconstruction. Through a sustained reading of his novel The Grandissimes this presentation shows Cable's preoccupation with an ideology of labor that, like antebellum Republican discourse, intrinsically (if not anachronistically) tied labor to ideas of moral and social progress and promised to give back to the now “Silent South” a voice worthy of being heard, and a culture worthy of being celebrated.
Sarah Dees
Religious Studies Religious Studies Methodology (In 3-D!): A Descriptive Model of Approaches
Just as religious adherents may disagree on practices within their tradition, so may scholars of religion disagree on the proper way to approach their objects of study. The insider-outsider debate in religious studies has prompted representatives of some methodological and theoretical camps to vie for dominance, asserting that their particular approach yields superior understanding and explanation. However, rather than arguing for an elusive ideal, developing a descriptive model of contrasting approaches could allow scholars to locate themselves with regard to others, and more easily recognize how they may proceed with more productive arguments. Past attempts at categorizing scholarly perspectives have used a scholar’s position on the insider-outsider gradient as the sole item for comparison. I propose instead a model that takes into account scholars’ methods and goals in addition to their positions, which will provide a more comprehensive basis for the evaluation of scholarly approaches in religious studies.
Amber Griffioen
Philosophy The Irrational Project: Toward a Different Understanding of Self-Deception
Generally viewed as highly paradoxical, self-deception has emerged as a problematic concept from both an epistemic and a moral standpoint. In this paper, I attempt to construct an account of self-deception that avoids the epistemic paradoxes. I examine two philosophical accounts of self-deception that I take to be problematic, before developing an alternative account that does away with these problems. I propose that that self-deception properly refers to a process, rather than a state. I discuss this view in detail, and conclude by mentioning a few questions raised by such an account that stand in need of further discussion.
Hassman Benjamin
Philosophy Recapturing Reference for (Some) Sorites-Susceptible Predicates
The sorites paradox argues against the existence of many objects, including heaps of sand and bald heads (put precisely, nothing can be bald, nor a heap). This essay paves a path back to genuine property reference for certain sorites-susceptible predicates, which thereby escape the wrath of this knotty paradox. In the end, it argues two claims. First, the proper conclusion to draw from sorites is prima facie nominalism for susceptible predicates rather than the ultima facie nominalism many accept. Second, such predicates can refer to a genuine four-place relational property that escapes the accusation of vagueness inherent in sorites-susceptibility.
Mark Bresnan
English Chris Bachelder's Bear v. Shark and the Triumph of Fan Speculation
What, if anything, do sports fans do? Contemporary American culture pays close attention to the games that fans watch, the stadiums in which they sit, and the often outrageous costumes they wear. In this presentation, I argue that fan voices are much more articulate and nuanced than the cheers and jeers that seem to cohere into unitary roar. American sports fans are instead defined by the written and oral texts they author. These fan texts are the subject of Chris Bachelder’s 2001 novel Bear v. Shark, an allegory of contemporary sports culture that emphasizes the role of broadcast media in shaping fan discourse. I use Bear v. Shark’s fictional fan culture as a lens through which to examine a variety of real fan communities including the self-described Hawkeye Nation, a web forum devoted to University of Iowa athletics. Each of these examples demonstrates the increasingly important role of speculation in fan discourses. I argue that the changes in both sports culture and communication technology that have occurred over the last two decades have transformed speculation into the dominant mode through which sports fans express themselves.
Adrienne Ho
Cinema and Comparative Literature Translating an Echo: Intersubjective Voices of Augustan Poet Sulpicia
In the European tradition, a translator of Classical verse relies on historical, archaeological and literary evidence as a biographical guide. However, with Sulpicia, the only extant female poet of Augustan Rome, we have no extra-textual biographical information, and philologists, literary critics, and commentators alike have rallied to the question, “Who is Sulpicia?” by representing Sulpicia’s corpus in multiplicitous, conflicting ways. This paper will show that translation, like commentary, is shaped by interpretive method. But, unlike in commentary, the hermeneutic choices facing any authorial translator extends into more difficult terrain than message. Sulpicia’s poems are a case in point where an authorial translator must recreate aspects like voice, which is often supplemented by biography. Because each translator’s answer to “Who is Sulpicia?” determines how Sulpicia’s corpus is represented, the primary concern of this paper is with the polyvocalic quality articulated by literary criticism and commentary, and the implications for a translator responsible to intersubjective voices. Instead of concluding that Sulpicia’s poems adhere to a strictly historical voice, this paper will consider Sulpicia’s poetry as an echo.
Tom Keegan
English
Making an entrance: At the threshold of the pub in James Joyce's Dubliners and Ulysses
A man walks into a pub. The doorstep of humor. That shopworn entrance for many jokes also freights a host of critical concerns for Irish literature. While the sentence orients the spatial terms of the joke, it can just as easily orient the reader to similar concerns in the narratives of James Joyce’s Dubliners and Ulysses. There, moments of entrance into the pub offer readers detailed geographies of both character and space that ask us to observe the pub's spatial and practice-oriented engagement with the art of storytelling. Joyce traces out a phenomenology of the pub that provides a more nuanced understanding of the Irish everyday than is often the case in a discipline dominated by post/anti/semi/colonial readings of the texts in question.
Chad Wriglesworth
English
Hydroelectric Development and the Columbia River: Accounts of Water and Work in Raymond Carver’s Poetry
In 1938, Richard Neuberger published Our Promised Land, an account of the Pacific Northwest that bolstered American nationalism and the production of hydroelectric dams along the Columbia River. The largest of these projects was the Grand Coulee Dam, a concrete mammoth designed to provide jobs, irrigate land, and provide cheap electricity for a surging number of western inhabitants. In an essay titled "My Father's Life," Raymond Carver locates his father among the thousands of wanderers who migrated west in order to build the dam. However, like many of the region's laborers, Carver's father was unable to locate the promises that lured him. As this paper suggests, paying attention to the documentary style of Carver's prose and poetry offers critics and historians some important insight into ways hydroelectric development shaped the social, economic, and spiritual experiences of people who inhabit this region.
Contact Division Head
Timothy Gupton
Humanities and Fine Arts Division
Spanish and Portuguese timothy-gupton@uiowa.edu
