Abstracts Accepted to Conferences
The following is a collection of abstracts written by English grads at UF that have been accepted to conferences.
1.
October 31, 2005
Title of Paper: "The Poetry of the Poisoned Mushroom: Ginsberg, Corso, Waldman, and The Atomic Bomb"
In my paper, I claim that the atomic bomb metaphorically serves as a poisoned mushroom not only because the physical shape of the bomb's mushroom-like shape, but also because the bomb causes alternated states of consciousness in its ability to create fear, anxiety and even madness. In his essay "The White Negro," Norman Mailer asserts, "We will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of [ . . .] the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these [Mailer wrote this essay in 1957] years" (587).
By examining the "psychic havoc" that pervaded the American psyche in the post World War II years and by comparing it to the poetry of the Beat writers, I explore two main ideas in my paper:
1.The pervasive references to the bomb and all its accoutrements indicate that the Beat writers were profoundly affected by the presence of the bomb.
2.The poetry of the Beats includes many allusions to the atom bomb, which indicates that their poetry also served as a psychic barometer for the era.
In order to illustrate these points in my paper, I discuss:
1. Psychological manifestations on the post World War II American psyche, such as the obsession in all things atomic, fear, anxiety, mental illness (represented through psychotic and neurotic behavior), and the attempt to understand the bomb through anthropomorphism and/or deification.
2.How these manifestations are reflected through close readings of the following Beat Generation poems: Allen Ginsberg's Howl, "America," and "Ode to Failure," Gregory Corso's "Bomb," and Anne Waldman's "Makeup on Empty Space."
In addition to using Mailer's "The White Negro" as a critical text, I also refer to Paul Boyer's By the Bomb's Early Light, as well as Ann Charters introduction of The Portable Beat Reader to inform my close readings of these primary texts.
2.
Conference: British Association for Victorian Studies (2005)
Conference Theme: "Victorians in the Long View: Contrasts and
Continuities"
Paper Title: "Sexualizing the (Re)Production of the Laboring Woman: The
Paradigm Shift from the Victorian to the Modern"
Abstract:
The condition-of-England novels that emerged after the Reform Act of
1832 turned to the lives of working-class families, increasing the
visibility of women's labor, and unleashing a series of depictions that
correlate a woman's "choice of life" with her sexual identity. In Mary
Barton, Elizabeth Gaskell establishes a framework in which the further
a
woman's choice of occupation derails from the domestic hearth, the more
she intensifies the promiscuity of her sexuality identity and
dismantles
the traditional structures of home and family. In Aurora Leigh,
Elizabeth Barrett Browning constructs a middle-class paradigm that
questions the adequacy of domestic education and female
accomplishments,
that might be described as "labor that is not labor" in Nancy
Armstrong's terms. Both novels situate the domesticity of woman as the
heart of the fertile family unit; the departure from this sphere into
the political economy produces a barren spinster or fallen woman. While
this dynamic is a great departure from the Romantic novels of Jane
Austen and Fanny Burney, I've chosen to look forward to its impact on
Modernist representations of women laborers across the Atlantic. The
paradigm of the New Woman, as represented in John Dos Passos's _The Big
Money_ and Anita Loos' _Gentlemen Prefer Blondes_, parallels the
Industrial Woman in that labor separated from the domestic sphere
results in the sexual, non-reproductive female body. However, the
difference in the twentieth century regards a shift in ideological
values: the New Woman engages in various forms of labor that positively
shapes her as independent, single, and sexually active. Therefore, in
this paper I will examine the parallel paradigm of labor and
domesticity
in terms of sexuality and reproduction that manifests in Victorian and
Modernist texts, while paying close attention to the historical
contexts
that reconfigure the reception of this paradigm over time.
3.
Conference: New York College English Association (NYCEA) (2003)
Conference Theme: The 'I' of the Beholder: Narrative Voice and Imagined
Reality
Paper Title: A Modernist's Reality: Six Internal Voices Commune in
Virginia Woolf's _The Waves_
Abstract:
The phenomenological 'subject of enunciation', as defined by Kristeva
and Husserl, holds responsibility for the utterance of semiotic
language
in its drive to shape reality. In Virginia Woolf's highly poetic novel
_The Waves_, the narration commences with six voices that evolve--in a
wavelike trope--into the voice of one mosaic individual. The narrator
as
one Identity in one Body comes to fruition in the final pages of the
book: "For this is not one life; nor do I always know if I am man or
woman, Bernard or Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny or Rhoda--so strange is
the contact of one with another." In this spirit, the novel explores a
series of detached fragments and watery unities as they pertain to
identities, inner/outer realities, and language.
Phenomenology and the nature of poetic language likewise grapple with fragments (individual words) and unities (poetic expressions) and how the subject formulates language into an expression of 'reality'. In _A Room of One's Own_, Woolf defines reality in one way as "the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals." How, then, is reality authenticated in _The Waves_ through the imaginary narration of one voice that is also six communal voices? For, since the onset of modernity, our lives have become -- in the words of Walter Benjamin -- "phantasmagorias of the interior," internal "universes" composed of memory, language, and sensory perceptions disconnected from social interaction. Through deductive reasoning, an internal life (or an internal narrative voice) may be said to be imaginary.
This paper seeks to articulate the sources of imaginary and the real in the unstable narrative voice(s) of Woolf's _The Waves_ through a phenomenological analysis of poetic language and the 'subject of enunciation'. I will also formulate an understanding of the metaphorical and existential nature of these six voices, who, at once declare: "I can imagine nothing beyond the circle cast by my body," but simultaneously reflect that they are bodiless: "silhouettes, hollow phantoms moving mistily without a background."
4.
Conference: Women's History Network (2005)
Conference Theme: "Women, Art and Culture: Historical Perspectives"
Paper Title: "Lily Briscoe's Painting: Absence as Vision in _To the
Lighthouse_"
Abstract:
In _To the Lighthouse_ (1927), the artist Lily Briscoe and the novelist
Virginia Woolf transport the reader through a series of visible and
invisible experiences of Mrs. Ramsay's character--Lily seeking
knowledge
of her identity, Woolf creating and unleashing it. In The Window', Mrs.
Ramsay and James occupy the space on the steps that forms the awkward
place of Lily's painting; Lily's ability to 'see' as a painter and
complete her portrait becomes complicated by Mrs. Ramsay's presence.
When Lily finally achieves her 'vision" in 'The Lighthouse' chapter, it
comes as a result of Mrs. Ramsay's absence and is inspired by Lily's
memory of her.
In her essay 'Life and the Novelist", published the same year as _To the Lighthouse_, Woolf writes on the relationship between observation of human life and the re-creation of it. She finds that the reproduction of life as the product of impressions received is mimetic on the surface, but does not penetrate the essence of life. Woolf claims that many of the errors committed in the fiction writing of her predecessors are caused by a preoccupation with recording the minute details of a visible human life. Yet, at the same time she does not propose the artist seclude herself in her studio pretending to write of life she is rarely exposed to. Woolf thus advocates a mixture of the two processes, one that begins with direct observation and ends in internal reflection on the event. She thus differentiates between the act of seeing with the eyes and that of seeing with the mind.
In _To the Lighthouse_, absence for Lily comes in two forms: Mrs. Ramsay's physical absence inspires the final cathartic stroke in Lily's painting and Lily's parallel absence of a maternal life like Mrs. Ramsay's enables her to become an independent female artist.