For the second spring in a row, I have been published in The Quarterly Conversation. This time I wrote about Shelley Jackson’s career in and out of print and electronic literature. There are a lot of other interesting essays on Borges, Bolano, and Swift among others alongside of my piece in the new issue.
(almost done clearing out the graduate school queue)
For Dr. Bluemel’s seminar on Intermodernism, I wrote my seminar paper in an attempt to define some sort of “sex/gender” system for Intermodernism, beginning with her own full length George Orwell & The Radical Eccentrics: Intermodernism In Literary London. To do this, of course, I relied heavily on Gayle Rubin from a theoretical standpoint. From a literary point of view, my focus was on Phyllis Bottome’s The Mortal Storm and Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas. (pdf)
My final graduate school paper was on the role of linearity in classical literature and how women subvert and become subverted by it. My primary focus was on The Descent of Inanna, but I also discuss The Rig Veda, the Persephone myth from The Homeric Hymns, and the Hebrew Bible. This paper was an extension of what I had written about the entire semester. (pdf)
(trying to clear backlog of graduate school writing)
For Dr. Evarts’ seminar on tragedy, I wrote my seminar paper on the role of “coming home” in tragedy and how that affects the power and authority of women. I focused on The Oresteia, The Homecoming, and A Doll’s House, with some references as well to the plays of Dacia Maraini. Critically, my focus is on Kristeva, Prentice, Moi, and, of course, Rubin. Overall, I am not that happy with this paper. We got sidetracked a LOT in this class, so class discussion of some works was unsubstantive. At best. Add a bit of interlibrary loan bad luck, and my best work was not done. I am still pretty proud of the angle I took, especially since it seemed to make some people in the room uncomfortable. (pdf)
I want to highlight a few guest blog posts I have contributed in recent weeks:
First, I contributed to Prof Hacker’s big #mla09 wrapup about the role of social media at the conference. There is a lot of great information and ideas in that post. I tried to come at it from a different angle that hopefully supplement the other ideas.
Secondly, I wrote a post about the role of intertextuality in Mrs. Dalloway for the Blogging Woolf weblog. This coincides with the Mrs. Dalloway Online Discussion Day that happened a day later as part of Woolf In Winter. Hopefully, in the future, I will be writing a few more posts for Blogging Woolf.
The absolute highlight of my time at MLA09 was the night panel on transmedia narratives. I finally got to meet my friend Christy Dena and also catch up with some other friends. Here are my notes:
Migratory cues:
After this, I just sat and listened to everything Christy was saying. Her work is fascinating and close to what I originally wanted to write about in my Master’s Thesis before sliding to something more “Englishy” (see my first symposium presentation about Distributed Narrative)
I also asked a question to Marc and Christy about the role of canon in fan culture. Specifically, I was curious how they regarded fan fiction and spinoff noncanonical media in regards to their examples of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Doctor Who. The BTVS series eight comic is pretty established as canonical, but what about Doctor Who where there are numerous comics, Big Finish audios, and other things where their place in the canon is murky at best. Both Marc and Christy said that trying to decipher between all of that just wasn’t worth doing, so they regards everything in the same manner. I can certainly understand that.
Afterwards, while catching up with Christy, we also talked about the defining of new terms which she does in her work. While writing my Master’s Thesis, I had trouble enough with resistance to terms like ergodic, distributed narrative, hypertext, etc. Christy is creating new terms as she goes.
One of the best panels I attended was on the role of collaboration in the Digital Humanities. I got to meet up with some friends from Prof Hacker and Twitter like Jason Jones and Bethany Nowviskie, who were both on the panel. I also caught up with other friends who I have known for some time as well.
My notes aren’t really detailed, I suppose, but here is what I wrote down during the panels:
Jason Jones
Laura Mandell
Bethany Nowviskie “Monopolies of Invention”
| 
| 
