Abstracts for English 700 Colloquium (AU 07)

First Day (Wednesday, November 28, 11:30 -1:18)

Panel I: Postmodernism, Feminism, Ethnicity, and Sexuality

Catherine Hart, "The Politics of the Postmodern in Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters"
   
In her 1990 novel Dogeaters Jessica Hagedorn employs several techniques often associated with postmodern narrative, including multiple narrators, multiple textual forms, and a nonlinear narrative sequence, to present life in Manila during the Marcos regime.  Several critics have remarked on the implications of these narrative techniques for the novel's overall meaning or purpose; insisting on the need for novels such as Hagedorn's to engage with sociopolitical issues, these critics reiterate Jameson's concern about the flattening out of culture, and the concomitant loss of the possibility for genuine critique, in the postmodern era.  While some critics (Grice) see Hagedorn's use of alternative narrative forms like gossip as both a means of productive destabilization and revision of history and of writing the nation, other critics (San Juan) see the fragmentation of the novel and the characters' obsession with Hollywood films as empty representation detached from any cultural or political meaning.
    Using Linda Hutcheon's theory of the postmodern as a theoretical framework, I argue that Dogeaters does succeed in presenting a focused, politically nuanced account of life in the Philippines during the Marcos era.  In order to decipher this aspect of Hagedorn's novel, though, one must understand the complexity of the postmodern narrative and its relation to truth.  Ultimately, as Hutcheon elucidates, postmodern narrative does not seek to tell the truth as much as it desires to question whose truth gets told.  This truth need not--indeed, cannot--be singular; rather, it is relative and varies according to the situation and interests of the teller.  To argue this point, I focus on the structure of the narrative and the voices of its tellers.  Specifically, I analyze Hagedorn's use of gossip as technique for depicting sexual violence and for retelling history and investigate the narrative shift in Joey's story from first person to third person.  Overall, my paper demonstrates that the truth that gets told through the act of writing history in Dogeaters is the truth of fragmentation and disorder--a truth at the heart of American cultural imperialism in the Philippines.  The novel emulates such fragmentary truth--or, rather, the truth that the world itself has been fragmented--through its forms as well as its themes.  

References

Candice Pipes, "Womanism: A Critical Framework for African Women's Literature"

Alice Walker first coined the term "womanism" in 1983 to name a philosophy of wholeness and woman-centeredness for black women and women of color. At once descriptive and prescriptive in its orientation, Walker's womanist framework characterizes women of color as: (1) audacious and willful, self-affirming and serious about their responsibility; (2) woman-centered both individually and communally; (3) whole, full of love for life, but loving self first; (4) purple, blossoming full of color.  Although Walker's model originally emerged from her engagement with African American women's writing and culture, my paper argues that by naming and outlining "womanism" as a concept Walker has created a paradigm for literary criticism that can illuminate the nexus between race and gender in African women's writing as well.
    To date, a number of scholars have published womanist analyses of African American women writers, including Katie Canon's study of Zora Neale Hurston and Deborah E. McDowell's reading of Sherley Williams' Dessa Rose.  For her part, Tuzyline Jita Allan in Womanist and Feminist Aesthetics attempts a womanist deep reading across a spectrum of texts, including Virginia Woolf, Alice Walker, and the African writer, Buchi Emecheta; however, Allan succeeds in reading only Walker's The Color Purple as womanist.  By contrast, seeking to bridge the gap between African American and African women's literature, I suggest that Walker's womanist framework can be used to read not only Emecheta's novel, The Joys of Motherhood, but other African texts, in this case, Ama Ata Aidoo's prose poem Our Sister Killjoy, as woman-centered communal allegories. By examining characterization and other techniques that contribute to the communal allegories outlined by Emecheta and Aidoo, I show how Walker's ideas afford a frame of reference for studying texts by black women writing in a different cultural context.
    In developing my analysis, I engage with Frederic Jameson's argument that all Third World literature exists as a national allegory. Jameson's approach assumes much about the "Third World," and one of these assumptions is that the national allegory is also masculine. Emecheta's and Aidoo's texts upset the masculinity of the national allegory while simultaneously upsetting the individualism of Western feminism by arguing for a communal allegory where a black woman's discovery of agency is not complete until she defines herself in terms of a greater community. By reading both works as coming-of-age stories and tracing the journeys of the two primary female protagonists, I demonstrate how each character's trajectory can be mapped out in terms of Walker's four points of womanism. Ultimately, the two characters stand as representatives not only for black women, but also for the larger African community, figuring the possibility of the survival of an entire people.
    Overall, then, my analysis explores the ability of womanism to cross national boundaries in order to provide a model for understanding of how African women use writing to articulate the possibility of a better existence for themselves and their respective communities. My aim is not to detail what African American and African women writers have in common, but rather to argue that despite their different traditions and experiences, black women in America and Africa share a common state of being, a shared otherness that links their blackness across oceans.

Works Cited or Consulted
Dylan Canter, Queering the Story, Redefining the Self: Chicano/a narrative in Felicia Luna Lemus's Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties

     This paper focuses on Felicia Luna Lemus’s 2003 novel Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties, drawing on work by Michel Foucault and Frederick Aldama to examine the nexus between sexuality, gender, and ethnicity.  In Lemus's novel the issue of sexuality, or of homosexual and "perverse" sexual acts, is complicated by the issues of gender and race since the text was written by and also focuses upon a Mexican-American/Chicana lesbian.  Thus, my paper integrates Foucault's ideas with work in gender studies and Aldama's Chicano/a ethnicity study to develop a three-tiered approach to the novel's representations of sexuality, gender, and race.  More specifically, I argue that Lemus’s text, by constantly drawing parallels between the past and the present, suggests an understanding of sexuality, gender, and race as both inherent and "performative," biological and socio-historical, and continuously redefines and re-explains that understanding through a unique mode of narrative structuring.
     To this end, in addition to discussing Foucualt's model of how the proliferating discourses of sexuality work to define and regulate homosexuality in particular, I draw on Judith Butler's concept of "gender performativity" and Aldama's work on how the resources of Queer theory can be incorporated into a Chicano/a context.  I focus explicitly on Lemus’s use of the narrator-protagonist Leticia, and the history and environment with which she is engaged.  In addition I focus upon the text’s unique re-interpretation of the traditional Mexican folkloric figure La Llarona, or Weeping Woman, who serves key narrative functions within the work.  The inclusion of this figure as a flesh and blood character that surfaces at crucial moments in the narrative necessitates a re-evaluation of the intersections of sexuality, gender, and race.  Her inclusion serves to illuminate the tension between tradition and the present which provides the framework for the questioning of identity and “performativity” within the novel.  Thus, through its themes as well as its narrative techniques, Lemus’s novel manages to avoid binary oppositions such as heterosexual/homosexual, male/female, biological/performed, etc., and instead suggests a continuous redefinition of identity that is both inherently queer and Chicano/a and yet not at the same time.
     
Works Cited or Consulted
Jenna Guimaraes, "Queer Politics in Alexander Chee's Edinburgh: How Plato and Sappho Shape a 21st-century Novel"

[abstract forthcoming]


Panel II: Questions of Identity: Performance, Discourse, and Narrative

Jennifer Herman, "Shewing, Sight, and Understanding: Gender Performance and a Feminized Christian Literacy
in Julian of Norwich's Revelation of Love"
   
Julian of Norwich's collection of religious revelations, A Revelation of Love, positions Julian in a rich tradition of medieval women mystics who include St. Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Siena.  Through their religious visions, Julian, Bridget, and Catherine use socially accepted medieval religious conventions to develop expanded modes of religious piety.  In this paper, drawing on Judith Butler's performative gender theory, I argue that in A Revelation of Love, Julian of Norwich establishes a new and more feminized mode of Christian literacy through her purposeful blending of deep theological knowledge with the rhetorical performance of a socially acceptable female-gendered religious role. 
    Previously scholars have regarded Julian as "an early experimenter with the resources of the English language, whose prose 'point[s] to an author thinking aloud rather than polished preformulated ideas,' so that 'the reader is involved in a primary mental process'" (Glasscoe, qtd. in Watson, 23).  Alternatively, she has been read as "a learned Catholic doctor, reinterpreting the divine and human wisdom of the past in the light of a present revelation for the benefit of the future" (Colledge & Walsh, qtd. in Watson, 23).  More generally, although critics have argued that the voice in Julian's texts is distinctly female and that her message is subversive in its religious motivations, the previous scholarship has not explored fully enough how Julian establishes a feminized Christian literacy through her strategic performance of a recognizably feminine identity.  Using Butler's account of gender as performance, my paper establishes that what is significant about Julian's text is her feminization of Christian literacy, a radically subversive move for a woman living in the Middle Ages.  I demonstrate that the success of her argument is dependent on the ethos that she develops through her performance of the authoritative female religious roles of mystic and anchoress, as well as through her facile use of rhetorical invention, arrangement, and style.  Thanks to these techniques, Julian avoids alienation of a predominantly misogynistic male readership but leaves the reader with an altered and distinctively feminized interpretation of theology.  The success of Julian's performance is evident at the end of the text when the reader finds him- or herself unable to dispute Julian's feminized interpretation, since she constructs her subversive position by appealing to unassailable religious and cultural conventions.  Because Julian uses the performance of a normative identity to actually transgress the accepted gender norms of medieval England, I suggest also that Butler's performative gender theory must be specified historically; rather than relying on parody to undermine gender norms, it is only by strict adherence to religious and cultural understandings of gender that Julian is empowered to do what no medieval woman should.

Works Cited or Consulted
 Elizabeth Brewer, "The Revolutionary Revenger: Foucauldian Approaches to the Revenger in
The Spanish Tragedy and The Revenger's Tragedy"

"Revenge is an act of passion; vengeance is justice," according to Samuel Johnson's 1773 dictionary.  However, history shows that the distinction between personal retribution and state-sanctioned repayment of wrong has not always been transparent.  This paper explores the role of the revenger in Renaissance drama from a historical perspective, characterizing revengers as a reaction to the Tudor government's sixteenth-century prohibition against revenge taken by any actor other than the state.  Ronald Broude highlights the inconsistency between the theory and practice of the Tudor-Stuart justice system, and suggests that revenge tragedy stages a broader cultural ambivalence about early modern systems of justice.  I build on Broude's ideas by considering the Tudor-Stuart dynasty as a precursor to the Foucauldian carceral system in place by the mid-nineteenth century.  In particular, I examine how the revengers in The Spanish Tragedy and The Revenger's Tragedy opt for personal retribution in favor of legally sanctioned public retribution that has failed both Hieronimo and Vindice.  I argue that the revenger attempts to override the emergent public justice system, motivated only by a transgression against his person; in doing so, however, he inadvertently functions as a revolutionary force that expresses itself as an attempt to cleanse the corrupt court.
    In making my case, I draw on the work of a number of thinkers who have been concerned with the possibility or impossibility of revolution, including not just Foucault but also Marx, Gramsci, and Hall.  Focusing on Foucault's description of the modern carceral system as a movement away from the Renaissance ideal of punishment as spectacle, my paper joins this discussion by analyzing Hieronimo and Vindice as victims who are unwilling to forfeit their personal right to vengeance.  I position the Tudor monopoly of vengeance as England's first step toward what Gramsci later terms cultural hegemony.  And thus, I consider Hieronimo's and Vindice's individual pursuit of revenge as an attempt to wield personal force against public institutions that ultimately become the carceral.  I further explore the production of the revenge tragedy genre as a form of meta-power by which the playwrights used language, as Hall describes it, as a weapon against the Tudor-Stuart justice system, even though that weapon ultimately still functioned within the monarch-regulated English society.   Rather than viewing the revenger himself as a direct attack against the Tudor or Stuart monarchs, I argue that the portrayal of the revenger as a stock character signals an artistic awareness of and reaction against an emergent communal system of justice.

Works Cited or Consulted
Joy Futrell, "Séance as Ritual: Effects of Extended Liminality on American Spiritualism"
 
When considering the Spiritualist movement in 19th Century America, scholars including Ann Braude, R. Laurence Moore, and Geoffrey Nelson have broadly focused on a variety of cultural issues from the reconciliation of religion and science to women's rights. While these studies are crucial for appreciating Spiritualism's influence within Victorian culture, such generalized critiques need to be supplemented by an investigation into the key ritual of the séance.  Using published memoirs as well as archival and periodical sources, this paper proposes that the séance ritual itself played a significant role in Spiritualism's rapid acquisition of widespread appeal as well as its equally sharp decline in popularity.
    Spiritualism's emphasis on social equality encouraged open participation in séances, so a variety of beliefs and motives were represented within the ritual.  Drawing on the work of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, I suggest that the diversity of worldviews underlying Spiritualist practices disabled a crucial function of ritual--the development of communitas, or a strong sense of community that promotes unity and equality.  This in turn affected the structure of the ritual (separation, liminality, reintegration) so that the reintegration phase, which involves a collective attribution of meaning to events, was absent.  This suspension of closure forced séance participants to find reintegration within sympathetic audiences primarily through subsequent personal narratives.  Typical narratives first framed the motivations for attending the séance, recounted participants' specific experiences, then presented evaluations ranging from testimonials to Spiritualism's legitimacy to attempts to discredit it as pseudoscience or outright fraud.  Overall, I suggest that when many of these narratives were made public, the interest in Spiritualism intensified, but because the narratives were constructed and dispersed among dissimilar, often polarized worldviews, they were contested, reappropriated, and refused by those both inside and outside the movement.  In this way, the very egalitarianism the movement promoted disrupted the potency of the séance as a ritual and contributed to Spiritualism's eventual decline.

Works Cited or Consulted
Cassie Patterson, "Formal Narratology, Contextual Narratology, and Folklore: An Integrative Approach to Appalachian Identity in Harriette Simpson Arnow's 'The Goat Who Was a Cow'"

Dan Shen, in her article "Why Contextual and Formal Narratologies Need Each Other," stresses the "mutually-benefiting relationship" between formal and contextual narratologies. She states that all contextual narratologies begin by drawing from the existing formal toolkit (concepts such as narratee, story vs. discourse, anachronies, focalization, etc.) and build upon it through their specific discipline--thus creating new tools for the formal narrative toolkit itself. My paper extends Shen's argument by examining an Appalachian story about identity and integrating a formal narratological approach with ethnographic and gender-oriented perspectives.
    Specifically, focusing on Harriette Simpson Arnow's short story "The Goat Who Was a Cow" as a case study, and adapting Simone de Beauvoir's foundational work on gender myths, I argue that the peoples of Appalachia are mythologized into two binarily opposed identities: the white-trash hillbilly and the American pioneer. Drawing on the formal narratological concept of the narratee, my analysis uses Arnow's story to highlight the disparity between Appalachian stereotypes and their actual conditions of existence. In Arnow's story, as in other narratives, the role of the narratee is especially important because it shapes how the story is told. If the narratee is a member of the narrator's community we can expect a story that focuses on "insider" information. Other stories, involving outsider narratees, will go into greater detail about the community and its practices. In turn, the distance between the narrator and narratee affects the ability of the reader to become part of the authorial audience, thus determining the reader's overall understanding of the message of the implied author. Arnow's story develops a narratee who is not a native of the narrator's community, but is being integrated into that community and is an individual the narrator likes and trusts. In this way, Arnow widens the scope of her authorial audience to invite Appalachian scholars as well as nonexperts to benefit from reading her story of mistaken identity. The text thus works against the grain of the process of mythologization, revealing that identity myths are rooted in the need to objectify and categorize the other. 
      In creating a satirical story about mistaken identity, Arnow presents the multidimensional identity of a resident of Appalachia in opposition to dominant stereotypes. In doing so, Arnow exposes the complexities of identity and the way in which stereotypes, by contrast, are a species of myth. By the same token, my paper shows that to fully explore processes of mythologization and stereotyping in fictional contexts, engaging in a formal narrative analysis is just as important as understanding the cultural significance of forms and techniques. In combining contextual and formal analysis, we can begin to see the ideological dimensions of form itself, as well as the extent to which ideology cannot be understood apart from the textual structures that express and perpetuate it.   

Works Cited or Consulted
Second Day (Friday, November 30, 9:30 - 11:18)

Panel III: Perspectives on Joyce's Dubliners

Ann Burgoyne, "Assertion and Subjugation: The Representation of Mothers in James Joyce's Dubliners"

My paper turns its gaze on the two most visible mothers in James Joyce's Dubliners, Mrs. Mooney of "The Boarding House" and Mrs. Kearney of "A Mother."  Current scholarship regards these mothers as confident, scheming, and controlling women who selfishly exert control over their daughters at their daughters' expense, often with the added indictment of sex trafficking (Paige 329-333).  While I have no argument against any of those assertions, my paper seeks to shift the ground of critical discussions of these mothers--specifically, by drawing on Michel Foucault's ideas concerning the inextricable interconnections between power and knowledge.  I work to expose the power structures exerting pressure on these women and to establish how those pressures determine their behavior.  In addition, I examine the role of knowledge--theirs and others--in determining their successes and failures.
    My study examines mother/daughter relationships and gender roles, focusing in particular on Mrs. Mooney who successfully wields power, the daughters and several male characters who acquiesce to those in power, and Mrs. Kearney who fails to gain the power she unabashedly seeks.  In Foucault's account of the development of the prison system in the early nineteenth century, the combination of constant observation, perpetual assessment, and punishment produced submissive subjects who internalized a strict set of norms specifying what counted as normal behavior.  Likewise, although the mothers in these stories are both assertive women who strive to control their circumstances, it is the degree to which they adhere to acceptable modes of behavior that determines their success.  Further, comparing and contrasting the two mothers highlights the importance of knowledge in consolidating or reinforcing power, as Foucault suggests.  Mrs. Mooney is keenly aware of the behavioral expectations of the early-twentieth-century church and the social and economic structures that exert pressure on her, her daughter, and her boarders, and she subtly uses this knowledge to manipulate the circumstances of her daughter's pregnancy to her advantage.  In addition, she relies heavily on her significant skills in observation and assessment, which inform her as to issues of timing and affect, giving her an advantage as she surreptitiously manages her targets.  She does not need to punish; the threat of societal wrath does this work for her.  On the other hand, Mrs. Kearney takes bold steps to assure that her daughter collects her rightful remuneration, but without taking into account the norms for conduct to which she is being held.  Mrs. Kearney's inability to live up to these norms alienates her and her daughter and negates the advantage of her daring assertion.  Thus, my paper deploys Foucault's ideas about knowledge/power to develop new insights into issues of gender in Dubliners, suggesting how the power of patriarchal institutions constitutes a paralyzing force in its own right--an oppressive force internalized by women in their role as mothers, and thereby passed down from generation to generation.

Works Cited or Consulted
Nancy Stewart, "Controlling One's Narratives:  James Duffy's Absence in 'A Painful Case'"

Previous criticism of Joyce's "A Painful Case" has touched upon James Duffy's rigid unwillingness to interact with others and his insistent isolation from intimate relationships.  Critics such as Boysen, Donovan and Norris have pointed to how the narrator goes to great lengths to characterize Duffy as self-indulgent and even elitist in his pursuit of a Nietzsche-inspired distance from the cultural conventions that surround him.  Building on these accounts, I further qualify Duffy's solitary existence as a reflection of his desire for complete control of the narratives in which he plays a part.
    Duffy's three-phase reaction to the newspaper account of Emily Sinico's death--his initial physical response, subsequent disgust with the journalistic account itself, and eventual horror as he recognizes the disconnect between his own perception of Sinico and the one constructed within the article--invites both Duffy and the reader to reevaluate this perceived sense of control. To this end, my paper uses tools from narrative theory, including the idea of narrative levels and frameworks for studying fictional minds, to highlight how the embedded newspaper account stages the crucial resources afforded by narrative for the construction of the mind of self and others. Specifically, I focus on two aspects of the newspaper story, (1) Duffy's own absence from the narration of the events leading to Sinico's death and (2) the story's miscontrual of her mind, arguing that these aspects of the account prompt Duffy to reconsider his own resistance to being inserted into public narratives over which he has no control.
    To make my case, I explore the parallelism between the embedded newspaper account of Sinico's death and the story as a whole.  Drawing on Alan Palmer's suggestion that the readers use their knowledge of real-world minds to make sense of fictional minds, I argue that Duffy uses the newspaper account in the storyworld in the same way that one would use Joyce's text to construct the fictional minds of both Duffy and Sinico.  More than this, however, I explore how Duffy seeks to control the role he plays in narratives that circulate in public, connecting such narrative exchanges to the process by which we make sense of our own and others' minds. Likewise, within the embedded narrative itself, the text suggests the extent to which the making of Sinico's mind is a social process.  Duffy's initial reaction to the article reflects his anxiety that he too may have misinterpreted her mind; more than this, however, Duffy's unfolding response suggests his acknowledgment that just as Sinico's story is incomplete and, indeed, invalid without recognition of his role in her life, so too will his life-story be negatively affected by his resistance to being inserted into others' narratives.

Works Cited or Consulted
Jeff Tibbett, "A Question of Reliability: The Narrators of Joyce's Dubliners"

This paper explores whether some of Joyce's narrators in Dubliners can be considered unreliable.  For example, the narrator of "The Dead" tells us that Gabriel's aunt Julia is "still the leading soprano in Adam and Eve's" (Joyce 152), but later we find out that prior to the beginning of the story, she had been the victim of Pius X's decree that women should be removed from church choirs (Joyce 169).  Latching on to such apparent inconsistencies, Margot Norris claims the narrator of "The Dead" has an agenda – s/he is a complacent member of the bourgeoisie.  Other critics such as Gerald Doherty, Therese Fischer, and Garry M. Leonard have also questioned the reliability of the narrators of Dubliners.  In this paper, I argue that debates about the unreliability of Joyce's narrators have as much to do with the changing definitions of unreliability as they do with the experience of reading Dubliners.
    I recontextualize the arguments for unreliability in the narrators of Dubliners by comparing the narration of "The Sisters," "Clay," "The Dead," and other stories with accounts of unreliability developed by narrative theorists like Booth, Cohn, Prince, Rabinowitz, and Hansen.  Based on their criteria I investigate which narrators are reliable and which unreliable, and to what effect unreliability is used. I also probe the possible motivations of the unreliable narrators, and discuss the question of whether they should be treated as characters or simply as elements of the stories' design that facilitate equivocation and ambiguity.  For example, I claim that the narrator of "The Dead" is unreliable not because of complacency, but because, like the story's protagonist, Gabriel Conroy, s/he actively avoids or disavows conflict.  I also point out that whereas according to Booth's criteria the narrator of "The Dead" is reliable, according to Chatman's the narrator is unreliable, and according to Cohn's that same narrator is neither reliable nor unreliable but discordant. Overall my paper argues that to have a meaningful discussion of reliability we must try to come to a consensus on a definition, and offers some suggestions about how we might synthesize a broad, workable concept of unreliability. Further, I work to test that definition against the questionable stories of Dubliners. 

Works Cited or Consulted
Emily Hooper, "Masculine Mothers: Gender Performance in Joyce's 'A Mother' and 'The Boarding House'"

In recent criticism focusing on "A Mother" and "The Boarding House" from James Joyce's Dubliners, scholars such as Linda Rohrer Paige argue that the "goodness" of the mothers is "most decidedly tainted" and the two mother figures seem "ineffectual or hardened, sometimes even wildly or sadly perverted." In addition, Paige argues that these mothers are usually paralyzed--”whether physically, socially or spiritually--and, in turn, inculcate a certain paralysis within their children. Other critics, Earl G. Ingersoll among them, have noted how a "conventional notion of the 'masculine'" is evident in Joyce's mothers. Building on this criticism, my paper draws on ideas from Judith Butler to argue that the paralysis of mother figures and their daughters in "A Mother" and "The Boarding House" results from the patriarchal structures and institutions of Joyce's Dublin, which place constraints on who can engage in particular forms of gender performance. More specifically, I distinguish between the "inner" and the "outer" gender roles of the mothers, focusing especially on the socially-constructed interior states of the characters.
    Extending Butler's argument that "gender is a kind of persistent impersonation that passes as the real" and that "performance destabilizes the very distinctions between the natural and the artificial, depth and surface, inner and outer through which the discourse about genders almost always operates," I explore how Joyce's mothers engage in potentially subversive gender performances, thereby attempting to overcome the paralysis and oppression they live under as a result of patriarchy. Both Mrs. Mooney and Mrs. Kearney perform what they might believe to be masculine gender identities in an effort to avoid the fate of other mothers who either "could not get their daughters off their hands" or could not insist upon and prevail in their daughters' contracts being fulfilled, respectively. But while Mrs. Mooney and Mrs. Kearney (consciously or unconsciously) perform male gender identities on behalf of their daughters' well-being, they fail to evade paralysis and oppression--in part because of a disconnect in the way male characters view them. More specifically, male characters in the stories believe the mothers' performances to be something uniquely other and problematic: chromosomally sexed females, which the males automatically perceive to have female gender identities, who are unsuccessfully attempting to perform male gender identities. In Mrs. Kearney's case, the male organizers of her daughter's concert brush the mother figure aside when she fails to act in a manner conforming to their culturally constructed notion of "a lady." In Mrs. Mooney's case, though she is successful in arranging the marriage of her daughter, she is ultimately engulfed in a paralytic position from which she can hope to escape only by acting out an irregular, masculine (and surely to be much-gossiped-about) gender performance.
    The overall goal of my study of these two stories is to illustrate the differences and interactions between the "inner" and "outer" gender roles, as Butler might call them, of the mother figures and how the social constructions of these roles contribute to the paralysis and oppression of mothers in Joyce's Dublin. I differ from Butler in arguing that there are subtle distinctions to be made between the inner, psychological experience and the outer, social enactment of gender identities, and that focusing on Joyce's techniques of thought representation can illuminate these distinctions. But at the same time, using Mrs. Kearney and Mrs. Mooney to explore how gendered characteristics can migrate from the inner to the outer domain, and vice versa, my analysis supports Butler's assertion that distinctions made on the basis of bodily boundaries are false ones.

Works Cited or Consulted
Panel IV: 19th-Century American Literature and Culture: Douglass, Hawthorne, Melville

Karin Hooks, "Foucauldian Perspectives on Frederick Douglass: Power and Subversion in the Mid-19th-Century Black Press"

Using Foucault's account of how power can be simultaneously prohibitory and productive, my paper examines two prospectuses published as advertisements for Frederick Douglass's abolitionist newspaper. In examining these prospectuses and the change in authorial persona that they reflect, I extend the argument made by David Leverenz in his book Manhood and the American Renaissance that Douglass refashioned himself both literally (from slave to self-made man) and literarily (through extensive revision of his autobiography) as his notions of manhood changed. Whereas Leverenz focuses on Douglass's transformation in his autobiographical works, I argue that the two prospectuses record a similar refashioning as Douglass struggles for dignity and manhood--and for his intellectual freedom.
    Douglass's first prospectus appeared in The Ram's Horn, a Black paper originally organized to speak against white-controlled presses; after a very short period as assistant editor at The Ram's Horn, Douglass published the prospectus for his own newspaper. This short prospectus announces the imminent publication of The North Star and reflects Douglass's inexperience as a journalist. The second prospectus, published thirteen years later to advertise the (newly renamed) Frederick Douglass Paper, self-reflexively highlights Douglass's disadvantaged background and acknowledges that his former slave status had ill-prepared him for a career in journalism, even as it demonstrates his self-realized journalistic competence and independence. I draw on Foucauldian discourse theory, as well as New Historicist methods of research, to suggest that the differences in these prospectuses document how Douglass worked within and against the dominant racial discourse to create a powerful image of himself as he resisted the social order of his time.
    After examining the historical contexts of the two newspaper documents to clarify ways in which they reflect their circumstances of production, I then explore how the prospectuses form part of the constellation of texts that help constitute the past in the first place. More specifically, I go beyond previous historical accounts of Douglass to argue that the stylistic and rhetorical differences of the two prospectuses are indicative of Douglass's successful entrance into a white-dominated field of discourse, enacting his definition and redefinition of himself as a Black journalist.

Works Cited and Consulted
Lauren Clark, "Scarlet and Silence: Imperial Anxieties in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter"

"The Scarlett Letter had not done its office" (Hawthorne 153).

Numerous critics have considered whether and how Hester's scarlet "A" serves to exile,  assimilate, or even empower its wearer. Building upon and complicating the arguments of previous scholars, including Sacvan Bercovitch's The Office of The Scarlett Letter, I draw on a Foucauldian understanding of knowledge and power to argue that Hester's "A"  is more than a punishment encouraging her  "consent" to be governed by a communal morality. Rather, Hester's personal interpellation is secondary to the letter's office as a site of government power, or power grounded in putative knowledge of Hester and her sin. At the same time, I incorporate Edward Said's work on Orientalist texts to explore The Scarlet Letter 's structure and "office" within its historical moment.
    I argue that Hester's "A" is most important as a site for the production of government power. Drawing on Foucault's concept of "power/knowledge," I present the magistrates' publicized moral knowledge-as represented through the A, but also the attempts to gain more knowledge in Hester's early interrogations--as justifying an increasingly invasive government in Hawthorne's early America. Within this formation of power, I build upon the work of critics such as Leland and Lee to explore how Hester's silence on key issues in the text may become her only possibility for subversion.
    After considering Hester's "A," I widen the focus of my investigation to explore the office of Hawthorne's Scarlett Letter in mid-nineteenth-century America. Maintaining a broadly Foucauldian stance, while incorporating Said's work on knowledge, imperialism and literature, I argue that Hawthorne's text parallels the Orientalist characteristics that Said tracks in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British texts (especially a tendency to speak for the Other from a position of "authority" derived from "knowledge" of the Other). But, whereas Said's British texts reflect a system of oppression that relies upon forced colonization, American identity--the only idea unifying the statee--is ostensibly built upon consent. Nonetheless, Said's model of the Orient and the Occident as produced through a cultural discourse of knowledge speaks to Hawthorne's narrator, who appropriates Hester's story, including an early and unifying American history, in order to argue against rebellion.
    Because the South's failure to "consent" threatened national stability, it hovers in the background of Hawthorne's text as another radical and internal entity requiring suppression.  I argue that studying Hawthorne's narrator, who gains authority by possessing the "official record" of the events--and thus silencing Hester's voice--highlights how The Scarlet Letter functions within its cultural moment. Specifically, the text focuses on the narrator's knowledge of the past, Hester's attempted radicalism, and the foundation of America to further reinforce the idea of community and assimilation over radical individualism or revolution.

Works Cited or Consulted
Lindsay Martin,"'Valuable Statistics' or Superstitious Mysteries: Ishmael's Narration and Ideology in Moby-Dick"

Recent criticism on Moby-Dick, such as that by Donald Pease, has emphasized the text's stance on nineteenth-century expansionism and American cultural imperialism.  Yet with this turn to issues of colonialism, criticism has abandoned close attention to the implications of first-person retrospective narration in Moby-Dick, the study of which can help illuminate the text's ideological import.  John Bryant, in "Moby-Dick as Revolution," does address the "structurally problematic" nature of the novel manifested in the division between Ishmael's present-day and past narration; however, Bryant skirts how problematic Ishmael's narration is, instead thematizing the undecidability of Ishmael's narration as revolutionary.  Continuing the conversation between narrative and ideology in Moby-Dick, I push Bryant's "structurally problematic" description further in order to emphasize the narrational and ideological split in Moby-Dick, which renders Ishmael's directly asserted ideology suspect.  Drawing on Stanzel's typological circle, I chart the movement of Ishmael's first-person narration between the surrounding third-person categories of authorial and figural narration, for Stanzel himself notes that first-person narration, when pushed to extremes, can mimic the overt but omniscient quality of authorial narration as well as the covertness of figural narration, in which the narrator cedes pride of place to the mediating consciousness of a "reflector" character.  I explore how the text's shifts in either direction on this circle often correlate with the shifts between past and present in Moby-Dick, as well as how ideological concerns map onto the temporal split.
    I argue that Ishmael's worldview is largely premised on a dichotomy between his present-day, rational (sometimes scientific) attempt to "capture" the truth of the whale, and the marked superstition and limiting subjectivity of the Pequod's crew.  Though Ishmael intends to privilege his present-day worldview (despite its limitations), the dichotomy he establishes breaks down as the divide in perspective between present and past, taken to its extreme, undermines his original terms. Ishmael's present-day narration moves toward authorial narration on Stanzel's typological circle, constituting a complete abandonment of the Pequod narration; though ostensibly objective, his authorial stance manifests a paradoxical mediation. By contrast, his narration of the past moves in the opposite direction, toward figural narration, backgrounding the mediation of events by the narrating-I—and for that matter the experiencing-I.  I argue that this split in Ishmael's narration renders it unreliable, partly because it stretches the limits of believable narration, but also because it inadvertently undermines the values it purports to promote.  To recognize this unreliability and thus enter Melville's authorial audience, the reader must realize that s/he cannot, as Ishmael often does in the present-day narration, assume the existence of an objective truth.  Nor can s/he, however, accept the opposite--that subjectivity and mediation are inescapable--given the extreme to which Ishmael takes this view by presenting fiction (his imagination of some events on the Pequod) as fact (the true history). The terms of this narrative split, when mapped onto the debate about imperialism, suggest a collapse in the terms of expansionism too.  Therefore, much as we find Ishmael's "reporting" of soliloquies on board the Pequod clearly impossible, we cannot accept his directly stated ideology. Moby-Dick ultimately suggests a corollary undecidability on the political question of American expansionism.
 
Works Cited or Consulted
Zachary Vance, "Transformation of a Classical Figure:  Reading Captain Ahab as an Epic Figure within a Democratic Society"
   
This paper draws on the model of intertextual relationships outlined by Gérard Genette in Palimpsests to examine the structure and function of Melville's reliance on epic traditions in Moby-Dick.  The mythic elements that inform the character of Ahab and his hunt are unmistakable.  Moby-Dick, as described by its author, is a "romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries" (Wenke 92).  While the novel may rely heavily upon the science of cetology as well as numerous tall tales based on the whale fisheries, the legends and myths which Melville draws upon within his novel are much wider in scope.  Using Genette's ideas, I argue that Melville's repeated references to biblical passages as well as elements of classical myth point both to the multiple hypotexts to which Moby-Dick relates--whether through a simple process of transformation or by means of the indirect mode of adaptation which Genette labels imitation.  Focusing on classical precedents for Captain Ahab, and building on the work of previous scholars who have linked Ahab to Prometheus (Sweeney) and the Egyptian god Osiris (Franklin), I argue for reading Moby-Dick as a palimpsest of Homer's works and Ahab as a transformation of Achilles.  In making my case, I suggest that Ahab is a tragic warrior-figure who is driven by emotions like Achilles' and whose prophesized death comes to fruition by means of the character's own sense of identity.  Further, though scholars have previously examined Ahab as a mythic figure, I emphasize the extreme diegetic transposition (or transdiegetization as it is termed by Genette) of Ahab into a world vastly different from that of Homer's epics; my focus is on how Melville uses this transposition to comment on nineteenth-century America. 
    In addition to examining how Melville transposes a tragically flawed Homeric hero into the setting of a nineteenth-century whale fishery, I explore Melville's concern with creating a distinct form of American literature.  The democratic principles that came to define the country made it extremely difficult to write an epic, given the genre's typical hierarchy of kings, queens, and warriors.  In connection with palimpsestic transformations like those found in Moby-Dick, Genette would argue that any and all alterations made by the author to the hypotext alter the meaning of that text--a given text's meaning being, in general, a function of the relationship between precursor texts and their later instantiations.  But more than this, Ishmael's open-ended approach to religion and the narration of the novel stands in stark contrast to the beliefs of the mythical figure of Ahab.  The Captain's sense of the determined shape of events and the inevitability of providential design causes him to fill the role of Fates' lieutenant.  I argue that this juxtaposition of Ishmael and Ahab enables Melville to compare the principles of freedom and originality (principles which American society aspired to) against those of a society governed by ancient and mythic traditions of providential design.  Captain Ahab metonymically represents archaic society; against the proud gods Ahab always stands forth as his "inexorable self."  The narrative's symbolic conclusion, with Ahab disappearing beneath the waves while bound to the indefatigable whale, thus carries a mythic insight for America as it portrays a hero whose tragic demise comes while he is still searching for his creative beginnings.  Ishmael, the modern man of the novel, becomes a spiritual outcast left adrift, yet his survival at the conclusion of the novel offers us hope for the future as it signals the end of one age and the beginning of another.
   
Works Cited and Consulted