Program for English 700 Graduate Colloquium

Click here for abstracts of the papers.


Thursday, November 30


Panel I: The Medieval Period to the 18th Century: Feminist Approaches

Gabriel Vicencio, “The Mysterious Made Innocuous: Using Simone de Beauvoir to Explore Gender Construction in The Squire’s Tale

Erika Claire Strandjord, “Prophetic Play as Feminist Author/ity: The Rhetoric of Vision in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judæorum

Jeffrey Tinley, “Building Rooms of Resistance: Demythologizing and Demystifying the Lover and Beloved in Mary Wroth’s Love Sonnets”

Juliann Reineke, “Becoming a Woman in Frances Burney’s Evelina: Female Sociality and the Construction of Gender Identity”


Panel II: Approaches to Narrative and Identity

Geordie Hamilton, “Consciousness of Family: Reading Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition as Historical Fiction”

John Acker, “Fervid Conceptions: Narrating Revelation in Wieland"

Josh Gass, “‘Conceal’d and Discover’d’: Reading Contradiction in Moll Flanders




Friday, December 1

Panel III: Postcolonial Theory, Postmodernism, and Neomarxism: Implications for Literary and Rhetorical Analysis

Gina Gemmel, “Can the Non-Subaltern Speak? Ethnic Identity and Literary Impersonation”

Lizzie Nixon, “Past the First Post: Postcolonial Historiographic Metafiction in Catherine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie

David Deutsch, “Re-connecting Music in Howards End: Forster’s Aesthetics of Inclusion”

Jessica Clements, “Engagement Ring Advertisements: A Case Study of Debt and the Rhetoric of Need and Want”


Panel IV: Desire, Interpretation, Genre: At the Interface between Text and Context


Joe Hess, “Freudian Approaches to the ‘Circe’ Episode in James Joyce’s Ulysses

Michele Wilbert, “Llorando por Tu Amor: Thwarted Expectation and Disruption of Audience Desire in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive

Dennis Wilson Wise, “McEwan’s Atonement and Todorov’s Fantastic: Rethinking Genre from the Standpoint of Reader Response”

Emerson Lowell, “Uncanny Freaks, Marvelous Clowns: Ontologies of the Other in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus