Posts Tagged ‘Kristin Bluemel’
I have a new post up over at Blogging Woolf. This time, I am writing about intermodernism, a term coined by Dr. Kristin Bluemel for literature and arts in Britain during the years between the World Wars. If readers are interested, I have plenty more to say about intermodernism.
(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 . 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 and Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas. ()
I am happy to announce my participation in this semester’s graduate symposium for our English program at Monmouth. This semester I will be taking part in a round table discussion about academic writing and publishing. It is a great privilege that Dr. Kristin Bluemel will be moderating and my thesis adviser, Dr. David Tietge (no link: ahem), will also be participating.
I will be sure to arrive early to check out Meghan Kutz’s presentation on orientalism in British travel writing. I have had the pleasure of speaking to her about her research and it is quite impressive.
Here is the complete schedule:
LITERATURE MATTERS
Graduate Student Symposium
Monmouth University Department of English
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Wilson Hall, Room 106
PROGRAM
10:00 to 11:30 Session 1: Colonial and Post-Colonial Readings
Moderator: Dr. Sejal Sutaria
Veronica Guevara “Cultural Conflict–or Synthesis? Revised Double Consciousness, Engaged Resistance, and Man’s Relationship with Nature, Time, and Humanity in Vahni Capildeo’s ‘No Traveller Returns’”
Meghan Kutz, “Orientalism in 1930s British Travel Writing on China”
Shanna Williams, “Feminism in Indian Literature”
11:30 to 12:30 Roundtable: Writing and Publishing
Moderator: Dr. Kristin Bluemel
Participants: Dr. Sue Starke, Dr. David Tietge, Sara Van Ness, William P. Wend, Kim Rogers
12:30 to 1:30 Lunch
1:30 to 3:00 Session 2: Literature and Composition Today
Moderator: Dr. Elizabeth Gilmartin
Lisa Pikaard, “Moral Ambiguity in a World in Turmoil: Harry Potter’s Global Implications”
Jenn Ernst, “The Hunter and the Hunted: Drug Use/Abuse and the Failings of the 60s in H. S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”
Jana Phelps, “Amending Writing Composition Instruction to Fulfill the Needs of the Contemporary Student”
Last year, around this time, I would have loved to have had Barth’s essay on Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym for when I was writing essays in Dr. Bluemel’s class or for general classroom discourse. I was pleasantly surprised to find Barth had written about Pym; this novel seems to have a very poor reputation. Leslie Fielder and Borges both wrote about Pym (the latter a strange essay about the use of the color white in the novel). I found the novel to be interesting, not enough to write a paper about, but my classmates more or less did not.
Recently read: Critical Practice by Catherine Belsey.
I have to thank Dr. Bluemel for recommending this book (well, to Toni, but I was standing next to them!). It proved to very helpful in further tempering my understanding of intertextuality, Barthes, and the “decentering” of authors. It is a brief but extremely useful text for any number of scholarly fields.
My first semester of graduate school, one of the courses I took was on Critical Theory with Dr. Bluemel. As we went from theorists as varied as Eve Sedgwick, Stanley Fish, and Roland Barthes I noticed a pattern forming during our discussions. A number of my contributions to the discourse were referential to not only outside sources, but even some outside of what is normally considered “literature” by most students. My professor told me to try to stay within the bounds of literature in order to not lose or confuse other students, which was fine by me. Still, I was troubled that I received blank stares from my classmates when bringing up David Hume, John Dewey, or even a popular contemporary like Zadie Smith. I had an extremely hard time trying to stay “in bounds” which it came to our classroom discourse.
In History Of Sexuality, while discussing the unity of power and knowledge in discourse, Foucault offers this definition of discourse:
We must conceive discourse as a series of discontinuous segments whose tactical function is neither uniform or stable. To be more precise, we must not imagine a world of discourse divided between accepted discourse and excluded discourse, or between the dominant discourse and the dominated one; but as a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies (100).
As an undergraduate, I took a number of extra courses to attain a minor in Philosophy. I did this in order to supplement my literary studies. What I learned from Dewey, Hume, Nietzsche, Arthur Danto, and others went with me back to the English classroom to accentuate my work there. Perhaps this is why theoretical concerns are more compelling to me than the standard close reading associated with English, but I see no reason for not extending into other fields for further enlightenment and thought. Just talking about English in English classes bores the hell out of me.
Recently read: Foe by J. M. Coetzee.
Before Dr. Bluemel assigned Foe to us I had not read much by Coetzee but had read about him. Foe is a fine retelling of the Robinson Crusoe story with a lot of postmodern tricks thrown in. In fact, in class we discussed this novel being the sort of prototypical postmodern novel to hand to someone who was not familiar with contemporary literature to check out. I don’t know if I totally agree with that, but I can get behind it.
Zotero Library
