The 12th Annual Graduate Conference on Language & Literature

at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

February 25-27, 2016Union South

MadLit

Boundaries &Space - Time - Discipline

Intersections

The 12th Annual Graduate Conference on Language and Literature

at the University of Wisconsin-MadisonFebruary 25-27, 2016

The Graduate Student Association of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s English Department is pleased to welcome you to the 12th annual MadLit conference. This year’s theme, “Boundaries and Intersections,” considers and challenges existing temporal, spatial, and disciplinary borders in the study of language and literature. From the play of history and narrative, to literal and figurative bridges, and to the scientific, linguistic, and literary exploration of disease, materiality, the environment, and animals, this conference traces how limitations and their rupture drive the study of literature and language.

GSA Members: Will Broadway, Robert Collins, Ryan Holley, Lisa Johnson, Katie Lanning, Emily Loney, Anna Muenchrath, Faina Polt,

Leah Pope, Neil Simpkins, Aaron Vieth

GSA Co-Chairs: Anna Muenchrath and Aaron Vieth

GSA would like to thank Professor Mark Wollaeger, the UW-Madison English Department, the Modernisms/Modernities Colloquium, the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Bibliomigrancy, the Graduate Association for Medieval Studies, the Composition and Rhetoric Colloquium, the Contemporary Literature Colloquium; the English Department Gender and Sexuality Caucus, the Borghesi-Mellon Disability Studies Workshop, the Americanist Lecture Series, and the conference panelists, moderators, and attendees for their support and participation. Additional funding was generously provided by the Associated Students of Madison and the Wisconsin Experience Grant.

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Keynote Speaker: Mark Wollaeger“Translatio auctōris: Reading and Writing in Conrad’s Shadow”

Thursday, February 25 at 5:00 p.m.Room: Industry (Third Floor)

This year’s keynote address will be delivered by Mark Wollaeger from Vanderbilt University. Professor Wollaeger’s talk will address the ways in which Joseph Conrad has been used in the criticism of Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, and Fredric Jameson in formulations of modernism, postcoloniality, and global literature. This talk uses the notion of translation through criticism – the reformulation of “Conrad” through key critical texts. In part, Professor Wollaeger argues, this means a reassertion of a concept of the author in relation to more systems-oriented approaches to global literature.

Professor Mark Wollaeger is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in English at Vanderbilt University. He served as president of the Modernist Studies Association in 2004-5. In 1990, his first book Joseph Conrad and the Fictions of Skepticism was published by Stanford University Press. He has also edited two collections on Joyce: James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”: A Casebook (Oxford 2003) and Joyce and the Subject of History (co-editor with Victor Luftig and Robert Spoo, Michigan 1996). More recently he has published Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945 with Princeton University Press in 2006 and edited the Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms in 2012. He is the founding co-editor, with Kevin Dettmar, of Modernist Literature & Culture, a book series from Oxford University Press.

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Keynote Address“Translatio auctōris: Reading and Writing in Conrad’s Shadow”Mark Wollaeger, Vanderbilt UniversityRoom: Industry (third floor)Continue the conversation over dinner and drinks at Brochach on Capitol Square.

Thursday, February 25

Friday, February 26

Panel 1: Crossing Boundaries or Opening the Curtains: Gender and Sexuality Room: Industry (third floor)

Moderator: Prof. Aida Hussen, University of Wisconsin–Madison• Robert Collins, University of Wisconsin-Madison: “Reflections

on Camp and Culture Industry: Vincente Minellie as the Aesthete in the Factory”

• Amy Gaeta, University of Wisconsin–Madison: “Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Public Engagement Toward a Curtain History”

• Danielle K. Nelson, Univeristy of Wisconsin-Madison: “‘Talking about myself always makes me feel tragic’: Green Girl’s Quiet, Sad, Subversive Feminist Politics”

Breakfast and CoffeeRoom: Industry (third floor)

Registration is located outside of Agriculture Room on the third floor and will be open from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

9:00–9:30 a.m.

9:30–10:45 a.m.

Registration is located outside of Industry Room on the third floor and will be open from 4:45 to 6:00 p.m.

5:00 p. m.

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Panel 2A: Empire, Modernity, HistoryRoom: Industry (third floor)

Moderator: Prof. Tejumola Olaniyan, University of Wisconsin–Madison• Diksha Dhar, University of Pennsylvania: “Sacrificial Practices in

Gaining Nationhood: Reading Legal and Media Articulation of Dadri Lynching and Badaun Rape”

• Lin Li University of Wisconsin-Madison: “Domesticating the Empire: New Housewives, Modern Domesticity, Bourgeois Culture, and Imperialism in Pre-War Japan (1880-1930)”

• Royce Novak, University of Wisconsin-Madison: “Navigating the Shadows of the Colonial State: The Radical Itineraries and Fluid Identities of Tan Malaka, 1923-1942”

Panel 2B: Rethinking Textual and Historical BoundariesRoom: Agriculture (third floor)

Moderator: Prof. Monique Allewaert, University of Wisconsin–Madison• Harrison Dietzman, University of Iowa: “‘I who have no weapon

but poetry’: The Redemption of History in Walcott’s ‘The Schooner Flight’ and ‘The Sea is History’”

• Neil Polzin, University of Nebraska-Omaha: “Navigating the Public Memory of Engineering Failures in Willa Cather’s Alexander’s Bridge”

11:00 a.m–12:15 p.m.

Lunch: Consult your welcome packet for restaurant suggestions!

12:15–1:30 p.m.

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Panel 3A: Matters of Memory: Testing Rhetorical (De)Constructions in Science and Medicine Room: Industry (third floor)

Moderator: Prof. Morris Young, University of Wisconsin–Madison • Heather Hannaford, University of Nebraska-Omaha: “Victor and

Clerval: Mary Shelley and the Androgynous Ideal in Frankenstein”• Meg Marquardt, University of Wisconsin-Madison: “Weird

Science: Investigating the Shift in Science Engagement in Late 1800s America”

• Tori Thompson Peters, University of Wisconsin–Madison: “Health for Victory: Yellow Fever and Medical Metaphors of Warfare”

Panel 3B: Playing with Time, Memory, and Narrative Room: Agriculture (third floor)

Moderator: Prof. David Zimmerman, University of Wisconsin–Madison • Ivan Babanovski, University of Wisconsin-Madison: “The Union

of Mimir and Mnemosyne: The Play of Memory and Nostalgia in 20th-Century Fiction”

• John Crema, University of Illinois, Chicago: “Crossing Representational Boundaries in Pynchon’s Against the Day”

• Isabelle Groenhof, University of Calgary: “Crossing Narrative Boundaries: Recuperative Storytelling in Graham Swift’s Waterland”

• Maegan Poland, University of Nevada–Las Vegas: “Mortality and Temporality: An Examination of Paul Ricoeur’s Discordance in Sarah Manguso’s The Two Kinds of Decay”

1:30–2:45 p.m.

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3:30–5:00 p.m.

Plenary Address: “Comics Crossover: Transcending Academic and National Boundaries”PhD Candidate Leah Misemer, University of Wisconsin-Madison Room: Industry (third floor)

Based on a new oral history of the authors/editors involved in the underground serial anthology Wimmen’s Comix from the 1970s, Leah argues that comics played a pedagogical role in the feminist movement of that time, as the editors of the series mentored and published the work of women who wanted to join the male dominated field of cartooning. The emergence of Ah! Nana, a French series of women’s comics that included many of the same authors, not only situates the community of women cartoonists as a transnational one, but also reconfigures our understanding of the feminist social movement on a global scale. At the same time that Leah considers how comics shift understandings of global culture, she also mobilizes their ability to transcend university boundaries by including the voices of women cartoonists frequently ignored in discussions of underground comics.

Leah Misemer is a PhD candidate in English Literature at University of Wisconsin-Madison with academic interests in contemporary American literature, visual rhetoric, popular culture, readership, authorship, and comics studies. Her dissertation, The Great Crossover: Readers and Authors in Serial Comics, argues that serial comics have served as pedagogical tools in social movements throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, from the feminist movement of the 1970s to the digital revolutions of the 2000s. Her scholarship has appeared in the scholarly journals Forum for World Literature Studies and Composition Studies, as well as on the Skepchick blog. Additionally, she was a founder of the A.W. Mellon Workshop on Comics at UW-Madison, where she played a leadership role in interdisciplinary conversations about comics that have led to discussions with administrators of a new Comics Studies minor. Based on her Mellon Comics position, she was invited to submit an essay to an edited collection on teaching comics in the digital age. When not doing research or teaching, Leah enjoys spending time with her corgi, wine tasting, and playing ultimate Frisbee.

Saturday, February 27

8:30–9:30 a.m.Breakfast and CoffeeRoom: Agriculture (third floor)

Registration is located outside of Fifth Quarter Studio on the second floor and will be open from 9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.

Panel 4: Identity PoliticsRoom: Fifth Quarter Studio (second floor)

Moderator: Prof. Leslie Bow, University of Wisconsin–Madison• Gabriela Almendarez, California State University-Northridge: “The

Topography of Borders: Hybridity in Butterfly Boy”• Christopher Castillo, University of Wisconsin-Madison: “All

Chained Up: Racialized Myths, the Political Unconscious, and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained”

• Mika Kennedy, University of Michigan: “Strange Empires: Race & the Borderlands of Vigilante Justice”

9:30–10:45 a.m.

Panel 5A: Animal Studies across Time, Space, DisciplinesRoom: Fifth Quarter Studio (second floor)

Moderator: Laura Perry, University of Wisconsin–Madison• Agnes Malinowska,University of Chicago: “Towards a Posthuman

Literary Naturalism”• Kathryn Prottengeier, University of Wisconsin-Madison: “Our

Monsters, Our Selves: An Essay”• Sam Schulte, University of Chicago: “To be (a baboon), or not to be

(a bat), On Time and Subjectivity in Baboon Mothers and Infants”

Panel 5B: The Liminal MedievalRoom: Agriculture (third floor)

Moderator: Matthew Boutilier, University of Wisconsin-Madison• Ryan Holley, University of Wisconsin-Madison: “Don’t Piss in the

House: Respect for Property and the Quest for Home(Land) in Mandeville’s Travels”

• Nicholas Jacobson, University of Wisconsin-Madison: “Scholars in Servitude: The Enslavement of Arab Scribes in 13th-Century Spain”

• Brian Wilt, University of Wisconsin-Madison: “Walking between Waters on Dry Land: The Old English Moses as the Hero on the Beach”

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11:00 a.m.–12:15pm

1:30–2:45 p.m.

Panel 6B: Bridging or Separating Humans, Animals, and MaterialRoom: Agriculture (third floor)

Moderator: Aaron Vieth, University of Wisconsin-Madison• Gabby Benavente, Florida International University: “Building

Bridges: Octavia Butler, Environmental Activism, and the Future of Literary Academic Discourse”

• Benedetta Piazzesi, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa: “Zootechnic Materials”

• Ethan Simmonds University of Chicago: “The Thing in the Jungle: Conjuctive Objects and Vibrant Subjects in Henry James”

Panel 6A: Modernist AlteritiesRoom: Fifth Quarter Studio (second floor)

Moderator: Will Broadway, University of Wisconsin-Madison• Anna Grelson, University of Wisconsin-Madison: “The

Boundaries of Knowledge: Empire and the Humanities in Bulgakov and Euripides”

• Erica Kanesaka Kalnay, University of Wisconsin-Madison: “Toys in Anxious Times: The Velveteen Rabbit as Modernist Text”

• Patricia Ruiz-Rivera, University of Wisconsin-Madison: “Blurred Lines between the Real and the ‘Unreal’: The Multiplicity of Universes in Jorge Luis Borges”

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LunchConsult your welcome packet for restaurant suggestions!

12:15–1:30 p.m.

Closing Panel: Room TBA

Moderator: Mike Opest, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Panelists:Professor Lisa Cooper, University of Wisconsin-MadisonProfessor Caroline Levine, University of Wisconsin-MadisonProfessor Susan Stanford Friedman, University of Wisconsin-Madison

The closing panel will feature three members of the UW-Madison English department discussing interdisciplinary research in the humanities. Lisa Cooper, Caroline Levine and Susan Stanford Friedman will be discussing interdisciplinarity in their own work and the questions it poses: how do we practice interdisciplinary research responsibly? What are the boundaries of our discipline and how permeable are they?

Lisa Cooper is an associate professor of English, with interests in late medieval literature and material culture. Caroline Levine is a professor of English, who works in Victorian literature and culture, formalism, realism, narrative theory, world literature, and the relations between art and politics. Susan Stanford Friedman, Hilldale Professor and Virginia Woolf Professor of English and Women’s Studies, has written most recently on modernism, cultural theory, and world literature. The panel will be moderated by Mike Opest, a graduate student in literary studies, whose interests include twentieth-century British, American, and Anglophone literatures, and modernism and modernist culture.

3:30–5:00 p.m.

5:00–5:15 p.m.

Closing Remarks: GSA Co-Chairs Anna Muenchrath & Aaron ViethRoom: Northwoods (third floor)

Closing ReceptionRoom: Northwoods (third floor)

5:15–7:00 p.m.

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Map of Union South

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Second Floor

Third Floor