Click on the link below for full information and scroll to the bottom of that page for a link on how to write paper abstracts:
We cordially invite you to submit undergraduate papers for our day-long conference on Saturday, October 6, 2007. In addition to a keynote speaker and panels on post-graduation options, MUSE will host multiple sessions of student paper presentations throughout the day.
Each paper session will contain three presenters, and each presenter will be given a maximum of 20 minutes to speak. 15 minutes will be allotted after the three presenters for Q&A. (Papers should probably be around 8-10 pages long, if read straight for the 20-minute time period.)
To present at the conference, please submit an abstract to muselitconf@gmail.com by no later than 4:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 26, 2007. An abstract shall be approximately 150-200 words and summarize the paper’s thesis and main points (and critics used, if applicable). You do not need to submit the entire paper in order to present at the conference (in fact, please don’t!).
Along with your abstract, please include your name, current address, current telephone number, email address, fall contact information (address and phone number) institutional affiliation, year in school, a working title for the paper, and any audio/visual needs you may have. You will be notified the evening of April 27, 2007 of your abstract’s final status. You will then need to confirm your conference attendance.
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6 comments:
Percy Shelley and Subjectivity
I am interested in Percy Shelley’s struggle with the subjective experience. He seems to find both liberation and oppression in the idea that one cannot believe in much of anything, because the mind creates reality. This viewpoint, largely based in Hume, allows Shelley to question social institutions that have very rarely been allowed to be blasphemed.
Shelley struggles to define the subjective experience in different essays, but the essays seem incomplete in their logic. However, perhaps due to the possibilities in poetry for metaphor and synesthesia, Shelley’s poetic characters best succeed in demonstrating the subjective experience. I will use “Alastor” and “Mont Blanc” as central texts in an exploration of Shelley’s subjectivity. I will use as peripheral texts different essays written by Shelley, and different theory that either influenced Shelley’s subjectivity or came as a natural extension of the same logic Shelley employed (ie Foucault). I will explore the logic in Shelley’s essays and demonstrate where they perhaps fall down in comparison to Shelley’s poetry.
The Failure of Love in Mary Shelley’s Mathilda
The focus of my paper will be the on the incestuous over tones in Mary Shelley’s Mathilda. In this story the relationship between the father and the daughter is the culmination of many years of the daughter yearning to be the beloved. She ultimately fails as she can not reconcile her actual relationship with her father and the fantasy that she has with her father. This disconnect in her relationship with her father mirrors that of her relationship with her aunt who can not love her.
I will use other short stories and essays written by Mary Shelley to demonstrate her thoughts on love and mourning to provide a deeper analysis of how the relationship between the father and daughter turned to incest. I will also discuss how the story is influenced by the Greek tragedy Antigone and the work of her husband Percy Shelley. I will also use examples from literary criticism in order to look at her work from more of a theoretical standpoint than an autobiographical standpoint.
We're supposed to post these, right? Here's mine:
It is important to reflect on whether language captures the essence of the objects around us. Literature is written with faith that language will communicate our experience to others. Once Percy Shelley read David Hume’s work, he realized that language does not truly communicate experience. Shelley had to rediscover where hope and meaning existed in the world—if not in language, if anywhere at all. In his piece Alastor, hope existed only during a moment of flux where a poet constructed an ideal of himself. But he still believed that no hope existed when creating a fantasy of an object because it cannot exist and be possessed at the same time. Julia Kristeva re-raises the jargon of Christianity to further explore this idea. She discovers that the loss of faith in language and also in Christ composes “a composition in loneliness”. Here, goodness can still be located through its aesthetic beauty. Language may not be able to capture all of the ‘divine’ properties of objects, but we should not grieve because it can sometimes capture a small part.
Creation and failed fatherhood in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein are themes that have been explored critically by many scholars. Mary Shelley’s presentation of birth and parenthood is fascinating, but takes on an entirely new life when read in conjunction with Percy Shelley’s The Witch of Atlas, written shortly after Frankenstein and its subsequent reviews. Both works deal with the creator, the creation, and the issue of parentage; and each takes on different, but perhaps not unrelated, arguments. The ways in which Percy Shelley responds to Mary Shelley through his poem, both personally and ideologically, demonstrate a living dynamic between the two works that is interesting to examine in a context where a very close dynamic also exists between the two authors. Juxtaposing Frankenstein with The Witch of Atlas may allow us to get at the issues of parenthood considered by the Shelleys philosophically and certainly tested by their tribulations with their own offspring.
(Although I did not get this assignment finished when it was supposed to be done (in the hustle of packing and getting ready to leave town, it completely slipped my mind) I wanted to go ahead and post it and I am hoping to get some feedback from my classmates.--Melody)
The Phantasm of Mathilda
In chapter three of Mary Shelley’s Mathilda, Mathilda’s father tells her she “looked more like a spirit than a human maid.” This description of Mathilda is accurate and to the point. Mathilda is a non-identity. She has never existed outside the phantasm. Her entire world created in fantasy and, for her father, she is the empty specter and sepulcher of her mother. Her father at their reunion sees her “dressed in white, covered only by my tartan rachan, my hair streaming on my shoulders, and shooting across with greater speed that it could be supposed I could give to my boat.” Mathilda is a body without a spirit.
Up until this point in her life, Mathilda has lived a life of fantasy. She has been stripped of her parents and educated with the use of literature, stories in which the mother is absent. Mathilda fantasizes about these stories, living out the roles of “Rosalind and Miranda and the lady of Comus” and suddenly her father is resurrected. Raised with out human companionship and affection Mathilda is never trained emotionally and in the course of her romantic reunion with her father, who sees her as a replication of the mother, her virginal veil of fantasy is torn. In my paper, I want to explore what happens when reality penetrates the fantasy and what Shelley trying to say about fantasy life.
Mathilda: The Silent Aphrodisiac
My paper focuses on Mary Shelley's Mathilda and the significance of silence and the unspoken word. Mathilda harbors passionate feelings for her father that she believes she cannot voice. She becomes fixated with these ideas, repeatedly flirting with them in her mind, and consequently the Refraining of Utterance almost becomes a character in her life. The paper contends that Shelley deliberately dwelt on the notion of abeyance as an erotic ploy to excite the reader, provoking us with the true residence of sexuality and love: likeness and fantasy.
I will formalistically prove this by examining select passages in the text where Shelley's combination of violent emotion with the conditional seem to suggest that it is in this void, this hope, that true feeling exists. I will support my argument with Percy Shelley's On Love and Hymn to Intellectual Beauty in which he focuses on the concept of likeness and imaging being the truth behind sentiment. This will be juxtaposed by M.M. Bakhtin's Dialogic Discourse in which he argues that there exists life and love beneath the spoken word. This addresses both the intra-diagetic eroticism that Mathilda toys with as well as the extra-diagetic erotic fixation that is forced on the reader as he/ she too is provoked by continually being teased by the spoken word.
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