English Language and Literature Commons^™

Reading 9/11 Through The Holocaust In Philip Roth’S The Plot Against America And Art Spiegelman’S In The Shadow Of No Towers, Stella Setka

Re-visioning Terrorism

This essay argues that Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America and Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of New Towers open up new spaces for reading the trauma of 9/11 not simply as the tragic story of a single day in 2001, but as a traumatic event that shares referents with other catastrophes in history, most notably the Holocaust. Further, the author demonstrates that these works are more concerned with the politicization of 9/11 than they are with the terrorist attacks themselves.

Historicizing The Present In 9/11 Fiction, Todd Kuchta

Re-visioning Terrorism

Reconfiguring the debate on the historical efficacy of postmodern fiction, novels inspired by 9/11 seek to view the present itself as history. McEwan’s Saturday, DeLillo’s Falling Man, and Hamid’s Reluctant Fundamentalist attempt to move beyond the view of history-as-text. Rather than evoking “the presence of the past,” they present characters trying to situate themselves in a new historical reality. Žižek’s account of Lacan illuminates DeLillo’s attempt to historicize the present, while McEwan gestures toward Foucault’s view of the present as exit. Only Hamid engages the historical potential of the present.

The Privilege Of Ambivalence: Saturday’S Henry Perowne On The ‘War On Terror’, Jax Lee Gardner

Re-visioning Terrorism

This essay considers the relation between personal privilege (class, race, nationality, sex) and political ambivalence toward the Iraq war as it manifests in the protagonist of Ian McEwan’s Saturday. Henry Perowne “feels culpable somehow, but helpless too” in his shifting opinions of the coming invasion. Throughout the text we are shown Henry’s multiple perspectives regarding Iraq. Such ambivalence is, in itself, a form of complicity in war. Henry neither tangibly opposes the actions of the government (as the protesters do), nor does he consider sacrificing any of his creature comforts in support of the war (as the soldiers do). I …

Female (Em)Bodied Justice: Terrorism, Self-Sacrifice, And The Joint Primacy Of Gender And Nationality, Renee Lee Gardner

Re-visioning Terrorism

In The Terror Dream, Susan Faludi asserts that instead of processing the events of 9/11 – what they might reveal about our culture, how we might thoughtfully grieve them and respond to those who perpetrated them – Americans reverted to a 1950s style domesticity, with the media representing men as heroic rescuers and women as victims of terrorists, in need of rescuing. This is ironic in that the majority of that day’s casualties were men, and the attacks themselves were perpetrated within our commercial and governmental centers. Yet much of the literary fiction that has emerged from 9/11 can …

Nationalism, Alterity, And Cognitive Studies In Mohsin Hamid, Laila Halaby, And Jess Walte, Aaron Derosa

Re-visioning Terrorism

This essay explores the metaphoric construction of the terrorist Other in 9/11 scholarship and literature. While academics demand an ethical engagement with Arab and Muslim Americans, they unwittingly reify a binary distinction of Other-Same that triangulates terrorist identity through ordinary Arabs and Muslims. Looking at Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land and Walter’s The Zero, I suggest an alternative metaphor for terrorism not as a regional or religious population, but as an internal impulse that dwells within us all. Doing so more ethically and productively aligns terrorism with the threat to global security in the post-9/11 era.

No More Tall Buildings: American Superhero Comics And The Shadow Of 9/11, Mauricio Castro

Re-visioning Terrorism

No abstract provided.

A Review Of Sustainability Themes In K-12 Books, Roxanne M. Spencer, Jeanine Huss

Education for Sustainability Summer Institute

No abstract provided.

Of Milton’S First Disobedience And The Fruit Of The Tree: “Ad Patrem” As Prologue To Paradise Lost, C. Macaulay Ward Jr

Interdisciplinary Perspectives: a Graduate Student Research Showcase

In Paradise Lost, first published in 1667, John Milton assumes the role of God’s advocate to make the case that God’s decrees are beyond reproach; humankind’s eternal death sentence and the banishment from Eden, issued as a result of Adam and Eve’s disobedience, are not excessive punishments. Twelve books and nearly ten thousand lines later, however, Milton’s argument seems to contradict itself. The Archangel Michael tells Adam that in the fullness of time, a new Paradise will be established as a place of joy and wonder far superior to the original Eden; and ironically, this wondrous ending is an …

The Failure Of The Free World: Anarchy In Uncle Tom’S Cabin, Andy Cerrone

Interdisciplinary Perspectives: a Graduate Student Research Showcase

Harriett Beecher Stowe is often identified as an advocate for Christianity, woman's suffrage, autonomy, and the abolishment of slavery. However, inviting the reader to view her work through an anarchist lens, her magnum opus—Uncle Tom’s Cabin— offers the reader the opportunity to reconstruct her politics with immense implication. Critics regard Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" as a sermon devised with the intention to inflate the nation with the righteous spirit of God, offering to the reader the opportunity to partake in the message of her religious vision. While Stowe's absolute faith in her Christian profile of God is present, she invariably …

What Is This Life?: Responses To Contingency In Chaucer's Pagan Romances, Luke Landtroop

Undergraduate Research Conference

In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the pilgrims’ host Harry Bailey invites the Monk to “quyte” or “repay” the Knight’s tale. Intrigued by various thematic and verbal connections between The Knight’s Taleand The Franklin’s Tale, and informed by critical opinions which identify the former as the “other” against which the remainder of the Canterbury Talesis arrayed, I set out to examine the ways in which The Franklin’s Tale “quytes” or responds to the issues raised in The Knight’s Tale. Not only are both tales chivalric romances set in the pagan past, but both also address the question …

Joel Faflak, Joel Faflak

Research Day (Arts & Humanities, FIMS, and Education)

My fields of interest are Romantic & nineteenth-century literature & culture; psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic theory, & histories of psychoanalysis & psychiatry; theory & criticism; 18th- & 19th-century philosophy; cultural studies & popular culture; American film musicals.

Writing, Resistance And History: Violent Rewriting In Postresistance African-American And Polish Prose, Agnieszka Herra

Research Day (Arts & Humanities, FIMS, and Education)

My core area of research is Polish and African-American prose fiction written during and after civil resistance movements in each respective culture. My main research question will be the extent to which literature in the postresistance period questions the events and the narratives that were part of uniting the society to participate in the civil resistance movement.

Exploring Collaborative Teaching And Learning Models In A University Drama Literature Classroom, Kim Solga, Jennifer Boman, Elan Paulson

Research Day (Arts & Humanities, FIMS, and Education)

No abstract provided.

A Test Case In Comparing Textual Evidence With Evidence From Material Culture: Conceptions Of Valhǫll, Russell Poole

Research Day (Arts & Humanities, FIMS, and Education)

Medieval Icelandic manuscripts preserve poems that speak of a hall presided over by the warrior-god Óðinn (Odin) and populated by élite Viking warriors who have died gloriously in battle.

Viking-Age picture-stones (bildstenar) erected in memory of the dead on Gotland, a Swedish island in the Baltic Sea, contain depictions of warriors being welcomed to a great hall.

How was this hall envisaged in the Viking Age? Would it have been conceived of as a typical Viking-Age building or as something more exotic?

This poster explores these questions.

2011 Making Literature Conference, Jeanne Murray Walker, Paul Mariani

Making Literature Conference

Keynote Address: "A Crisis of Imagination," Jeanne Murray Walker

Keynote Address: "God & the Imagination," Paul Mariani