ET CETERA
Spaces of Speculation

Tuesday, April 23, 2024
12-2pm
Dr. Charles A. Sankey Chamber

Featuring presentations by the 2024 Master of Arts in English Candidates

Claire Thyne

“These were frightful times”: metafunctions in/of The Mysteries

My project, and Watterson and Kascht’s picturebook The Mysteries (published in 2023), are situated within an epoch characterized by environmental issues including climate change and resource depletion. Anthropocene discourse conceptualizes our current epoch as one “dominated by anthropogenic processes” (Smith and Young 12). Steve Mentz suggests that “the essential contribution that humanities scholars can make to Anthropocene discourse” is the recognition of the “function of narrative in human history,” and he positions stories as the “essential technology” through which we facilitate “our responses to Anthropocene forces” (4-5). My paper follows Mentz’s suggestion to explore Watterson and Kascht’s The Mysteries as a multimodal (verbal and visual) technology that exists within the Anthropocene and responds to Anthropocene forces. Engaging with ecocritical/environmental literary perspectives and Clare Painter’s multimodal discourse analysis framework, my paper aims to contribute to the scarcely explored realm of “picturebooks for adults” as well as the critical conversation surrounding literature as it relates to/reflects the relationship between human and nonhuman nature.

Jaime Bastien

Rifling through the Historical Record: Vollmann’s The Rifles and a New Materialism Historiography

Vollmann’s historical novel The Rifles asks us to imagine the influence that the arrival of rifles has had on North America. It tells the story of Arctic explorer Captain John Franklin and his doomed quest to discover the Northwest Passage. Franklin’s agency to conquer the Arctic is thwarted when, failing to listen to the local Inuit, the passive Arctic environment and technological objects around him appear to take on a life of their own. Therefore, my research will borrow from New Materialism, a movement that highlights the agency of materials, to read The Rifles as a historical novel that portrays humans as not the central historical agents in history, but (often blind) ecological actors that are in equal negotiation with the agency of the technological and natural materials surrounding them.  This research is significant as it highlights a way of understanding history that offers instructions and warnings on the shared agency we have with the materials that surround us.

Olivia Hay

“Love is everything”: An Exploration of Feminist Friendship in Miriam Toews’ A Complicated Kindness

My Major Research Paper will explore friendships between women in Miriam Toews’ A Complicated Kindness. My analysis focuses on the friendships of 16-year-old Nomi Nickle, who lives in a small Anabaptist-Mennonite town. Both Trudie, Nomi’s mother, and Tash, her older sister, are forced to abandon Nomi, who is, in turn, left with basically no connections to women or female friendships. There is, however, one exception to this: Lydia “Lids” Voth. Despite conforming to their town and strict religious system, Nomi and Lids have an honest and judgment-free connection. My theoretical framework will consist of critical research that focuses on friendships in Anabaptist-Mennonite sects and feminist theory, which is often, though not always, a response to philosophical theories on friendship. Through this feminist framework, my Major Research Paper will address three main research questions: How do Nomi’s friendships fit into the concept of the “dark body of friendship?” How do friendships in this category disrupt Anabaptist-Mennonite ideals such as brotherly love? Moreover, when connections between women are intact, how would we categorize them in relation to the terms of friendship set out by the church?

Zoe Williams

“Sun in Ice. Ice in Lung”: The Renewal of Cultural Knowledge and the Construction of the Arctic in Tanya Tagaq’s Split Tooth

Tanya Tagaq’s Split Tooth follows the coming-of-age story of a young Inuit girl living in 1970s Nunavut as she engages in a series of trans-corporeal relationships with the more-than-human beings in the Arctic environment.Stacy Alaimo describes trans-corporeality as “a new materialist and posthumanist sense of the human as substantially and perpetually interconnected with the flows of substances and the agencies of environments” (476). My project will focus on five trans-corporeal interactions with emphasis on the construction of these moments through the intermingling of prose with images and poetry which the scant scholarship on Split Tooth has ignored. My project asks how does the embodied and trans-corporeal relationship between the Inuit protagonist and the more-than-human world facilitate the renewal of culture knowledge within the landscape of the Arctic (particularly in a landscape affected by the ongoing effects of colonialism and climate change)? How does the construction of the text—through its aesthetics—intervene in those trans-corporeal relationships and shape their depiction or implications?

Maddie Beaulieu

Pages of Land: Countermapping the Intimate Cartographies of Canadian Experimental Poetics

This project, which focuses on six short works of poetry by Canadian authors, considers the relationship between experimental visual poetics and countermapping, a subdivision of critical cartography. Experimental visual poetics and countermapping share a common—though uninvestigated—interest in maps, map-making, and the disruption of social and cultural norms. My work will explore this commonality in order to understand how countermaps found in works of visual poetry resist existing power structures by establishing connections and intimacies between individuals and groups, both within and without the experimental writing community.

Jessie Hendriks

Digital Horizons: Faculty and Student Perspectives on ChatGPT and the Future of English Studies

On November 30th, 2022, OpenAI announced the launch of their new, free-to-use generative AI (Artificial Intelligence) model, ChatGPT. Seemingly overnight, ChatGPT gained renown as “one of the most advanced” AI models of its kind (Ray, “ChatGPT: A Comprehensive Review,” 134). Almost as rapidly as ChatGPT gained popularity, conversations about its yet-to-be-seen effects on writing, teaching, and learning began to take hold within academic institutions. Writing-focused disciplines, such as English studies, were met with a new existential crisis. My work develops from ongoing conversations in education that ask, “what now?” in response to the widespread availability and continuous development of generative AI models like ChatGPT. Since both faculty and students are implicated in shaping a future for the discipline, and since both are deeply affected by disciplinary policies and standards of practice, my project situates both groups’ concerns, expectations, and ambitions for the future direction of English studies as a part of a shared discourse rather than two related but distinct conversations. Stefan Popenici argues that the imagination will play a significant role in shaping the future for education in the wake of AI development and adoption (193). His writings inspire much of the future-forward focus of my project, which interrogates English faculty and student imaginings of a future for the discipline. The primary research questions underpinning this project are the following: How do English professors’ understandings of and engagement with ChatGPT compare to those of English students? How do English professors and students incorporate and/or account for AI-powered tools such as ChatGPT in their imaginings of a future for the discipline? (How) do faculty and student wishes for the future of English studies align/diverge?