Faculty research across the academic disciplines was celebrated in Kreitzberg Library for five days in mid-October. The following are contributions from the Department of English.
Brett Cox Writing Science Fiction & Fantasy
This year I published two short stories. "My Whole World Lies Waiting" considers unusual events experienced by a couple on a driving vacation out West; it appeared in Rabid Transit: Long Voyages, Great Lies, an annual chapbook published by Velocity Press. "Petition to Repatriate Geronimo's Skull," which speculates on longstanding rumors regarding the alleged presence of the skull of the Apache leader Geronimo in the private collection of Yale's Skull and Bones society, appeared in Phantom, a magazine published by Prime Books that debuted at the 2006 World Fantasy Convention.
Forthcoming are two short stories, "The Serpent and the Hatchet Gang" and "Mary of the New Dispensation," both centered on reputed "fantastic" events from 19th-century New England history--and both, interestingly enough, appearing in British magazines. I also have a critical essay that reconsiders cyberpunk legend William Gibson as a Southern writer that will appear in a collection of essays on Gibson's work, The Gibson Mosaic. In June, at the annual meeting of the Science Fiction Research Association, I presented an academic paper on the use of horror in the early fiction of Robert A. Heinlein.
Linda Karch on D.H. Lawrence & the Phallus
The exhibition of D. H. Lawrence’s paintings in London in 1928 shows the development of Lawrence’s nature. A gifted writer, his acts of perception, so evident in his fiction, could not help but surge into pictorial art as well. Painting gave Lawrence a sense of identity in society. He enjoyed the feeling of giving his art to friends, and to neighbors. His viewing and dwelling on real visionary pictures gave him great delight and satisfied his desire for the assurance of social closeness. On the other hand, his pictures of nudes deliberately challenged society. He presented the human body, as he believed it should be viewed, alive, beautiful, sensual, and entirely natural and blessed. He wrote: “I put a phallus, . . . in each one of my pictures somewhere. . . . [T]he phallus is a great sacred image: it represents a deep, deep life which has been denied in us.” Due to the nature of his paintings, the authorities, notified by early press reviews, confiscated and locked up many of them. Society could not accept Lawrence’s paintings, responded to them from behind its facade of respectability, and labeled them obscene, just as society had labeled The Rainbow and Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscene.
Dan Lane on the “American Man Fish” &
Captain Paul A. Boyton’s 1880s voyaged on the Mississippi, Yellowstone, Missouri, Arkansas, and Sacramento Rivers. Beginning in the mid-1870s, he gained international fame for his swimming demonstrations in a vulcanized rubber lifesaving dress, the precursor to modern wetsuits and survival suits. From shell-diving expeditions in the Caribbean to diamond prospecting in South Africa to swimming the lengths of major American and European waterways, Boyton presented himself as a rugged adventurer who was willing to explore the most extreme environments. Confident in his skills and the protective buoyancy of his wetsuit, Boyton emerged as a savvy athlete eager to please adoring crowds often numbering in the tens of thousands.
As he navigated turbulent waters and contested terrains, Boyton helped demystify water travel and encouraged a generation of swimming enthusiasts and wilderness adventurers. Similar to the current fascination Americans hold for endurance sports such as triathlons, rock climbing, and eco-challenge expeditions, Boyton’s audiences rabidly consumed his tales and demonstrations of extreme physical challenges as recreation. He raced a number of times against Englishman Matthew Webb, the first man to swim unaided across the English Channel. Boyton capitalized on marketing the story of his incredible voyages, suggesting to audiences that they, too, could experience such adventures if they tried the lifesaving dress.
on Winslow Homer’s Surveillance Culture
The paintings of nineteenth-century American artist Winslow Homer show a measured use of images of visual technology—such as binoculars, telescopes, spyglasses, opera glasses, and rifle scopes—to provide his audiences with novel strategies for viewing American scenery, social customs, and leisure activities. Homer frames some of his art with a distinct eye toward promoting a new view of travel and realism powered by technologically enhanced observation. As he quietly offers viewers a sanctioned way to consume beach scenes, shipwreck dramas, and governmental surveillance, he models the use of new visual technology as a desirable way to search for significance in the details of the mundane and the spectacular. As he depicted figures applying visual technology, Homer encouraged the consumption of landscape views by collapsing barriers to distance and thus to detail; in so doing, he helped to train a generation in the aesthetic possibilities of close observation. Optics provided a literal framing mechanism.
He sometimes shows figures employing optical technology for professional surveillance of the landscape. Perhaps Homer’s most critically acclaimed use of optics, this image shows a sniper perched on a tree branch, aiming through a rifle’s telescopic sight. Homer also illustrated scenes of surveillance dedicated toward preserving the safety of ordinary citizens. In his 1874 Harper’s Weekly illustration, “Watch-Tower, Corner of Spring and Varick Streets, New York,” Homer depicted five scenes focused on a fire watch-tower, one of nine in New York at the time. A veritable panopticon with 360 degree views through wide glass windows of lower Manhattan, the 125-foot iron tower dominated the skyline, a symbol of governmental surveillance. In the largest vignette, a watchman uses a telescope to scan the rooftops for smoke. On a table-top near him, within arm’s reach, a pair of binoculars stands ready for use.
Dan Lane presented his work on Paul Boynton at the Fifth Biennial International Society for Travel Writing Conference: “Roughing It!” held at Metropolitan State College of Denver, Colorado. His work on Winslow Homer was presented at Sight Lines: A New England American Studies Conference on the Culture and Science of Vision held at the American Antiquarian Society and Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts. /p>
Kathleen McDonald on Women’s Private Writings & the Arthurian Myth
In the spring of 2006 I presented two conference papers. The first was at the Northeastern Modern Languages Association and discussed the private writings of late eighteenth-century women from the Boston area. This paper analyzed letters and diaries in pursuit of two main objectives. The first interest was in social history. These ostensibly private writings provide an entrée into the private/domestic world that has long been ignored by historians focusing on the public realm. As most eighteenth-century people, both men and women, spent the majority of their lives in and around this private/domestic world, learning more about that space and its meanings is crucial to a full understanding of that time. The secondary question of this project undertakes the issue of how we understand what is and is not considered literature. The diaries and letters of famous men have long been considered literature, but not so those of women or the unknown.
My second paper was presented at the 41st International Congress on Medieval Studies and discussed how the Arthurian myth is used to re-present each successive society in which the tale is retold. The cultural alterations of the West in the 20th century were many in terms of gender equality, understanding of class and race, and social perceptions of war. All of these modern cultural movements made for very different Arthurian tales as the century progressed. As many 20th century versions of this legend were told on film, rather than in books, I focused my search on that medium.
Christopher Morris on Alfred Hitchcock & “The Road”
During the academic year 2005-2006 I delivered papers at two conferences—one at Dickinson College and one at Florida State University. To understand how these talks fit into my ongoing research, I need to go back to 2002 when my book The Hanging Figure: On Suspense and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock was published.
In that book I sought to redefine suspense, not as a psychological phenomenon but as a function of the necessarily incomplete meaning of verbal and visual signs. The thesis of the book was that in Alfred Hitchcock’s films we can observe dramatizations and allegories of the way meanings put forth in film criticism appear and disappear. The book’s critical tradition was deconstruction—the movement associated with the writers Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and J. Hillis Miller—according to which representation begins by seeming natural but ends by seeming arbitrary. Many of Hitchcock’s films involved pictorial hanging figures (for example, characters clinging to gutters or the edges of cliffs), but these are simply cinematic shorthand for the sense in which all “figures” of the film (including visual and aural phenomena) ultimately expose intellectual closure to be an illusion.
In 2005 another deconstructive study of Hitchcock appeared, by Tom Cohen, titled Hitchock’s Cryptonomies. Cohen’s book acknowledged some of the insights of mine but took a different tack: by studying particular recurrent images and devices (three examples are numbers, mothers, and Hitchcock’s cameos), Cohen read Hitchcock’s films as allegories of the way film could challenge the Enlightenment epistemology that created it. I admired Cohen’s book but wanted to come to a clearer understanding of where our approaches differed, so I published a review of Hitchcock’s Cryptonomiesin the journal Film Criticism. This review became the basis of my two conference papers. The first examined Cohen’s book from a theoretical perspective; the second discussed his interpretation of Hitchcock’s film Sabotage. I concluded that though we could learn a lot from Cohen’s book, it perpetuated the belief that a representation of Hitchcock’s films could be made without irony or without reflection on its own claims of closure. (While some of Cohen’s book gestured in this direction, not enough of it did, in my view.)
Meanwhile, my response to Cohen’s book also influenced an ongoing project: final revisions of my book-manuscript, The Figure of the Road: Deconstructive Studies in Humanities Disciplines, which was set to be published by Peter Lang late in 2006. My new book analyzes the familiar metaphor of “the road” (as, for example, in the phrase “the road to ruin” or in the Exodus pattern of The Grapes of Wrath); it studied this figure in works of American literature, literary criticism, Taoism, the Acts of the Apostles, film, popular culture, and the installations of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The last chapter in that book is titled “Curriculum and Ethics in a Figural World.” In it, I recommend Cohen’s book, with some qualifications. I was glad to be able to insert that recommendation into the nearly press-ready manuscript. The Figure of the Road was published last month.
