Leroy Allston Ames Essay Contest!

The English Department would like to announce the Leroy Allston Ames Essay Contest  for the best essay on literature and/or history of England from 1750 to 1900 (limit one entry per student). Submissions are due Monday, April 28, 2014 at noon in the English Department Main Office at Anderson House! We encourage all undergraduates, including matriculated COPACE students to apply! Best of luck to all!



Robert Karockai's conference experience

Recently many of the graduate students at Clark’s English Department have been attending conferences to showcase their work. Robert Karockai, a graduate student at the English Department, has been kind enough to give us an account of his experience attending the HERA conference in Washington D.C. All of us at the English Department would like to offer a hearty congratulations to Robert, as well as all of the other Graduate students who were able to present at conferences.

Without further ado, here is what Robert had to say about his experience:

 

              A few weeks ago, I presented a paper at the HERA (humanities education research association) conference in Washington D.C. This was my first academic conference, first airplane ride, and first time out of New England. Full of anxiety and self-doubt, I arrived in Washington and took a train to the most luxurious hotel I've ever seen. Immediately upon entering the Fairfax  on Embassy Row (which I learned later was the childhood residence of Al Gore and Jacqueline Kennedy's favorite place to have a cocktail during the "Camelot" years ), I was greeted by a HERA representative, given a schedule of events, and invited to an informal cocktail reception in the hotel lounge.  Within forty-five minutes I found myself in the midst of an absolute Bacchanalia populated by academics. I learned much at that conference, perhaps foremost among them the absolute joy of being in the presence of seventy-five drunken P.h.d.'s. This first evening, sans drunkenness, set the tone for much of the rest of the conference. Simply put, I met an untold number of scholars whom I had become comfortable with and exchanged ideas with them. The conference became the perfect marriage of academia and blooming friendships as it progressed. My presentation went extremely well, in part because I suspect a number in the audience enjoyed my Worcester accent, which I employed without restraint. I left four days later feeling genuinely sad. My experience was so overwhelmingly​ positive that I plan to search for another conference in another part of the country as soon as I can afford to attend one. Thanks to Prof. Lisa Kasmer for teaching me to write and present a conference paper; Prof. Meredith Neuman for her almost supernatural ability to point out the exact sources I needed to add to improve my paper, and Prof. Peggy Korcoras for introducing me to the beauty and complexity I found within Hawthorne's short stories.

                                              Yours,

                                                  Robert Karockai  M.A. candidate

 

Featuring...My Honors Thesis

Like Lauren Cyr, I also have been working on an Honors Thesis this year. While I could give tips and tricks on navigating the process of very-long paper writing, I think Lauren already put it best (follow this link to see her post: http://clarkenglishblog.blogspot.com/2013_09_01_archive.html.) Instead what I would really like to do is just to tell you about how I came to my topic and what I have so far learned about it. Because for the first time in a while, I have found a topic for which I cannot exhaust my enthusiasm.

I knew I wanted write an honors thesis basically since declaring my major. To me, it had always been a part of my plan. However, when it came time to start thinking of a topic, I was 100% burnt out. My junior year beat me down and I found that during that summer I didn't want to think of anything academic at all. Furthermore, I knew I was tired of all the topics I had explored before. I never wanted to read Jane Eyre or Evelina again; no longer was I interested in the gendered advertising techniques employed by Dr. Pepper, Coca-Cola or any other company; I would not want to look at another colophon in the confines of Clark's archives; I did not want to read another autobiography. I wanted to take everything I had read and done and throw it across my room in a fit of childish catharsis. But more practically and reasonably, I knew I wanted to be excited about what I was going to do for a whole year, and I thought in order to do that, I needed to find something new.

It wasn't until I went to see The Great Gatsby movie--which I hated--that my thesis began to take shape. Nick, to me, is an iconic narrator. Yet in that movie, I felt he barely even needed to exist. He was just a vehicle for reporting the plot of the book and means through which the morality of the text could be interpreted. Looking deeper into Nick and narrative style, I began to realize that Nick's distance and possible objectivity allowed him to become a moral authority within his text. Furthermore, I saw this pattern in other narrators throughout the literary cannon:  Walton in Frankenstein, Dr. Watson in Sherlock Holmes. As I accumulated more examples, I began to find one major gap emerging. There were no female narrators of this type, no female authors writing this type.

Skipping forward a bit, I, with the help of Professor Huang found Jazz. Written by Toni Morrison and voiced by a complicated, implicitly female character, the novel happens to focus upon the same time period as The Great Gatsby, the Jazz Age in the United States. However Jazz focuses upon the Blacks of Harlem who barely enter the world of Gatsby's moneyed elite. Using these two books as my texts, I began to explore the world of narrative voice and narrative ethics, gossip and claims to knowledge, gender and canon-building.

I am not going to give you a huge summary of my paper. If you want a sense, look at the word cloud.

 

Word Cloud of my Thesis courtesy of Word it Out

No, instead I want to tell you what I learned. What I learned, topic-wise, is that Toni Morrison is a literary genius and a wizard. I learned that Fitzgerald's Nick is way more interesting than I or that dumb movie gave him credit for. More seriously though, I learned that gender still matters, especially in terms of what is taught and what books/characters become iconic. In excluding female authors and female narrators from the canon, female experience is discredited and erased. I also learned that reliability and objectivity are not intrinsically linked. There is truth in subjectivity, and there is reliability in acknowledging one's own subjectivity.

 

The most important things I learned, however, had nothing to do with my topic. I learned that I can sustain a project for a long period of time. I can do research, make deadlines, write pages I did not know how I was going to fill. I learned that I can be ambitious and push the limits of my own analysis. My topic was often messy and seemingly full of holes, and I was able to push past that.

 

I'm immensely proud of the work I have done. When I started this academic year, I really did not understand the word "Capstone". How could any one thing have been the pinnacle of achievement in my education? But this project/paper is my capstone, my crowning glory. I may not have worked on it through out my years at Clark, but my years at Clark lead me here and I am so glad they did.

 

 

 

2014 International Conference on Narrative

From Thursday, March 27, to Saturday, March 29, Clark University's Department of English, the Higgins School of Humanities, and the Dean of the College will be co-hosting the 2014 International Conference on Narrative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The conference will feature professors and students from all over the world presenting papers on questions of narrative in various media through many different theoretical lenses.

Three Clark professors will be chairs of panels at the conference: Professors Esther Jones, Lisa Kasmer, and Betsy Huang. Professor Jones will head a panel on the issue of “Narrative Ethics & the Intersectional Body,” featuring presentations of papers by Clark MA students Bella Che, Stephanie Grace, Nadia Gul, Natalie Kruse, and Ayesha Sindhu. Professor Kasmer will lead the panel “Gothic Narratives & Cultural Subversions,” in which she will present her own paper, “Traumatic Subjects: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Cultural Memory.” And finally, Professor Huang will be heading two panels: “Partial Minds & Cognitive Estrangement” and “International Epistolary Forms & Networks,” the latter of which will feature a presentation from Clark PhD research assistant Melike Sayoglu.  

If you have a chance, take a ride to MIT and support your Clark colleagues, teachers, and friends!

White Privilege Meets Interracial Adoption: Comments and Conversation

As part of the Higgins Faculty Series for this semester’s dialogue symposium sponsored by the Higgins School of Humanities, our department’s own Professor Fern Johnson will be giving a talk with her partner, Professor Marlene Fine of Simmons College, on the topic of interracial adoption.  The talk will be held on Thursday, April 3^rd at 4pm in the Higgins Lounge at Dana Commons.

Fern Johnson and Marlene Fine will talk about their perspectives on white privilege as the white parents of two adopted African American children. They are the authors of The Interracial Adoption Option: Creating a Family Across Race (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2013).  The book provides a beginning point for the white person who is contemplating or already has adopted a child of another race, but it is also a commentary on how blinded white persons- even those who have studied race- can be to the everyday realities of race.  The topic of interracial adoption remains charged, but it is taking on new meanings as our society becomes more multi-racial.

 

To see an article coauthored by Professors Johnson and Fine, see When White Parents Have 'The Talk' With Black Sons.

To listen to the authors discuss their new book, check out a talk they gave with Radio Boston, The Interracial Adoption Option.