event calendar

Esi Edugyan, winner of the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize

Tuesday, 3 April, 2:30 pm, Agnes Etherington Art Centre

Esi Edugyan, winter of the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize for her novel Half-Blood Blues, is giving a public reading followed by a panel discussion.

Edugyan has a Masters in Writing from Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, including Best New American Voices (2003), ed. Joyce Carol Oates, and Revival: An Anthology of Black Canadian Writing (2006).

Her debut novel, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, was published internationally. It was nominated for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, was a More Book Lust selection, and was chosen by the New York Public Library as one of 2004’s Books to Remember.

Edugyan has held fellowships in the US, Scotland, Iceland, Germany, Hungary, Finland, Spain, and Belgium. She has taught creative writing at both Johns Hopkins University and the University of Victoria. She currently lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

This event is open to the public.

Karen Valihora (York University), “Austen’s Oughts: The Case of Emma”

Tuesday, 13 March, 2:30 pm, Watson 517

“Emma was sorry;—to have to pay civilities to a person she did not like through three long months!—to be always doing more than she wished, and less than she ought!” Austen’s oughts—those of her characters and those of her narrators—are delicately, even ironically, balanced between first-person uses and the third-person reflections they are supposed, in a moral grammar, to indicate. When a character employs an ought, Austen’s free-indirect style offers two contexts for meaning: we distinguish between what they say and what they ought, according to a morally idealized, third-person calculus, to mean. But what is the context of this ought? How does Austen establish it as the standard by which, without fail, and without ambiguity, all of her characters, and all of their thoughts and actions, are ordered and arranged?

Karen Valihora received her PhD from Yale University, and is associate professor of English Literature at York University. She specializes in the history of ideas with a focus on eighteenth-century and romantic aesthetics, moral philosophy, and literature.

Brooke Pratt, “Transplanting the Ruin: Sara Jeannette Duncan’s Canadian Folly”

Tuesday, 28 February, 2:30 pm, Watson 517

Sara Jeannette Duncan’s The Imperialist (1904) has long been regarded as an important text for discussing Canada’s shifting cultural, colonial, and political status during a period of notable transition. Signs of this transition come through in Duncan’s description of the house that shelters her protagonists as a space of both distinction and encroaching dilapidation. Her representation of the novel’s central dwelling space as a site of architectural idiosyncrasy verging on ruination suggests that she envisioned it as a kind of folly—that is, as a purpose-built ruin of the sort that came to be a distinguishing feature of eighteenth-century landscape design. Reading the house as an alternative version of the picturesque ruin provides a fresh perspective on the novel’s playful integration of British cultural tradition into a distinctly Canadian setting.

Brooke Pratt is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of English at Queen's University. She holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Western Ontario, where she specialized in Canadian literature and literary history. Her new research on literary heritage and tourism in Canada emerges from her doctoral dissertation in which she examines representations of abandoned space in Canadian writing from the early nineteenth century to the contemporary period.

Tzachi Zamir, “Pornography and Acting: Between Presentation and Re-presentation”

Wednesday, 15 February, 4:00 pm, Watson 517

Tzachi Zamir is the author of books and articles on the intersections of philosophy, literature and cultural practice. Ethics and the Beast (Princeton, 2007) probed moral aspects of human-animal relations; new research in this area concerns the literary representation of animals. Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama (Princeton, 2006) begins an exploration that he has continued in recent essays in New Literary History. His current research concerns philosophical dimensions of dramatic acting and has appeared in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Theatre Journal, Critical Inquiry and New Literary History. Tzachi Zamir teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literatur at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

David H. Richter, “The Enigma of Identity: The Woman in White and La Femme sans nom”

Friday, 10 February 2012, 2:30 pm, Watson 517

This paper concerns a legal case in France that became a novel in England, a novel that generated a whole new genre of fiction, and with it a new form of social anxiety, and it’s finally about a second legal case that came along to exploit that anxiety. How do real life mysteries get into literature and what happens to them when they do? What cultural transformations occur when one society starts telling stories that originated elsewhere? The French legal case concerned the marquise de Douhault, also known as “la femme sans nom,” the novel was The Woman in White, and the second, British, legal case was that of the Tichborne Claimant.

David H. Richter is a Professor of English, Queens College and Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is author and editor of many books and articles on literary theory, the gothic novel, 18th-century literature, true crime fiction, biblical narrative and film.

A Reading with Sandra Nicholls

Monday, 6 February 2012, 7:30 pm at the Grad Club

Diane Schoemperlen, current Writer-in-Residence, will be hosting a reading and discussion at the Grad Club on Monday, February 6 starting at 7:30 p.m. The featured speaker is Ottawa poet and novelist Sandra Nicholls, who will read from her hilarious debut novel and talk about her adventures in self-publishing.

Sandra Nicholls is an award-winning writer who has published two books of poetry and numerous short stories. She has sat on numerous juries for arts grants and once had the pleasure of being Poet-in-Residence for the Peter Gzowski Golf Tournament for Literacy. She has also taught both English and Creative Writing and is currently the Senior Writer at Library and Archives Canada.

Described by one reviewer as “a comic tour de force” and by another as “ingeniously outrageous,” Sandra’s first novel All the Seas Shall Turn to Lemonade is an uplifting romp through the unlikely relationship between two academic misfits and a crackpot scheme to establish a commune based on the theories of Charles Fourier. This novel was self-published and Sandra will share the details of going this route for publication.

"On the Promise of Peace: Kant's Wartime and the Tremulous Body of Philosophy"

David L. Clark, Professor of English and Cultural Studies and Associate Member of the Health Studies Program in the Department of Health, Aging and Society, McMaster University

Friday 20 January 2012, 2:30 pm, 517 Watson Hall

Abstract: Immanuel Kant’s last texts move from the labour of critique to more palpably social and political concerns. But they do so in a time of extraordinary armed conflict, and on the brink of what the philosopher presciently calls “wars of extermination.” In what ways do Kant’s late writings respond to this grim prospect, making war violence not only an explicit subject of philosophical consideration but also reconfiguring the very shape of philosophical discourse as it attempts to take a measure of war’s consequences, and mourn its immeasurable losses? How is the social and political work of the 1790s, and the Enlightenment project for which they stand, made to tremble at war’s awful reality?

Dr. David L. Clark is George Whalley Visiting Professor in Romanticism at Queen's University during the winter term of 2012. He has published research on a wide range of subjects, including critical animal studies, contemporary theory, German idealism, and Romantic literature and culture. Forthcoming work includes: Bodies and Pleasures in Late Kant (Stanford UP); Animals...in Theory. a special issue of The New Centennial Review; and "'Not ours, this death:' The Post-Animal after the Post-Human," to be published in World Picture.

"Raphael's Ostrich"

Una D'Elia, Associate Professor, Department of Art, Queen's University

Friday 27 January 2012, 2:30 pm, 517 Watson Hall

Una D'Elia has published on Christian poetics in Titian's paintings, Michelangelo's drawings in relation to Vittoria Colonna's poetry, the ambiguity of Petrarchan painting, images of pastoral silence, the pathos of nature in garden sculpture, the decorum of an image of a defecating dog, the clothing of allegorical personifications, and other aspects of the relationships and disjunctions between word and image in the sixteenth-century Italy.

Fall 2011 Speakers Series

30 September 2011, 2:30 pm, 517 Watson Hall

J. Edward Chamberlin has suggested the following article as the basis for the research forum discussion:　"The corn people have a song too. It is very good": On Beauty, Truth and Goodness,　Studies in American Indian Literatures, 21. 3 (Fall, 2009): 66-89.

J. Edward Chamberlin was born in Vancouver, and educated at the universities of British Columbia, Oxford and Toronto. Since 1970, he joined the faculty of the University of Toronto, where he is University Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature; but his interest in stories and songs has taken him around the world, to the hunters of the Kalahari and the herders of Mongolia as well as to the islands of the Caribbean and the wide-ranging literary and cultural traditions that have shaped the Americas. He worked on the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry and the Alaska Native Claims Commission, was Senior Research Associate with the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in Canada, and has worked extensively on native land claims in Canada, the United States, Africa and Australia. He was Poetry Editor of　Saturday Night　magazine, and has lectured widely on literary, historical and cultural issues. His books include　The Harrowing of Eden: White Attitudes Towards Native Americans　(1975),　Ripe Was the Drowsy Hour: The Age of Oscar Wilde　(1977),　Oscar Wilde’s London　(1987),　Come Back To Me My Language: Poetry and the West Indies　(1993),　If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground　(2003), and　Horse: How the Horse Has Shaped Civilizations　(2006).

14 October 2011, 2:30 pm, 517 Watson Hall

Sarah Johnson, "Embodying Wit in Queen Anna's Masques"

This paper examines masques in which Queen Anna performed with her ladies, giving particular attention to Samuel Daniel's The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses and Tethys' Festival. I argue that in these masques, the performing female body comes to visually and thematically represent the soul. This bodily representation of the soul challenges women's exclusion from political government. It thus constitutes a subversive political statement that does not hinge on sexual transgressiveness, a topic that past feminist masque criticism has foregrounded. My interpretation further departs from previous criticism by reading Jonson and Daniel's theorizations of masque structure, which they explicitly compare to the soul-body divide, as complementing rather than contradicting the women's physical performance. To support my argument, I draw on seventeenth-century concepts of the soul-body divide as well as on early modern theories of dance.

Sarah Johnson is a SSHRCC postdoctoral fellow working in the English Department at Queen’s. Having completed her doctoral studies at McMaster University, she is currently revising her dissertation for publication as a book, provisionally entitled "‘A Spirit to Resist’: Staging Women and the Soul-Body Dynamic in Early Modern England." Her publications include articles on Dekker, Rowley, and Ford’s The Witch of Edmonton, on Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass and Rowley’s The Birth of Merlin, and a forthcoming article on Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed. Sarah serves as the assistant editor of the journal Early Theatre.She is also co-editing an essay collection on the early modern soul and an edition of Robert Wilson’s play, The Three Ladies of London.

19 October 2011, 4:00 pm, 517 Watson Hall

Andrew Elfenbein, "Reading, the Archives, and the Psychology of Memory"

This paper will retheorize reader reception in terms of the dynamics of memory rather than interpretation.　Drawing on work in psychology, history of the book, reader response, and the sociology of literature, I will argue that the history of reading should encourage a rethinking of the basic psychological formulations of narrative memory.　 I will also discuss implications of this project for possible futures in interdisciplinary work.

Andrew Elfenbein, Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, has discovered that the key to interdisciplinarity is a good pair of boots.　Fascinated by Roman Jakobson's famous diagram of the literary encounter, he has spent his career investigating overlooked pieces of that diagram.　His first book, Byron and the Victorians, considered the history of authorship through the figure whose career enabled the modernization of literary production and celebrity.　His second, Romantic Genius:　The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role, theorized the role of the literary author as a medium between Foucault's regimes of the priest and the doctor in producing the truth of sexuality.　His next book, Romanticism and the Rise of English, put the least noticed and least loved portion of Jakobson's diagram, the history of language as a code, at the center of literary history.　His most recent venture gave him the chance to sink his teeth into a new edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. He is now working on intersections among the histories of comprehension, statistics, literature, and cognition.

19 October 2011, 4:00 pm, 517 Watson Hall

John Watkins, "Drinking From Your Father's Skull:　An Italian Horror Story and Its Lessons for Today's Up and Coming Scholars"

In 567, King Alboin of the Lombards murdered King Cunimund of the Gepids and fashioned his skull into a drinking cup.　 He then married Cunimund's daughter Rosimund as a second battle-prize.　Years later,Alboin forced her to drink a toast to her father's memory from his very own skull.　That was the worst mistake Alboin ever made.　 Rosimund and her vindictive fury wove their way through medieval chronicles and early modern dramas from Sweden, the Netherlands, and England.　But scholars have rarely talked about her, her cultural afterlife, and her story's place in the long history of interdynastic marriage that mapped the emerging European state systems.　This paper will not only introduce you to Rosimund but to the disciplinary impasses that have silenced her story in the Anglophone academy.　

John Watkins is Distinguished McKnight University Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, where he holds affiliate appointments in History, Italian, and Medieval Studies.　　 He is the author of The Specter of Dido (Yale, 1995);Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England (Cambridge, 2002); and, with Carole Levin, Shakespeare’s Foreign Worlds:　National and Transnational Identities in the Elizabethan Age (Cornell, 2009).　 He has edited a special issue of The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies on the New Diplomatic History and co-edited Shakespeare and the Middle Ages with Curtis Perry for Oxford University Press. 　 Co-director of the Mediterranean Studies Collaborative at Minnesota, he is finishing a book on marriage diplomacy in England, France, and Italy.　Past associate editor of The Journal of British Studies, he serves on the editorial boards of Mediterranean Studies, Explorations in Renaissance Culture, and Spenser Studies.　

4 November 2011, 2:30 pm, 517 Watson Hall

Shelley King, "Interpretive Faith: Pullman, MacDonald and the Politics of Reading"

This paper brings together two writers of children's literature who at first glance might seem to have little in common: the first is Philip Pullman, best known as the award-winning contemporary author of the young adult fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials (Northern Lights/The Golden Compass 1995, The Subtle Knife 1997, and The Amber Spyglass 2000), in which the young protagonists ultimately destroy God, save the universe by discovering their awakening sexuality, and help to establish a Republic of Heaven; the second is George MacDonald (1824-1905), a Victorian author best remembered (when remembered at all) for nursery classics as The Princess and the Goblin (1870-71) and At the Back of the North Wind(1868-69), and for his adult novel Phantastes (1858), whose blend of fantasy and Christian mysticism profoundly influenced C.S. Lewis. Yet the two have more in common than one might think. Their shared fondness for the works of William Blake may suggest a certain radical tendency in the thought of both writers with regard to hierarchies of power, especially ecclesiastical hierarchies: if Pullman's novels offer a scathing indictment of the cruelties perpetrated in the name of an organized quasi-Christian religion, MacDonald's rejection of doctrinal beliefs such as heathen damnation placed him at odds with Victorian theologians. Still, the one remained a devout believer throughout his life, dedicated to promulgating a Christian message of love and redemption, while the other has become one of the most powerful voices of secular humanism in Britain today. Despite their diametrically opposed theological positions, however, these authors are united by faith of a different kind: faith in the interpretive powers of their child readers. I argue that this shared commitment to engaging the child reader by offering complex literary texts renders Pullman and MacDonald important to understanding two key issues in the study of children's literature today: "cross-writing" and the place of ideology in works for young readers.

Shelley King (PhD University of Toronto, 1988) is Professor of English at Queen's University (Kingston, Canada) where she specializes in Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Children's Literature. Her primary research interests are Amelia Alderson Opie, a woman writer of the Romantic period, and Philip Pullman, contemporary author of fantasy fiction for children and young adults; curiously enough, both are natives of Norwich. Publications include editions of Opie's Adeline Mowbray (Oxford World's Classics, 1998) and The Father and Daughter (Broadview, 2003), chapters in His Dark Materials Illuminated: Critical Essays on Philip Pullman's Trilogy, edited by Millicent Lenz with Carole Scott, (Wayne State UP 2005) and in Performing the Everyday: The Culture of Genre in the Eighteenth Century in the interdisciplinary series Studies in 17th and 18th-CenturyArt and Culture, edited by Alden Cavanaugh, (U of Delaware P), as well as essays in journals including Eighteenth-Century Studies and Children's Literature. Her most recent work includes The Collected Poems of Amelia Alderson Opie(co-edited with John B. Pierce), OUP, and Refiguring the Coquette: Essays in Culture and Coquetry (co-edited with Yael Schlick), Bucknell UP. She is currently co-editing Volume 12 of The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, and The Princess and the Goblin and Other Fairy Tales by George MacDonald for Broadview.

18 November 2011, 2:30 pm, 517 Watson Hall

Ian Balfour, "The Sublime is Now and Again: Theory, History and the Example of Lyric"

This talk will address the discontinuous and not quite parallel histories of the phenomenon--which is not a phenomenon-- of the sublime and discourses about it. We will try to make sense of how and maybe even why the sublime comes and goes.　 Broad theoretical and historical speculation will be followed by some up-close looks at how certain lyrics, including even in the unlikely mode of the sonnet, participate in the mode of the sublime.

Ian Balfour is Professor of English and of Social & Political Thought at York University. He is the author of several books, including The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy, and numerous essays on popular and unpopular culture, including Pee Wee Herman and the Pet Shop Boys.　With the filmmaker Atom Egoyan he co-edited Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film and with Eduardo Cadava And Justice for All?:　 The Claims of Human Rights for South Atlantic Quarterly. He also edited a volume of SAQ on Late Derrida.　 He has been the M. H. Abrams Distinguished Visiting Professor of English at Cornell, the Margaret Bundy Scott Professor at Williams College and a visiting professor at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, UC Santa Barbara, SUNY Buffalo, and Stanford.　He has twice been a fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. He’s currently finishing a book on the sublime.

25 November 2011, 2:30 pm, 517 Watson Hall

Daniel O'Quinn, "Tears: Intercultural Mediations and the Theatre of Diplomacy"

Near the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century, as the Napoleonic wars became ever more global in their ramifications, Britain was busily negotiating a treaty of alliance with the Shah of Persia as part of a larger strategy of protecting its holdings in India. The British embassy to Tehran in 1809 and the ensuing Persian embassy to London in 1809-10 generated important diplomatic gains and an opportunity for extended intercultural exchange between Britons and Shi’ite Muslims. These exchanges were the focus of much attention on both sides: the London papers kept a daily record of the actions of the Persian envoy to London, Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, and the envoy for his part kept a detailed journal of his London visit which was widely circulated upon his return to Tehran. The earlier embassy of Sir Harford Jones was documented by his assistant James Morier in an extraordinary illustrated travel narrative entitled A journey through Persia, Armenia, and Asia Minor (1812). Both Mirza Abul Hassan’s journal and Morier’s narrative offer remarkable observations on the contemporary performance cultures of Tehran and London. Morier presents a detailed account of Ta’zia performances which re-enact the martyrdom of Husayn ibn Ali, and Mirza Abul Hassan presents complex discussions of opera and ballet at the King’s Theatre and a performance of King Lear at Covent Garden. These two scenes of reception were separated by precisely one year and thus both fall within Muharram, the first month of the Muslim calendar. The Ta’zia plays performed during this traditional time of mourning for Shi’ites constitute crucial sites for the staging of affect and community affiliation. The first section of this paper uses Morier’s ethnographic account of Ta’zia performances during the month of Muharram in order to theorize the affective dynamics of intercultural exchange. The second section elaborates on this discussion of intercultural reception by suggesting that Mirza Abul Hassan relates to King Lear and the opera seria of Guglielmi as surrogates for the Ta’zia performances he so palpably misses during his stay in London. The subtext of sadness and anger which permeates his journal, the Hayrat Namah, thus operates both as a trace of cultural alienation from his homeland and of social affiliation with his friends in the British metropole. The paper will conclude with the suggestion that this same blend of alienation and affiliation lies at the heart of diplomacy itself and thus is subject to complex political calculations which bring the contingencies of global affairs to bear on the seemingly trivial category of feelings.

Daniel O’Quinn is a Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. He is the author of Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770-1800 (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005) and Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium, 1770-1790 (Johns Hopkins, 2011). The former book explores the representation of Anglo-Indian affairs on the London stage and in the theatre of politics at the close of the eighteenth century. The latter book examines the mediation of the American War in the British press and in a variety of performance venues. He has also co-edited the Cambridge Companion to British Theatre,1730-1830 (2007) with Jane Moody, and has edited the Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan for Broadview Press (2008). He is currently editing Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Embassy Letters with Teresa Heffernan for Broadview Press and embarking on a new project on intercultural performance and diplomacy in the eighteenth century. His articles on the intersection of race, sexuality and class in a range of cultural milieus have appeared in various journals including ELH, October, Studies in Romanticism, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Theatre Journal, Documents, European Romantic Review, and Romantic Praxis.

"Tending Your Digital Identity: Web Presence, Teaching, and Professionalism in the Era of Social Media"

DATE: September 16, 2011

Who isn't an expert in social media? Because so many of us use these services every day, we will work together to identify some of the norms of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and think critically about how our involvement with them might impact our roles as instructors and teaching assistants. While this session will provide a general overview of the current research and policy regarding social media in the classroom, we will also consider techniques to avoid possible problems that may occur. The second portion of this session will discuss how best to cultivate a professional digital footprint and present your research on the internet.