English Comps Symposium – Saturday, May 7, 2016

Coffee & Muffins – Laird Second Floor Hallway – 9:00 am

WELCOME – Tim Raylor, Department Chair – 9:25 am

Session I    9:30-10:30 a.m.

A.  Victorian Cultural Critiques—Laird 206

  1. Francesca Arcidiacono, “Specimens of Subversion: Resisting Museums in Victorian Literature”
  2. Claire Edgley, “The Power of Social Policing: Internalized Discipline in Victorian Heroines”
  3. Samantha Saltzman, “Christina Rossetti’s Case for Granting Power and Autonomy to Girls” 

B.  Monsters and Talking Birds—Laird 211

  1. Peter Alexander, “Textuality and Scientific Racism in Stoker and Lovecraft”
  2. Wren Wells, “A Life of its Own: Control Within and Beyond Frankenstein”
  3. Joshua Wickert, “Chaucer’s Birds Can Be Vulgar”

C.  Creative Writing: Poetry—Laird 212

  1. Juan Carlos Chotocruz-Abarca, “IN the Land of the Free”
  2. Mikayla Coulombe, “To Darkness”
  3. Madeline King, “Disclosure”


Session II    10:35-11:35 a.m.

A.  Gender, History, and Performance—Laird 206

  1. Madelaine Horn, “Women and Honour in Shakespeare’s History Plays”
  2. Sarah Meister, “The Interpretive Value of Prison Shakespeare”
  3. Kayla McKinsey, “Women’s Subjectivity in South Asian Narratives of Relocation”

B.  Creative Writing and Projects: Drama and Hybrid Forms—Laird 211

  1. Kristen Nassar, “This is What Sticks (And How to Clean Your Room)”
  2. Isabel Carter, “For Your Viewing Pleasure”
  3. Casey Short, “Changing Conventions: New Media and Narrative Levels in Webcomics”
  4. Kathleen George, “Stripped”

C.  American Experimental Forms—Laird 212

  1. Erik Johnson, “Thoreau’s Pedagogy toward Poetic Perception in Walden”
  2. Claire Pennington, “Postmodernism and Moralizing Narrative in The Crying of Lot 49”
  3. Noah Bunnell, “The Re-Birth of the Critic: Deconstructing Metacriticism in House of Leaves”


Session III    11:40 a.m.-12:40 p.m.

A.  Colloquium—Laird 211

  1. Grace Black, Alex Caulfield, Sam Chao, Jeong Lim, Helenmarie McHugh, Alexandra Norvet 

B.  Morality, Subversion, and the Reader—Laird 206

  1. Ben Hiskes, “The Roles of Reason and the Reader in Paradise Lost”
  2. Austin Showen, “Hierarchical Subversion in Dickens’ Criminals”
  3. Miriam Wolf, “Subversion and the Carnivalesque in Children’s Literature”

C.  Creative Writing: Fiction—Laird 212

  1. Emma Sunog, “Secrets”
  2. Casper Kelly, “July 6, 2015”
  3. Wilson Josephson, “Fatherland”

RECEPTION/LUNCH—Laird Second-Floor Hallway—12:40-1:40 p.m.