Forms and Figures
What Can I Say: Teaching Online Audience Reception in Literary Courses
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Jonina Anderson Lopez
This paper considers how to integrate discussion of online audience reception into literary courses. Based on past literary courses I’ve taught, I’ve considered how to engage students not just in the story they might be critiquing, but to interest them in building meaning and multiple narratives. Students are urged to consider audience reception as an interpretive lens, and to consider the extent critical views of work can be taken as representative. Thoughts/questions I pose to students include: “There are multiple layers of story analysis occurring today, online/offline. You are a critic. You voice matters, or does it? Does any critique of a story matter?” The question of critical views of representative re-envisions the function of a critic. For modern audiences, there are several ways to view and discuss stories. Students integrate online audience sentiment by placing the informal everyday critic (from social media/informal review sites) in context with a chosen literary work. Analyzing audience reception (or sentiment) of a chosen story can help position a student researcher as an informal critic themselves, and what this means for storytelling and online discourse overall. Through this activity in relation to their literary analysis, students are encouraged to increase their digital literacy skills, and to review alternative sources and how they differ from traditional sources. Additionally, this activity may encourage students to consider how creativity and authorship are always about reception and pleasing the audience; and now, the audience has more immediate and wide-reaching means to share perspectives.
Featured Queerness in the Depths: The Character of Water in LGBTQ+ Texts
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Cathryn Stevens
Water is ever changing—it moves between, it reaches out, it touches disparate continents and concepts. Through the focused application of Queer theory and gender theory to visual and textual sources, I investigate the image of water as an embodiment of and backdrop for Queer stories. I employ Dr. Kathyrn Stockton’s work on cis/trans surface and Dr. Amy Jeffery’s work on queer liminal spaces, among other sources, to analyze three Queer, ocean-centric texts: Moonlight (2018), Yanyi’s The Year of Blue Water, and Jean Genet’s Querelle. I take an intersectional approach, also considering the impact of racial and cultural histories on the role of the ocean in each text. I expect to find that, in these works, the ocean takes on a role similar to that of the established concept of liminal space; it allows for impossible contradictions—between male/female, gay/straight, surface/depth—to exist. Through this analysis, I highlight how the symbolic ocean opens avenues for LGBTQ+ people to think, dream, and explore. I flow between the three texts, using each to illustrate a new dimension of the Queer(ed) ocean. I visualize showing screencaps and micro-excerpts from these texts as well.
Ecological Spirituality in the Life and Writings of St. John Baptist de La Salle
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Myra Patambang
Born in the 17th century France, a Catholic Priest, Founder of the Institute of the Brothers of Christian Schools and declared Universal Patron of Teachers in 1950, John Baptist de la Salle is a prolific writer. He had written more than 200 manuscripts and today’s Lasallian Family has published several of the Saint’s spiritual writings. Most popular are the Meditations for the Time of Retreat, Meditations on Sundays and Feasts, Conduct of Christian Schools, Memoir of the Beginnings to name a few. Originally written in French, the writings had been translated into different languages that reach the farthest of Lasallian communities across the globe. It could be deduced that such a reservoir of spirituality and depth of faith of St. La Salle transcend nations and generations. This paper presents a reflection on and an analysis of the thoughts of Saint John Baptist de La Salle as revealed in his collection of writings. Through a rigorous survey and careful analysis of the compendium, the researcher identifies references to environmental consciousness, care for the earth, integrity of creation and themes that point to the Saint’s ecological values. Inasmuch as Lasallians today are challenged to continuously mature in faith, zeal for service and communion in mission, it is paramount that they likewise grow in deeper consciousness of what is happening to Mother Earth and embrace an authentic ecological conversion in juxtaposition with an unwavering commitment to action. Following the footsteps of the Founder, every Lasallian must advocate justice, peace and integrity of creation.
Janet Schaw’s Journal of a Lady of Quality: Female Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Travels
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Nira Gupta-Casale
My paper offers a descriptive analysis of Janet Schaw’s Journal of a Lady of Quality, which is a narrative of her eventful, and often perilous seven week oceanic journey from Scotland to the West Indies, her sojourn in Antigua, and her subsequent residency in North Carolina, and Portugal, between the years of 1774-1776. Situating Schaw within the context of increased women’s travels in the eighteenth century, my paper examines Schaw’s assertions of “truth” claims and authority in her ethnographic passages. I show how her distinctively female voice transcribes transatlantic experiences and underscores received opinions on gender, class, and race, with particular focus on those passages where her stated feminine empathy exposes class and racial prejudices. My paper also explores the emerging identity of the female cosmopolitan subject and interrogates the degree to which cosmopolitanism was imbricated with commerce in this period of imperialist expansion. My interest in Janet Schaw’s Journal of a Lady of Quality lies both in its value as a document of historiographic significance, as well as in the way the text reveals certain structures, tropes, and fissures in the collective imaginary of early global capitalism, especially reflective of a gendered, bourgeoise sensibility.
