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The programme is nearly ready - there are all sorts of fascinating topics being covered, plus exclusive evening events for delegates.

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Fashionably Welsh: Felicia Browne Hemans’s Early Poetry

by Mary Chadwick

One of the most popular poets of the nineteenth century but largely forgotten in the twentieth, Felicia Hemans has been rediscovered by critics, if not the public, in the last few decades. Her representations of a restricted feminine sphere have provoked debate amongst feminists while her national poetry - English, British, Welsh and beyond - provides a site of ambiguity for scholars determined to solve the conundrums she poses.

Hemans spent the majority of her life in Wales. She began her poetic career in the wake of eighteenth-century Celticism (or Celtomania) and at the height of the Romantic rediscovery of Wales by those whose plans for European travel were thwarted by war. A voracious reader, she published her first volume of poetry at the age of fourteen.

Focusing upon her juvenilia, this paper explores the relationship between Hemans’s work and her location in North Wales. I begin by examining the uses to which Hemans puts a number of the themes of eighteenth-century Anglophone Welsh poetry including the glorious past and subsequent decline of Welsh history and culture, the figure of genius, and fairy lore. My focus is the extent to which Hemans’s appropriation of these themes indicates the incorporation of Wales, her culture and her people into the relatively new state of Great Britain.

Biography

Mary Chadwick is in the final year of an AHRC-funded PhD at Aberystwyth University. She researches expressions of Welsh identity among the North Walian gentry of the late eighteenth century.

This One Goes To Eleven: Postdramatic Signs in bobrauschenbergamerica

by Nik Wakefield

This paper will reveal the power of the eleven signs of Postdramatic Theatre at work in bobrauschenbergamerica.  Using the theoretical structure of Hans-Thies Lehmnn’s layout as well as the structure found in the text of the show, each section of this essay will begin with the Postdramatic sign being focused on.  Then a quote from Lehmann about that sign will begin a discourse that analyses aspects or moments of the performance that exemplify that theoretical framework.  To reflect the fragmentary nature of the performance, one point will end and another will begin. 

During the process of creating the show Charles Mee kept avoiding the question as to how SITI should transition from one scene to the next.  Finally, he told them to just go on to the next moment. Taking his advice, this paper will go from one sign of Postdramatic Theatre to the next, in numbered order.  That simple structure will reveal the beauty of the theory and the performance.  As a whole, analyzing bobrauschenbergamerica through the framework of Postdramatic Theatre’s eleven signs will reveal the significance of both the theory and the performance.

Please Mind the Gap: The Semiotic Temporality of the Frame and the Gutter

by Keegan Lannon

In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud postulated one of the most important theories in comic studies: the theory of closure.  That is, in the gaps between panels, the reader performs some mental addition, filling in the missing narrative pieces between the depicted moments of the story.  For McCloud, the frame represents a small, almost instantaneous amount of time, and the gap represents a variable duration depending on the reader’s closure. 

Recent theorists, like Neil Cohn, have complicated this understanding of the temporality of the frame by arguing that certain frames possess an unknowable duration – certainly one that could be longer than just a moment.  This paper further develops both McCloud’s and Cohn’s arguments couching the temporal duration of a frame semiotically.  This paper, by examining pages from Craig Thompson’s Blankets, will demonstrate how the frame can suggest duration through visual and verbal signs, such as the motion line or the word balloon.

Biography

Keegan Lannon has begun work on his PhD at Aberystwyth University in Wales in an attempt to read comic books professionally.  His dissertation topic focuses on comic books and narrative theory. 

Trauma, History and Gender: Discrepancies in Psychoanalytic Ways of Reading Holocaust Testimony

 by Nigel Rodenhurst

This paper can be broken down in to three sections. The first summarizes the current ‘state of play’ in theoretical approaches to Holocaust testimony and fiction/film with similar traits. In short, critics including LaCapra, Caruth and Langer use theory influenced by Freud’s later work on ‘trauma’. This is used to explain discrepancies in ‘trauma’ narratives which would otherwise be considered ‘postmodern’.

The second section looks at the ways in which female experience was written out of Holocaust history (as was the experience of Jews who were not from Eastern Europe), and the efforts of historians and anthropologists to address this imbalance.

The final section argues that these efforts should be extended to readings of Holocaust testimony in which female experience is analysed through a ‘one gender fits all’ method based on Freud’s later work on trauma. In short, Caruth, LaCapra and Langer all approach the testimony of male and female patients/witnesses as though men and women experience trauma in identical (male) ways. Following Kristeva’s work on feminine depression, I argue that it is now time not only to include women’s experience fully in Holocaust history, but also to respect the nuances of difference between the male and female psyche when discussing this experience.

The Visual and the Literary in Contemporary Welsh Ecopoetry in English

by William Welstead

This paper situates itself on the borderlines between the literary and the visual arts.  It examines recent collaborations in Wales between contemporary poets and visual artists, working with themes of pleasure in landscape and wildlife, and fear for its loss.

For John Ruskin, in Modern Painters, it is what is represented and said that determines greatness rather than whatever is in the ‘language of lines’ of the painter or the ‘language of words’ of the writer.  Welsh landscape artist Kyffin Williams, felt that the visual arts should reinforce the idea of cynefin (which can mean habitat), designating for Williams ‘the place where you live and are naturally acclimatised’ that is already so well expressed in the poetry of Wales in both languages.

Firstly, the paper crosses the word/image borderline through the ekphrastic relationship between poet, Philip Gross and photographer, Simon Denison in I Spy Pinhole Eye in which Gross’s poems work from Denison’s pinhole photographs of electricity pylons.  Secondly, it considers the long-standing collaboration between poet Gillian Clarke and painter Mary Lloyd Jones, for example as captions for her pictures, as well as their joint-working on a series of poems and paintings.

Biography

William Welstead is just starting his final year as PhD Student in the Deaprtment of English at Aberystwyth.  The provisional title of his thesis is Braided narratives in Contemporary Welsh Ecopoetry in English.

‘A Proper Adventure’: Writing a Bilingual Wales

by Lowri Emlyn

This paper will provide an overview of the writing process behind my short story, 'A Proper Adventure,' and discuss some of the questions and issues encountered when presenting the Welsh language within an English text.

Queer Modernisms and the Politics of Loss

by Ery Shin

What are the intersections between queerness, gender, and class in an early modernist context, with the focus being on narratives of pain in relation to disenfranchised queer bodies?  How do writers such as Djuna Barnes and Virginia Woolf reject or conform to the exclusionary, heterosexist politics of their day? 

A new wave in queer theory is pushing to reclaim the stigmatization historically defining modern queer consciousness, thereby giving a fuller, more realized portrait of Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender (LGBT) identity.  If the first half of the twentieth-century largely features representations of closeted homosexuals suffering alone, the Gay Pride movement of today promotes “post-gay” gays: dashingly urban figures “flaunting their well-adjustedness.”  What are the dissonances arising between these two clashing images?  Joining a growing number of critics interested in queer negativity, I hope to further dialogue on what it means to be or feel queer in the twenty-first century by looking back to the early twentieth.

Given homophobia’s persistence in the present (evidenced in Uganda’s harsh penal codes and the recent string of gay teenage suicides publicized across the U.S.), a large part of this project involves figuring out how to navigate political infighting within the gay community, then, bridge the gaps between theory and political action.  Much of queer theory deconstructs categories and stable identities, yet civil initiatives, by necessity, require group solidarity.  How do we effect change without compromising intellectual integrity?  Is such a thing possible?

This presentation examines both the past and future of queer theory and politics by asking, as Douglas Crimp urges us, “How do we make what we know knowable to legions?”  Demystifying all of these issues before the general public is a daunting prospect, but one that must be tackled nonetheless in light of the ongoing struggle for gay rights.

Biography

Ery Shin received her B.A. in English at Princeton University, and is now pursuing a doctorate in English at the University of Oxford.  Her specialties lie in LGBTQ literature, queer theory, modernism, as well as gender & sexuality studies.  Her PhD dissertation is currently titled “Queer Modernisms: Pain and Paradox in Women’s Writing,” and will focus on authors such as Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Katherine Mansfield.  The point of the study is to examine queer suffering in select texts in order to recuperate it in the present.

Aristotelian Rhetoric and the Asignifying Dimension of Pathetic Appeal

by Brian Stone

In rhetorical studies, rhetoric has traditionally been conceived of as a communicative act; bound up in notions of communication are implications concerning signification and meaning. Recently, the linguistic turn in the humanities has complicated this conversation by challenging signification and demonstrating the instability of, if not the indeterminacy, of meaning in communicative acts. However, scholars such as Daniel Smith and John Muckelbauer have challenged the necessity of thinking in terms of rhetoric as a communicative act. Instead, they suggest rhetoric deals in making people ‘do’ things, rather than, or alongside, understanding them. Through engagement with classical rhetoricians, they have demonstrated rhetoric as possessing an asignifying dimension.

Following the work of these theorists, I argue that such notions of rhetoric were always already prevalent in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, particularly in his theory of pathetic appeal. In Aristotelian studies, there has been a longstanding debate concerning both Aristotle’s work on rhetoric and ethics as to whether or not pathe is subject to logoi, or logoi subject to pathe. In this paper, I suggest that logical appeal entails pathetic appeal in as much as pathetic appeal entails logical appeal and that thinking this problem in terms of dialectical negation has led to an endless proliferation of oscillating positions. Within the Aristotelian tradition there is indeed an asignifying dimension of rhetoric.

Biography

Brian Stone is a doctoral candidate studying Classical and Medieval rhetoric at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His dissertation research examines the use of rhetorical handbooks by scribes in early Irish monastic communities and the role those handbooks played in the composition of myth.

Machines of Love and Grace: Hacking the Subconscious in Creative Writing

by Shawn Andrew Mitchell

Despite the last fifty years of literary theory, and despite the overpopulation of MFA-accredited writers and the limited range of styles possible, the dominant mode of thought within creative writing workshops and programs is still that of the author as an auteur who needs to “find his or her voice.”  There is little attention paid to ideas of deconstruction or heteroglossia, the ideas that an author is a construct or a compilation of other voices, that what goes in is what comes out.

Likewise, workshop participants in advanced workshops are by and large expected to have found their writing technique, and thus workshops focus primarily on critiquing the work, not generating it.  But how does one reach that state of flow where the subconscious opens up onto the page?  In From Where You Dream, Robert Olen Butler suggests the answer is functional fixedness: write every day at the same time in the same place with the same notebook and pen and your stories will flow out.  But what if they don't?  And what if you have no ideas to work with? 

In an age of computers and the internet, there are new frontiers for generating writing.  My talk will present various methods that might be taken, from imitative writing to computer-generated language to Oulipian formal constraints.  I will read from a few of my short stories and discuss the methods used to generate them.  Overall, I will argue for moving beyond old concepts of “voice” and “originality” and into the humble and productive state of trusting in the unknown of the machine.

Biography:

Shawn Andrew Mitchell is currently pursuing his MFA in fiction at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale where he teaches composition and creative writing. He is a contributor to the Fiction Writers Review, and his fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Torpedo, NANO Fiction, The Montreal Review, Prime Mincer, and Crafty Magazine. His short story “It’s Not the Heat So Much As the Jelly” was anthologized in Torpedo Greatest Hits, available from Hunter Publishers in Australia.

Registration for New Horizons NOW OPEN

Keeping this short and sweet:

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Coming soon: The conference program is in the final stage of confirmation and will be announced here soon!