Be sure to read the call for papers (CFP) very carefully to make sure you meet all criteria before sending off an abstract.
Here are a few of J.D.'s abstracts that have been accepted. If you would like to share yours, please send them to J.D. (jdacts2024@yahoo.com) and he'll put them up:
Conference Abstract (from Dr. Karen Roggenkamp):
The Sentimental Quaker: Friendly Communities and Moral Sympathy
in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and “Life in the Iron Mills”
In its most ideal rendition, antebellum fiction fused sentimental affect with Christian evangelicalism and directed readers’ sympathies toward moral reform. The emotional portrayals of such fictional characters as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom and Rebecca Harding Davis’s poor Welsh laborers aimed to forge a religiously-inspired bond between reader and character that led to actual sympathy—a force that in theory would influence readers to respond with positive social action when meeting “unfortunate characters” outside the pages of the novel or the story. But how was this religiously-based sympathy enacted and modeled within fiction itself? And how did antebellum authors envision the correlation between sentimentality and action in literal practice?
One response to such questions lies in the Quaker communities depicted in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills.” Stowe’s novel provides an extended look at a Quaker settlement to which Eliza escapes with her young son, in flight from a Kentucky slave-trader. And in Davis’s story, Deb, a convicted thief and Welsh immigrant, resettles in a Quaker community after her release from a dismal iron-town prison. Both authors cast a respectful eye on such settlements and suggest that in these religious societies, sympathy comes to life as religious characters model what it means to “feel right,” as Stowe famously enjoined. The depiction of Friendly settlements provides, for both Stowe and Davis, a model of sympathy pressed into social action and a picture of humane “oneness” that lies at the crossroads of sentimentality and Christian benevolence.
This paper analyzes the web between sympathy and religion as drawn through the Quaker communities in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills,” placed against the backdrop of other antebellum fiction about Quakers. I interrogate how the Quaker concept of “friendly persuasion” intersects with the moral politics of sentimentality, and I interweave the context of Quaker involvement in antebellum social issues with the progressive impetus behind some sentimental fiction. Ultimately, in blending sentimental conventions with images of nineteenth-century Quaker life, these works push our understanding of sentimental fiction beyond the vaguely-defined “Christian sympathies” with which many scholars define the genre and allow readers to envision the religious and political import of antebellum sentimentality.
Book Chapter abstract:
Touch and Choice in “Pushing Daisies”
Though the story of Ned’s discovery of his ability to resurrect life is repeated in some form at the top of every episode of Pushing Daisies, the ability itself – and not its limitation (specifically, that Ned continually must choose between allowing a person/animal to live or letting it die, and that no matter what choice he makes, something dies) – seems to take center stage. This makes a lot of sense dramatically because, in a comedy, having a character continually having a Hamlet-moment would be a bit of a downer (to say the least). However, the limitations of Ned’s power are pivotal in his relationship to Chuck and Digby, and provide his character depth that is subtly explored in the writing of the show and in the acting of Lee Pace. I would like to examine the ways in which touch and our human need/desire for touch are utilized in the character of Ned and, specifically, in his ability; Ned is a sort of Midas, except he does not desire gold, he desires touch – and, unlike Midas, he finds ways to fulfill this desire without destroying what is around him.
Ned’s ability and the ways he deals with this ability, I think, also suggest a moralizing for larger themes – every time he uses his ability, the choice is life or death. I would like to conclude by exploring how Ned’s actions (or sometimes inactions) require an audience to reevaluate its own actions and inactions – what choices would we make? Whose life would we choose? In this way, Ned, and Pushing Daisies in general, require an audience to engage and think more than they might watching According to Jim or some other inferior comedy; unfortunately, it seems that ABC audiences were not willing to engage or think.
Journal Article abstract:
Redefining the English Major: Adding Strength to Strength
Harvard served as a model for English departments in the past and, with its 2008-2009 changes, it seems to take the mantle in providing yet another model; however, I propose a much more radical approach to creating undergraduate “English” curriculum that does more than push the boundaries of traditional study of English literatures. I propose a complete redefinition of the English major.
Those who are currently “English” Majors seem to be increasingly less concerned with studying a national literary tradition, but seek a world literary tradition. My proposal, thus, changes the name of the department and the major to Department of Literature and Language.
Harvard’s new model is a start, but it still centers the study of literature and language on one literature and one language, English, and, thus, continues to offer a half solution.
