12th Annual Miami English Graduate and Adjunct Association (MEGAA) Symposium – March 13, 2015

Schedule

8:00-8:45	Registration and Breakfast
8:45-9:45	Panel A
10:00-11:00	Panels B, C, D
11:15-12:15	Keynote 1
12:15-2:15	Panels E, F, G
2:30-3:30	Keynote 2
3:45-4:45	Panels H, I, J

8:00-8:45 Reading Room 337 Registration and Breakfast

8:45-9:45 Session I: Panel A

Panel A-Room 258 Queer Acts, Experimental Stages: Selling, Consuming, Surveiling

Chair: Jason Palmeri, Associate Professor of English Director of College Composition

Risking Method, Risking Queer Ruralism
Caleb Pendygraft, Composition and Rhetoric
Relationality, Gender Policing, and Trans Diversity in Montesquieu and Balzac
Jacob Raterman, French Literature, Queer Theory

Avant-garde Theatre in the Consumer Society: Virtual Existence and Space Discretization in Punchudrunk’s Sleep No More
Xie Keke, English, Drama

10:00-11:00 Session II: Panels B, C, and D

Panel B-Room 250 American Dreams: Prose and Poetry

Chair: Cathy Wagner Professor of English Director of Creative Writing

The Doctors’ Daughter
Christopher Maggio, Creative Writing/Fiction
Dream Space & Poetic: Traveling the Unconscious Through Images
Emily Corwin, Creative Writing/Poetry

Panel C-Room 256 The Anxious Past: (Re)Assessing the Archive in Perilous Times and Spaces

Chair: Nalin Jayasena Associate Professor of English

Alternate Archives and Competing Histories: The Search for Historical Meaning During the Postwar Years
Tyler Groff, Late Victorian and Modernist Literature
Revamping the Archive: Theda Bara, Film History, and the Queer Politics of Loss
Tory Lowe, American Literature/Film Studies
Mnemonic Arhives and Post-War Sri Lankan Art of Resistance
Dinidu Karunanayake, Memory Studies/Cultural Studies

Panel D-Room 258 Unquiet Silence: Rhetorics and Ontologies

Chair: Katie Taylor, Assistant Professor of English, Composition & Rhetoric

“Crazy Theory”: Neuroatypicality as Ontology
Patrick Harris, Composition and Rhetoric
Digital Dangers: Edwin Snowden, Parrhesia, and Online Space
Renea Frey, Composition and Rhetoric
Western and Chinese Rhetoric of Silence
Yebing Zhao, Contrastive Rhetoric

11:15-12:15 Room 102 -- Keynote 1: Associate Professor Andrew Hebard, Director of Literature Program

Naturalist Fiction, Global Space, and the Biopolitical Aesthetic

This paper explores how naturalist novels represented globalization as a problem of spatial scale. More specifically these novels query how one might aesthetically apprehend political agency in relation to systems that operate at a global scale. Using Frank Norris’s unfinished trilogy on global wheat trade as an example, the paper argues that Norris seeks an aesthetic solution to the problem of representing American territorial and economic expansion in the early 20^th century. Rather than a formalist aesthetic that valued coherence and its ability to mediate between part and whole, the Octopus forwards the aesthetic values of ambiguity and complexity. It does this because it reproduces the ambiguous spatial imaginary of American imperial sovereignty as well as the biopolitical imaginary of American imperial governance.

12:15-1:15 Lunch (box lunches are provided for speakers, presenters, chairs, and registered guests in the Reading Room)

1:15-2:15 Session III: Panels E, F, and G

Panel E–Room 256 Three Cultural Narratives: The Dangers of Race and Nationality

Chair: Brian Roley, Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing

Happy Hair Day
Corey Burdine, Creative Writing
They Lived Along the Baseline Road
Sammani Perera, Creative Writing
Awakening the Gods
Cynthia Smith, Literature

Panel F–Room 258 A Place of One's Own: Navigating Hostile Spaces

Chair: Erin Edwards Assistant, Professor of English

Dual Antithesis and Broken Symmetry: Native American Indian Complicated and Conflicted Spatial Existence in N.Scott Momaday, James Welch and Louise Erdrich’s Narrative
Wanxin Mao, Native American Literature
Tame Sparrows, Dangerous Streets: The Urban Aesthetic in Woolf and Loy
Catherine Tetz, English Literature
No Country for Diasporic Men
Zehra Yousofi, Postcolonial Literature

Panel G–Room 341 Getting Real: Branding, Living, and Dying

Chair: Cynthia Klestinec Associate Professor of English

Shifting Topographies: New Borderlands in Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year
Clint Rodgers, English
Consuming Cities: The Urban Branding(s) of Reality TV by Bravo
Allison Nettnin, English
A ‘Critical-Dramatistic’ Analysis of Representations of Mainland China in News Reports
Hua Zhu, English

2:30-3:30 Room 101 -- Keynote 2: Assistant Professor Linh Dich

"The News of the Street”: What can Transnational Literacies (Re)Teach us about Race and the Public Sphere

Examining transnational and digital literacies may help us reconceive of multiple and alternative spaces (Fraser), specifically public spaces, as overlapping, geopolitical ecologies and as sites of symbolic/rhetorical resources for addressing inequity. In examining Nah, a Vietnamese rapper and his movement between Vietnam and America, this talk maps Nah’s transnational literacy acts that borrow from American-based rap and hip-hop’s political potential to challenge government corruption in Vietnam. Nah’s simultaneous existence in multiple transnational and local public spheres gestures to a different model of the public that may be more conducive to interrogating unequal power dynamics. Nah’s transnational literacies construct a framework for us to address race and racism in America by challenging how popular media represents itself as an ideologically and materially white public through the visual rendering of whiteness as power and difference as objects of subjugation. As such, transnational digital literacies prompts us to (re)consider the role that alternative public spaces can play in providing needed symbolic resources and identity formation for challenging dominant public spaces and systemic inequality in America.

3:45-4:45 Session IV: Panels H, I, and J

Panel H–Room 250 Conflict at Home and Abroad: The Fight Within and Without

Chair: Jody Bates, Lecturer

“Annika” A Chapter Alone
Andrew Bergman, Creative Writing/Fiction
After Action: Things I Learned During the War
Matthew Young, Creative Writing/CNF

Panel I–Room 256 Rethinking Trauma of the Other: Things, Bodies, Freaks

Chair: Katie Johnson, Associate Professor of English

“We Thought Her Sorrows Ordinary”: Domesticity, Materiality, and Ordinary Trauma
Mosisah Mavity, English Literature
Castrating the Femme Fatale: Elsa Mars as the Monster/Freak Human
Michelle Christensen, English Literature
Becoming Animal
Evan Fackler, English Literature

Panel J-Room 258 Challenging Concepts of Community

Chair: Michele Simmons Associate Professor of English

Navigating Student Collaborative Spaces
Ellen Cecil, Rhetoric and Composition

Navigating Student Collaborative Spaces
Laura Tabor, English