Third Annual Graduate Humanities Forum Conference

Co-sponsored by GSAC, English, Anthropology, Art History, Comparative Literature, East Asian Studies, Judaic Studies, Romance Languages, and Women's Studies

ABSTRACTS

TEXT, IMAGE, & ORALITY IN CHINESE TRADITIONS
Faculty Discussant: Dennis Mair (AMES)
Student Moderator: Michael Laver (AMES)


Xuanjuan: A Transitional Genre Between Orality and Literacy, Peng Mu (Folklore)
Xuanjuan or Nianjuan, reciting precious rolls or reading aloud precious rolls publicly, is one of the most popular professional storytelling genres that is still alive in parts of China. Yet, unlike most of other popular professional storytelling genres, due to its religious function, precious rolls, the texts, are not only used as cribs or peeking texts, but also are considered as sacred implements in the religious ritual process of Xuanjuan. Precious rolls are texts, however, they are not just written for reading, but rather written for reading aloud, for reciting, and for performing. In this sense, Xuanjuan represents a liminal form existing between orality and literacy. Based upon a general outline of the history of Xuanjuan, I focus on one specific area and a specific text, and examine the tensions and leaks that result from the entwinement of oral/secular tradition and written/religious tradition.

Textual Mandate on the Periphery of the Chinese State, Eli Albert (AMES)
The Guoshanbang, or Passport for Crossing the Mountains, claims to be an imperially sanctioned document issued to the ancestors of the Yao people, granting them freedom from taxation, corvee, and the need to pay obeisance to local officials; as well as the right to sovereignty over the myriad mountains and grottoes under heaven. A long scroll-like document written in a Yao variant of literary Chinese and stamped intermittently with authenticating seals of the Emperor and other images, the Passport is rolled up and stored in the village headman’s home, only to be displayed during the lunar new-year ceremonies. Just as revealed scriptures, or treasures, served in Chinese official discourse to legitimate the authority of the emperor and the dynastic line through their symbolic association with the Mandate of Heaven, so too do Yao Chinese texts serve to legitimate the authority of village leaders and clan lines; as well as to create and maintain local and extra-local Yao identities.

Mimetic Functions of Pictorial Eulogies in Three Eastern Han Tombs, Hsin-Mei Agnes Hsu (AMES)
This paper presents a study on some funerary wall paintings found at three Eastern Han (25-220 C.E.) sites in modern Hebei province, China. From a post-processual perspective, these images communicate information of a specific cultural group and can be treated as ethnographic texts. As evidence of personal virtues and as an aid for achieving immortality, I argue that these pictorial eulogies represent an amalgamation of Confucian ideology and early Daoist religious beliefs and target a postmortem, supernatural audience. I also look beyond a common vocabulary of iconographical images to suggest that each pictorial program was assembled to represent a unique life, raising the issues of private art and individualism in early China. In essence, my research is an effort to understand the functions of funerary murals from an emic perspective.

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PANELS

Text, Image & Orality in Chinese Tradition

Materiality & Ethe(o)reality

Historicity & the Evolution of Texts

Mapping America

Cultural Encounters

Undressing the Text

Sex and the Text

Intertextual Reflections

Performing the (Extra)Ordinary

Reading the Nation

Alternative Writing Surfaces

Sharing the Page

MATERIALITY AND ETHE(O)REALITY
Faculty Discussant: Roger Chartier (History)
Student Moderator: Dierdra Reber (Romance Languages)

Some Thoughts on Book History, Erica Fruiterman (English)
My paper attempts to theorize the evolution of textual studies over the last twenty years with the purpose of exposing some of the limitations of and reasons for the practice of textual materialism. I address the place of this growing subject of study within the academy and discuss the problems and benefits of its interdisciplinary approach. I use examples from my own research to highlight what textual materialism can and cannot illuminate about the transmission of knowledge and the construction of history. I conclude with some thoughts on the future of textual studies.

Villard’s Sketchbook: The Transmission of Architectural Knowledge in the Middle Ages, Acalya Kiyak (Architecture)
Throughout the history architects have kept sketchbooks where they record their memories, comments or drawings of things they have seen or conceived. Notwithstanding, sketchbooks of medieval architects were not intended for exclusive recording, but indeed, they were circulated, transmitted and copied in different locations and times. Medieval sketchbooks were the primordial medium that transmitted the architectural knowledge among the architects and builders before the rise of mechanically reproduced images.

The earliest sketchbook that survived until our time was compiled by the French architect Villard d'Honnecourt in the first half of the 13th century. Villard recorded his visits to many countries in ink drawings together with accompanying explanatory notes. He gathered them in a book that served as a memory aid, source of design ideas, and instruction manual for builders and masons. Drawings on vellum for architectural details were kept unbounded so that they could be removed often and copied. This paper will study Villard's book as mode of transmission of architectural design and its impact on the theory and praxis of architecture in the Middle Ages.

The Dairyman’s Daughter: The Material History of an Evangelical Text, Kyle Roberts (History)
Over the course of the 19th century, few evangelical texts proved as popular or enjoyed such celebrity for promoting religious conversions as Legh Richmond’s The Dairyman’s Daughter. First published in England in 1809, Richmond’s short story of the life and death of a young woman on the rural Isle of Wight became a global phenomenon. Millions of copies were printed and the story was translated into over forty languages. By looking at the material history of this text, I will explore why it was so successfully received, and how it can function as a window into the role literature played in the Evangelical movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The Dairyman’s Daughter is not just the story of an exemplary Christian's conversion, but one of the impact of new technologies on printing and distribution, the global growth and expansion of Protestantism through the combined efforts of America and England, and underlying class tensions that shaped the movement.

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HISTORICITY AND THE EVOLUTION OF TEXTS Faculty Discussant: Jennifer Snead (English)
Student Moderator: Jonathan Hsy (English)


Stoic Emendations and the Concept of the Text, Kevin Tracy (Classics)
Stoic comments on Homeric epic are preserved piecemeal in the scholia and commentaries. Some scholars have recently drawn out the consequences of these comments for our understanding of Stoic philosophy. This paper will shift the focus from the philosophy that Stoic comments imply to the notion of text that they imply. In the commentaries and scholia, these Stoic comments, often philosophically motivated, are represented as “emendations” of the text that compete with the “emendations” of ancient critics such as Aristarchus, whose project is thought to involve textual criticism to the exclusion of philosophical exegesis. Where there are none of the philological concepts needed for precisely defining the concept of the text and the role of the text critic, we should not expect a clear-cut distinction between textual criticism and exegesis. But it is clear that the Stoics did embrace such philological concepts. Therefore it is important in the historical study of the concept of the text to determine where the line was drawn in the case of these seldom-studied fragments of Stoic commentary.

A Rare Nusayri Manuscript in Van Pelt’s Rare Book Room: A Preliminary Investigation, David Hollenberg & Tarek Kahlaou (AMES)
In a 1907 letter responding to the great University of Pennsylvania Professor of Oriental Studies Marcus Jastrow, the physician Sterrett Metheny disagreed with Jastrow's appraisal of an Arabic manuscript he had recently brought back from Syria. "I rather am inclined to think the Ansari [sic] MSS are much rarer and harder to obtain that you or Dr. Williams think." In fact the physician's instincts were correct and Jastrow was mistaken: Codex 43 of Van Pelt's Special Collections is one of the very few Nusayri texts in the public domain.

The Nusayris are a secret, heretical Shi'ite sect that arose the tenth-century in the mountainous regions of Syria. For the Humanities Forum, we will access the codicological aspects and provenance of the physical text of Codex 43, and also provide a framework for future inquiry into its place in the tradition of Nusayri literature.

Adultery, Murder, & the Writing of the Penitential Psalms, Clare Costley (English)
In this paper, I examine the link between the Penitential Psalms and the story of David and Bathsheba (in 2 Samuel 11-12). I first tie the widely-held medieval and Renaissance belief that David composed the Penitential Psalms after committing adultery with Bathsheba (and murdering her husband) to the presentation of those psalms in devotional hand-books, or primers. I then ask why David's authorship of the Penitential Psalms was crucial for some Medieval and Renaissance theologians (John Fisher, for example), but barely significant for others (Savonarola, Luther). Finally, I look at a curious primer of 1538, which presents two divergent readings of the Penitential Psalms. The first reading is founded in the narrative of David's repentance after his sins; the second favors a more general penitential application of the psalms, and casts doubt on the Davidic reading. This juxtaposition of readings, I argue, both captures and contributes to various doctrinal uncertainties of the time.

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MAPPING AMERICA: LANDSCAPE, IMAGE, & KNOWLEDGE
Faculty Discussant: Nancy Bentley (English)
Student Moderator: Kristina Morris Baumli (English)


“The Road to Akron”: Reading the Post-Industrial Landscape, Brian Gregory (Folklore)
The condensed experience of Akron, Ohio’s rapid growth--and the trauma of its sudden industrial collapse--left behind a rich cultural text: Akron’s contemporary post-industrial landscape.

But are landscapes truly texts, and if so, how are they read? If, as Susan Stewart contends, writing inscribes space, but is at best a poignant fragmentary artifact in which what the body knows--the visual, the aural, the tactile--is concealed, how do we begin to re-animate the silent hull of the material artifact (the urban landscape) and the phantasm of human presence frozen in textual depict ions of it (the book)?

This visually-driven presentation juxtaposes close “readings” of sites in a contemporary post-industrial landscape (focusing on Akron’s vernacular houses) with scrutiny of more traditional texts (focusing on Ruth McKenney’s 1939 Akron-set “proletarian” novel, Industrial Valley).

From Eye to We: The Problem of Envisioning the Thirties Documentary Book, Jeff Allred (English)
While not a classic "material text" bit of scholarship, my essay will focus on the rise of documentary books in 1930s America. These mixed-genre books, (and I plan to focus on Wright's Twelve Million Black Voices and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men [both 1941]) I will argue, juxtapose photographs of "everyday life" with text in ways that generate a bewildering range of effects. On the one hand, some such texts implicitly claim to capture reality without mediation with a shocking naivete; on the other, the intensity of the photographs' realism itself precipitates a crisis for writers as they are forced to reckon with the always already compromised status of language as a mimetic means. In addition to (or alongside) these more formalist concerns I want to focus on the ways these books position the documentarian vis a vis his/her subjects. In so doing, I want to emphasize the fraught politics of representation (in both the aesthetic and political senses) that haunts the practice of documentary right from its origins in the Thirties.

“Words that set, then miss, the mark”: Narrative Unknowing in Toni Morrison’s Jazz, Nicole Furlonge (English)
How does one narrate, interpret, and create from what one knows while trying to undermine the known with intelligent, probing, and exploratory questions? How does one incorporate the surprises encountered in such activity? These questions, which are at the heart of my own critical struggles, are dramatized in compelling ways in Toni Morrison's Jazz. From the text's opening line "Sth. I know that woman," Morrison presents a novel concerned with knowledge transmission. But, from the moment the narrator utters that initial line, her certainty and, along with it, that of the reader, is shaken and questioned throughout the text. In this paper, I plan to examine Jazz and its concerns with narrative anxiety, the reader’s role in making meaning, and the limitations of “knowing”. I will consider the role that a 1920s James VanDerZee photograph, one that inspired Morrison to write the novel, but is curiously missing from the text, plays in these concerns.

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CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS: TRANSLATING THE OTHER
Faculty Discussant: Barbara Fuchs (Romance Languages)
Student Moderator: Eli Albert (AMES)


From Knight to Critical Reader, via the Other: The Literary Makeover of Empire in Don Juan Manuel's "El conde Lucanor", Dierdra Reber (Romance Languages)
I propose to examine El conde Lucanor, a 14th-century text of the Castillian author Don Juan Manuel, as an identity-making machine for the caballero [knight], whose social status, traditionally linked to military activity, here begins to evidence a transition to letters as a virtual--and social--battleground for the title of nobility. Don Juan Manuel performatively initiates his reader in a two-pronged operation of literary engagement: first, the appropriation of narratives proper to the cultural Other and their critical interpretation as necessarily definitional of the noble state (Book I) and second, imitative (re)production of such narratives (Books II-IV). Membership in Don Juan Manuel's imagined noble community is thus predicated on this practice of critical interpretation and subsequent imitative literary production--a practice whose circular logic works as much to affirm the noble status of the individual as to define the entire noble state as a body ultimately recognizable, and penetrable, only through the lens of a largely appropriated culture.

In this sense, El conde Lucanor marks a pivotal point at which the collective practice of critical reading and imitative writing begins to play a central role in both the production of literature and the construction of noble masculinity. Don Juan Manuel’s critical poetics of status will ultimately culminate in the cancionero poetry from which Spain's first early modern authors emerge.

The Early English-Chinese Dictionaries & the Sino-Western Cultural Communications in the 19th Century, Jia Si (AMES)
The Sino-Western cultural communications in the nineteenth century is closely related to the Protestant missionaries from the Europe. According to written records, such communication found its expressions first in dictionary compilation. The communication and at the same time, the conflict between the Chinese and Western cultures can be traced in the word coinage or the sentence making in those works: cultural differences make the interpretation of the western materials and sciences as a complicated exchange of thoughts. Between 1820 and 1920, the revision of English-Chinese dictionaries, the emerge of various new dictionaries and the fact that various replacements, supplements of the definitions in dictionaries fully demonstrate that it took some time for new words to form in the cultural communication, and to find their way into the Chinese language. Therefore, every translation is a cultural explanation, for the selecting and shaping process is a reflection of the differences and friction between the Chinese and the Western way of thinking.

Printing Pure Knowledge: Missionaries & Books in 18th Century India, Michael Linderman (SARS)
In the early period of colonial encounter in India, Protestant missionaries mastered vernacular languages, translated their own books into those languages, and advocated the increase of literacy among the indigenous people with whom they worked. In all of this work, their assumptions about the book as a mode of literary production affected their encounters with and interpretations of the people and traditions of indigenous cultures.

Using Elizabeth Eisenstein’s work on the effect of printing in European intellectual history, as well as sociological work on literate and oral cultures, I will examine the work of an early eighteenth-century protestant missionary in South India, Bartholomeus Ziegenbalg. His missionary method and budding indological project offer insights into European assumptions about different kinds of knowledge and the book as a mode of intellectual production, and can illuminate distinctions among early Western approaches to Indian society. Ziegenbalg’s 34 Conferences, a collection of indigenous responses to his mission work, also provides early glimpses of indigenous reaction to the Western emphasis on books and book culture.

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UNDRESSING THE TEXT
Faculty Discussant: Vincent Pecora (Director, Humanities Consortium, UCLA)
Student Moderator: Ellen Welch (Comparative Literature)

The Novelist as Theoretician: Responding to David Harvey’s Reading of Raymond William’s “Loyalties”, Michael Wiedorn (Comparative Literature)
My paper is a response and challenge to the radical Marxist geographer David Harvey's appropriation of the literary theorist Raymond Williams. While teaching at Oxford, Harvey becomes involved in an auto workers' movement (the auto plant at Oxford employs far more people than the university) and agrees to write a book about the experience with one of the movement's leaders. Rather late in this process, however, he decides that helping the auto workers to keep their jobs is counterproductive with regard to the larger socialist struggle, and drops out of the movement, deploying the opposition of space (i.e., globality) and place (locality) to justify what looks like a betrayal. Harvey quotes heavily from the work of Raymond Williams to argue that when the transition from place to space, from local struggles to a global one, is made, something--the concerns of particular people or groups --is inevitably lost. In Williams's novels, Harvey finds evidence that the historical materialist dialectic must sacrifice particular people in particular places if it is to progress; I argue that Williams's novels set in motion a rather contrary idea, namely that the historical materialist dialectic must inevitably return to and affirm the particularity of certain places, rather than quitting them definitively.

The Hermeneutics of Self: Textuality and the Social Sciences, Adam Graves (Religious Studies)
To what extent can meaningful action be interpreted as a text? To what extent do texts provide a basis for self-understanding? This paper examines the ways in which the work of one renown French phenomenologist, Paul Ricoeur, attempts to answer such questions.

Ricoeur developed his textual theory in response to two interrelated consequences of the ‘ontological shift’ within the hermeneutic tradition. According to Ricoeur, the shift from the epistemological/ psychological concerns of Dilthey to the ontological issues raised by Heidegger resulted in a radical critique of the Cartesian subject and an alienation of hermeneutical theory from the particular methodological concerns of the social sciences. This paper illustrates how Ricoeur’s reflection on the nature of textuality demands that the question of subjectivity be raised within the context of a constructive dialogue between hermeneutics and the social sciences (i.e., history, structural anthropology, and psychoanalysis). Ricoeur not only suggests a conception of ‘subjectivity bound by the text,’ but also points towards a notion of textuality that exceeds the boundaries of the book.

Masters and Subjects or Mastering the Subjects: Reading and “Oxen of the Sun”, Nancy Srebro (English)
By creating a narrative that changes literary style every few paragraphs, James Joyce deliberately frustrates his readers’ desire for any easy mastery of the chapter “Oxen of the Sun” in Ulysses. Joyce employs style to render the chapter’s content almost inaccessible. Even sophisticated readers must return to basic questions as to who is speaking and what they are saying. Joyce’s use of style to complicate these seemingly simple questions exposes the tensions and connections between different narrative styles, meaning, and ideology. I will argue that Joyce veils the chapter in a variety of styles so that readers do not focus on mastering the text’s content but instead explore the political implications of different subject positions and how they change depending on context and historical literary style.

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SEX AND THE TEXT
Faculty Discussant: Wendy Steiner (English)
Student Moderator: Anika Kiehne (German)

"Chick Lit" and Concurrent Media Phenomenon, Stephanie Harzewski (English)
The “chick lit” corpus can be best conceived as a composite of Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City and Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, both originally newspaper columns collected and published in 1996. The instant classic status of these two texts coupled with the popularity of the Sex and the City HBO series and Bridget Jones’s film adaptation catalyzed the emergence of a new subgenre in Anglo-American women’s popular fiction. In the past five years, over one hundred chick lit titles have been published from international bestsellers such as Jane Green’s Mr. Maybe, Jennifer Weiner’s Good in Bed, Sophie Kinsella’s Shopaholic series to the more ephemeral titles of Harlequin’s Red Dress Ink imprint. This presentation will delineate chick lit tropes and begin to make the larger argument that this twenty/thirty-something female urban adventure subgenre may be conceptualized synergistically with concurrent media phenomenon, specifically, feminist Marxist and materialist U.S. wedding industry analyses, online matchmaking services, and reality TV.

Pablo Takes a Bite of the Apple: Reading Picasso’s Early Still Lifes, Natasha Ruiz-Gomez (Art History)
In the 1960s the less-studied Pablo Picasso, the still life painter, stated, “‘I want to tell something by means of the most common object…. For me it is a vessel in the metaphorical sense, just like Christ’s use of parables.’” In 1908 and 1909, I believe that Picasso developed the iconographic sign “apple = woman.” This paper endeavors to place the artist’s often-ignored small plaster sculpture Apple in this context. As the Cubist idiom moved away from a naturalistic depiction of the body, the subject matter of his work came to embody its sensual aspect. With the hard-edged Apple, Picasso was forced to rely on its iconography within his own artistic production and also its larger historical signification in order to convey a sense of human presence.

Bronzino’s "Cosimo I as Orpheus": Metamorphosis of a Ruler, Liliana Milkova (Art History)
In 1950 the Philadelphia Museum of Art acquired one if its most prized Italian Renaissance works: a portrait of Cosimo I, Grand Duke of Florence (1519-1574, reigned 1537-1574) by Agnolo Bronzino. Dated to 1537-40, the painting portrays Cosimo as the mythological poet and musician Orpheus with explicit eroticism, which together with the allegorical content, is unusual for a portrait of the duke. In the present paper I will suggest a new reading of Cosimo’s nude body as coding the theme of metamorphosis, associated with the Renaissance understanding of Orpheus and the Florentine homosocial environment. I view the subject’s body and its larger contexts as illustrating young Cosimo’s transformation from boyhood and effeminacy to manhood and masculinity, from a distant dynastic heir to the very monarch of Florence. I will argue this through presenting a formal analysis of the painting, an exploration of the Orpheus myth and its significance in Renaissance Florence, and through investigating the contemporary socio-political scene as well as the artistic tradition surrounding Cosimo at the time before and after the portrait’s execution.

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INTERTEXTUAL REFLECTIONS
Faculty Discussant: Peter Stallybrass (English)
Student Moderator: Jared Richman (English)


Intertextuality and the Genre: Reading Marginalia in Shakespeare’s First Folio, Jonathan Hsy (English)
I am studying handwritten marginalia in two different 17th century editions of Shakespeare's First Folio. I argue that the copious hand-written comments next to the printed Shakespearean text in these folios fly in the face of our modern assumptions about how Shakespeare is to be read, and that the marginalia most strikingly complicate our notion of literary genres. The marginalia also point to the "foreign-ness" of pre-modern reading practices, in that the handwritten comments don't quite "respond" to the printed text in a way we would expect.

Ninjobon as Representations of Performance, Kristin Williams (AMES)
Tamenaga Shunsui popularized the ninjobon, a genre of illustrated romantic fiction in nineteenth century Japan. Shunsui represents dialogue phonetically, differentiating by the speaker’s gender, age, and mood. This creates a theatrical effect as it combines with a plot structure adapted from the theater and detailed descriptions of setting and costume.

As Shunsui presents the characters and setting of his 1837 ninjobon, Harutsugedori, his debt to the theater is implicit in the emphasis on visual and aural aspects within the text, and he draws on vocabulary and traditions from the theater to set the stage for the story to come. Dramatic aspects of the text are reinforced by illustrations of characters in action poses, use of a non-past form of verbs, and a narrative perspective that shows traces of orality. Shunsui’s ninjobon occupy a place at the intersection of prose and
theater where verbal and nonverbal signifiers combine to represent performance.

The Mirror: Intertextuality and Method, Timothy Carmody (Comparative Literature)
The title’s “Method” refers in turn to authorial, readerly, and critical methods. This paper has two parts, one somewhat broad and theoretical, and another more conventionally literary, but both are fairly straightforward. Its first portion examines the development in high modernism of a self-consciously intertextual literary work, one where literary allusions and omissions are incorporated into the text with a greater or lesser degree of rigor. In particular, the paper considers the problems such an “intertextual method” poses for critics attempting to sort through the play of texts, especially those wishing to avoid appealing to discredited notions of authorial intention. How does the reader mark these presences or absences, and how can the critic ground them in his or her arguments? The second portion is a reading of the Telemachus chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses with these considerations in mind.

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PERFORMING THE (EXTRA)ORDINARY
Faculty Discussant: Emma Dillon (Music)
Student Moderator: Pamela Geller (Anthropology)

“It’s a Healthy Kind of Thing”: (Con)Textualizing Barbershop Performance, Richard Mook (Music)
Song interpretation is notoriously important for barbershoppers, who often discard the notated rhythm of the page in favor of a delivery controlled by a mixture of textual, rhetorical, gestic, and musical considerations. Though a number of studies have begun the belated process of documenting barbershop's complicated history and place in America's cultural landscape, none have adequately accounted for the importance of song interpretation for barbershop performance. Using evidence from fieldwork interviews conducted in Philadelphia, this paper will analyze a local barbershop performance while considering not only the lyrics and musical setting of a piece as written, but also such factors as physical gesture, facial expression, dynamics, and vocal timbre. This analysis provides a new view of how participants perform class, whiteness, and masculinity through barbershop singing, and of the importance of history for this unique vocal style.

Transcribing the Transcendent: Writing and Virtuousity in Tartini’s “Devil’s Trill” Sonata, Tim Ribchester (Music)
Tartini's sonata, thought to be composed in 1713 after the composer claimed he was visited by the devil in a dream, contains a celebrated double trill reported by Tartini to represent "a pale reflection" of the music played on his violin by the satanic hallucination. The concept of music as transcribed recollection (as opposed to an artistic representation of nature), and the extent to which the practice of writing is capable of capturing the musical content of such a recollection, are both made problematic in the light of recent critical theory. Jacques Derrida's "grammatology" posits the idea of writing as a "dangerous", undermining supplement to its signified; the metahistorical theory of Michel DeCerteau, meanwhile, rejects the feasibility of transcribing the utterances of the possessed. These issues are further compounded by the rationalistic ethos of the the early eighteenth century Enlightenment, an ethos that made its presence strongly felt in Tartini's own treatises on composition and performance, and against which the devil as musical protagonist necessarily functions as an intrusion. I will examine the relationship of the "Devil's Trill" - both the sonata and the trill passage itself - to the secondary theoretical sources above, and try to ascertain the success or failure of the sonata in conveying its intended recollection, giving equal consideration to the acts of writing and performance.

Noveau Réalisme: Performance and the Textual Prop, Meredith Malone (Art History)
On Sunday, November 27, 1960, the French artist Yves Klein appropriated an entire calendar day and presented it as his Theater of the Void. A four-page newspaper titled Dimanche was distributed to various newsstands in Paris. It functioned as a prop for the overall spectacle, translating the everyday through strategic juxtaposition of images and text. This exemplifies a larger artistic turn occurring in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Throughout Europe and America, artists turned away from the canvas and began using their bodies and the objects overwhelming their daily lives. Focusing on the postwar shift from passive object making to the staging of events, I will analyze the cultural and theoretical issues inherent in specific performative practices of the Nouveaux Réalistes. Events by Yves Klein, Daniel Spoerri, and Ben Vautier will serve as the main focus of this essay. Manipulating the communicative tools of media, gallery, and artist, including, respectively, the newspaper, the certificate, and the signature, each artist applies insightful critique of art world systems of signification. Their most effective performances rely on the exploitation of textual and documentary media to parody modern society's strategies of consumption and collection.

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READING THE NATION
Faculty Discussant: Carol Muller (Music)
Student Moderator: Michael Laver (AMES)

The Politicization of Popular Publications During the American War for Independence, Patrick Spero (History)
This paper will explore the New England Primer and almanac, two of the most popular publications in Early America, during the American War for Independence. The radicalism of the Revolutionary era forced printers, like so many others in British North America, to address the conflict between their British heritage and new national identity. This conflict compelled printers to reconcile the political implications of certain passages in the Primer and the almanac. This paper hopes to accomplish two things. First, I will examine why certain passages were controversial and how printers, in changing these passages, helped forge a common national identity. Secondly, I would like to explore how location affected the radicalization of printers. For instance, Boston, as the locus for radicalism, altered these passages first, and slowly, as the Revolutionary War and movement spread southward, so too did the changes in print.

The Making of a Court in Wittenberg, Freyda Spira (Art History)
At the beginning of the 16th century, four fundamental texts emerged which demonstrate an interest in articulating political ideas concerning what constitutes an ideal political state and a just ruler: Thomas More’s Utopia (1515/16), Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince (written 1513, published 1532), Desiderius Erasmus’ The Education of a Christian Prince (1515/16), and Baldassare Castiglione’s The Courtier (finished 1516, published 1528). Against this background, the elector of Saxony Frederick the Wise (1486-1525), commissioned his own politically motivated text, The Dialogus of Andreas Meinhardi (1508). The Dialogus is consistently employed within scholarly texts as a guide to the castle, its church, and the city of Wittenberg; it is employed merely for its descriptive purposes. My paper will instead approach The Dialogus as a political text, a “mirror of the prince.” (The “mirror,” a genre of politically motivated literature dating back to ancient Greece, is concerned with the powers, duties, responsibilities, and personal qualifications of those destined for positions of ultimate authority. The “mirror” represents the ruler as a paradigm of power and perfection to be emulated by his people.) I will examine how Meinhardi’s text relies on the visual arts to create a verbal portrait of Frederick and his court.

And the Word Was Made Flesh: Woodrow Wilson’s Frontier Thesis, Kristina Baumli (English)
Frederick Jackson Turner first expounded the Frontier Thesis, perhaps the most influential reading of American history and the formation of the American national character, in 1893. Historians such as Patricia Limerick and the “gang of four” have elucidated its shortcomings as a practical historigraphic method, particularly its Idealist, literary qualities. Although the Frontier Thesis has been largely discarded as an historical methodology, as a text it was astonishingly well assimilated into American culture. My paper will explicate on the little-known maieutic role Woodrow Wilson played in the development of this thesis; further, I will argue that Wilson’s 1893 Division and Reunion instrumentally endows the era between Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln with foundational centrality in American history. Further, in Division and Reunion, Wilson uses a seemingly typological method to exemplify, and in the case of Lincoln, to apotheosize the Westerner. Ultimately, I conclude that Wilson’s promotion of his version of the Frontier Thesis was an ideological attempt to facilitate post-Reconstruction national unity by positing the Western type as a Hegelian synthesis of the “character” of the Northerner and the Southerner.

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ALTERNATIVE WRITING SURFACES
Faculty Discussant: Michael Solomon (Romance Languages)
Student Moderator: Madera Gabriela Allen (Romance Languages)

Dancing the Self: Reading and Writing Bodies in Authentic Movements, Seran Schug (Anthropology)
Authentic Movement is a Euro-American form of healing dance based on an integration of modern dance improvisation and psychoanalytic methods. According to the discourse of Authentic Movement, a transformation of the self takes place through the development of awareness and integration into consciousness of one's own unconscious personal memories and feelings as well as transpersonal unconscious motivations for behavior. Heeding the slogan that "the body does not lie," authentic movement practitioners attest to the idea that knowledge of the true self comes from "listening to the body," which in their model, refers to becoming aware and paying attention to kinesthetic sensations in the body. By contrast, they regard verbalizations as constructed, planned and potentially artificial reflections of the self. My analysis of an Authentic Movement session with breast cancer survivors, however, shows how both narratives of the self and sensorial experience are mutually constructive and integral to the healing process in Authentic Movement.

Toward the goal of self-transformation, Authentic Movement constructs a lived experience of the body in which the mover experiences their own body as if it is being moved by an intelligent agentive force that is emanating from inside the body. In particular, Authentic Movement facilitates changes in the bodily experience of self through the semiotic mediation of the perception of space, time, and movement. However, changes in body image are only felt as changes in self-image through the linking of these phenomenological transformations with a narrative understanding of what these sensorial changes mean about the self. Accordingly, Authentic Movement strictly constructs the way one narrates one's perceptual experience. It follows that self-narratives in Authentic Movement are iconic models of the authentic experience, effecting the sense that the meaning of events are being given to rather than constructed by the participants. Participants, for example, often narrate their experiences in the passive voice, speak of their body in the third person, and contextualize their experiences in transpersonal realms. Self-narratives are also not only stories about the emergence of the self in authentic movement, but also enactments of self as well.

In conclusion, Authentic Movement as a ritual of self transformation is an ideal form with which to understand how bodies as texts are read and interpreted as images of the self.

Corporeality, Textuality, and the Maya, Pamela L. Geller (Anthropology)
Cultures through space and time have deployed the physical body as an alternative writing surface upon which to etch social norms and personal predilection. In this presentation, I look specifically to pre-Columbian Maya peoples' myriad corporeal alterations in anticipation of fleshing out, so to speak, the meanings behind and motivations for such modifications. However, in doing so, I first acknowledge that the vast majority of contemporary scholarship concerned with body modifications have been impacted by perduring and negative stereotypes. Beginning with Iberian conquest of the New World, chroniclers denigrated and misread meanings embedded in such inscriptions; hence, pejorative attitudes have thwarted a reading or conception of the body as a vibrant means for native communication. Foregrounding skeletal materials and dental remains exhumed in burial spaces from northwestern Belize, I argue that bodies-as they are written upon and read-in fact constitute an important, and oft-devalued, embodied text.

Textile and Codex in the Iliad, Josiah Davis (Classics)
The process of weaving a textile has long been recognized as the dominant metaphor for the performance of oral poetry in ancient Greece. Within the Iliad and Odyssey themselves, however, I argue that textiles are correlated to a surprisingly different technology: the writing tablet. Recent archeological finds dating from Mycenaean Greece and passages within the Iliad itself show that the Homeric epics imagine the composition and creation of poetry in material rather than purely oral terms. My paper focuses on the similarities between two passages in the Iliad that describe two different material texts (Iliad 3.125-28 and 6.168-70). Both the surface of Helens textile in Book 3 and Bellerophons writing tablets (a pinax) in Book 6 are diptychs that fold like a codex to conceal the reading material inside. Their subject matter, as well as their form, is also similar: both surfaces contain tales of the sufferings that Helen and Bellerophon are to endure. The discovery of writing tablets that date to the Bronze Age, when the Homeric epics were being composed, aboard a sunken merchant ship off the coast of Ulu Burun in Turkey provide us with archeological evidence for the existence of such folding tablets. As I will show, Helens textile is described in terms of a codex and contains a story that is designed to be read in a sequential manner.

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