Intimacy/Proximity

A National Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference

April 7, 8 and 9, 2005

Indiana University, Bloomington

A Note from the Conference Organizers:

We have sought to assemble panels which cross traditional academic boundaries of discipline or period. It is our hope that by placing these disparate elements in unexpectedly close proximity to each other, we can help to forge new connections, new intimacies within a vast array of exciting scholarly and creative work.

Visit the conference “Base Camp” for Programs, Nametags, Information, and Refreshments

Thursday 5:30-7:30 Ballantine Hall 004

Friday 3:30-6:30 Ballantine Hall 011

Saturday 9:00-5:00 Ballantine Hall 141

This conference is sponsored by:

IUSA

GSAC

Department of English

Conference Schedule

Thursday, April 7^th

^{Base Camp: BH 004}

6:00-7:15 pm

Human/Nature

Ballantine Hall 347

· Will Stockton, English, Indiana University:

“The Normalization of Bestiality: Kinsey’s Analysis of Human Sexual Contact with Animals”

· Madeleine Thompson, English, Indiana University:

“To ‘Suffer a Sea Change’: The Seaside Guides of P.H. Gosse, the Aquarium, and Ever-present Time”

• Kara Kendall, English, Indiana University:

“Girl Meets Jungle: Reexamining the Woman-Nature Link in Tim O’Brien’s ‘Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong’”

Friday, April 8^th

^{Base Camp: BH 011}

3:45-5:00 pm

Trans-national Intimacies and the Female Poet

Ballantine Hall 006

• Julie Wise, English, Indiana University:

“Crossing Dress, Class, and Nation: Christina Rossetti’s Poetic Response to the 1863 Cotton Famine”

• Chantal Carleton, Comparative Literature, Indiana University:

“Intimate Spaces: Elizabeth Bishop and the Idea of Home”

· Esther Lee, Creative Writing, Indiana University:

“Crossed, Cross, Crossing”

Media, Spectatorship, and Domestic Space

Ballantine Hall 109

• Mica Hilson, English, Indiana University:

“Facing the Soap Opera”

• Patrick Kinsman, Comparative Literature, Indiana University:

“She’s Come Undone: Chantal Ackerman’s Jeanne Dielman”

• Sarah E. S. Sinwell, Communication and Culture, Indiana University:

“Sensation/Separation: Constructing Intimate Spaces in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream”

5:15-6:30 pm

Erotics of Intimacy

Ballantine Hall 006

• Stuart Davis, Linguistics, Indiana University:

“Samuel Gridley Howe, Laura Bridgman, and Female Intimacy”

• Peter Molin, English, Indiana University:

“‘Sibling Intimacy’ in Catherine Sedgwick’s ‘Wilton Harvey’”

• Donald Dow, English, Rutgers University:

“‘A Charge Transmitted and Gift Occult’: Democracy, Intimacy, and the Erotics of Spirituality in Leaves of Grass”

Women, Intimacy, and the Pre-modern World

Ballantine Hall 109

· Michelle Sonia Kaiserlian, History of Art/Comparative Literature, Indiana University:

“Dissolving into Ecstasy by Fire, Water, and Wine: The Fluidity of Divine Union in the Writings of Marguerite Porete and Jelaluddin Rumi”

• Elizabeth Williamsen, English, Indiana University:

“Violent Femmes: Abjection and Identity in the Ferumbras Group”

• Angela Florschuetz, English, Rutgers University:

“The Stranger Within: Maternal Genealogies in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale and Man of Law’s Tale”

8:30 pm: Keynote Address

Peter Coveliello, “No Covenants but Proximities: Intimacy and History”

Wylie 005

Peter Coviello is Associate Professor of English at Bowdoin College. He studied at Northwestern University and went on to Cornell University where he earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in English. He has been at Bowdoin since 1998, and has taught courses in nineteenth- and twentieth- century American literature, Africana Studies and Women's Studies. At Bowdoin, he is also the chair of the program in Gay and Lesbian Studies. He is the editor of a new edition of Walt Whitman's Civil War memoir, Memoranda During the War, and the author of Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature, forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press.

Please join us for a reception after the keynote address

Saturday, April 9^th

^{Base Camp: BH 141}

9:30-10:45 am

Poetry, Community, and Testimony

Ballantine Hall 109

• Susan Davis, English, Indiana University:

“Amy Levy and the Poetics of Proximity”

• Kate Goldstein, English, Indiana University:

“‘Psalm 37 at Auschwitz’: Jacqueline Osherow’s Imaginative Acts of Witnessing”

• K. Keener, Creative Writing, Indiana University:

“Self-Portrait as Midwest”

Sentimental Romance in Crisis

Ballantine Hall 144

• Margaret Wald, English, Rutgers University:

“Proposals of Intimacy in Clarissa”

• Adam Pence, English, Indiana University:

“Crisis and the Heroine in Sybil and Mary Barton”

• Margaret Hermes, English, Indiana University:

“‘Let Thy Chief Terror Be of Thine Own Soul’: Daniel Deronda’s Embrace of Transformative Fear”

11:00 am-12:15 pm

Writing, Writers, and the (Auto)biographical

Ballantine Hall 109

· Paul Westover, English, Indiana University:

“Literary Tourism: Ideal Presence and Imaginative Topography in Romantic-era Britain”

· Katie Macnamara, English, Indiana University:

“Woolf and the ‘Modern Essay’: From Armchair Intimacy to Lecture Hall Proximity”

· Thomas Miller, Creative Writing, University of Notre Dame:

“21 Stories About Gun Control—An Autobiography”

Shame and Fear of Intimacy

Ballantine Hall 144

· Melissa J. Jones, English, Indiana University:

“Touching Sights: Thomas Middleton’s Pornographic Discoveries”

· Bliss L. Kern, English, Rutgers University:

“Shame, Self-Esteem, and the Modern Subject in Paradise Lost”

• Lee Anne Bache, English, Indiana University:

“Shouting Back to Keep from Moving Forward: Jimmy Porter of Look Back in Anger”

Lunch Break

2:00-3:15 pm

Gender, Sexuality, and the Limits of Representation

Ballantine Hall 109

· Sarah Zurhellen, English, Appalachian State University:

“Clarifying Clarissa: Reconsidering Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Vision in Mrs. Dalloway”

• Deborah M. Kuzawa, English/Women’s Studies, Ohio State University:

“Trans Subjectivity and Queer(ed) Love: The Narrator in Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body”

• Sara Jane Stoner, Creative Writing, Indiana University:

“Danica Phelps and the Practice of Pleasure”

Intimacy, Pedagogy, and “The Profession”

Sassafras Room, Indiana Memorial Union

• Rob Cosgrove, English/Education, University of Michigan:

“Practices of Intimacy: Love, Criticism, and Concepts of Intellectual Rigor”

• Sara Biggs Chaney, Composition, Literacy and Culture, Indiana University:

“‘This Hurts Me More Than It Hurts You: Intimacy and Equity in the Service-Learning Classroom”

• Danna S. Ephland, Creative Writing, University of Notre Dame:

“Bodysongs Workshop”

3:30-4:45 pm

Proximity and Radical Aesthetics

Sassafras Room, Indiana Memorial Union

• Ricky D. Crano, English, Ohio State University:

“Vibratory Understanding: Artaud on Language, Identity, and the Therapeutics of the Theater of Cruelty”

• Rebecca Disrud, Comparative Literature, Indiana University:

“Intimate Listening, Creative Cheating: Uses of Recording in Gould and Cage”

• Vanessa Reese, English, Indiana University:

“’Don’t Blacken Your Speech Around Me’: Race, Language, and Performativity in Senna’s Caucasia”

America and Its Discontents

Ballantine Hall 109

• William Christopher Brown, English, Indiana University:

“The Nationless Exile and the Southern Aristocrat in Joseph Conrad’s The Arrow of Gold and William Faulkner’s ‘Wash’”

• Renee Barlow, English, Indiana University:

“Racial Abjection in Trans-National America: Blackness as Boundary in Cather’s My Antonia”

• Victoria Elmwood, English, Indiana University

“Oral History in Prison Poetry and Convict Literature”