Seeking Meaning
Surviving through Your Self-Reliance, Creative Problem Solving, Adaptability, and Resilience: Humanistic Strategies for a World Gone Wild View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Michael K. Green
The aim of this work is to answer two questions: According to the humanities, what kind of world do we inhabit, and what strategies can the humanities provide for surviving and thriving in this world? We inhabit a world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, which in our current situation manifests itself in international instability due to the decline of Western empires, social instability due to racial conflicts, financial instability due to an unstable currency, and economic instability due to the transition into the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Such volatility creates emotional scars, and the humanistic strategies for managing these scars are Self-Reliance, Creative Problem Solving, Adaptability, and Resilience. (SCARs)
The (Un)Welcome Stranger: Intercultural Sensitivity in Six American Novels View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jeffrey Hughes Morgan
My research explores the level of inclusivity in fictional communities in six classic American novels: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s’ The Scarlet Letter, Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs, Henry James’ The American, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. It also measures the intercultural sensitivity in fictional characters in these communities, focusing on characters who are deemed different in these communities as well as those who represent the status quo in those communities. The cultural interactions, the conflicts that occur in these novels, serve as models when viewed under the lens of Milton J. Bennett’s Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity, providing a truly interdisciplinary perspective on human differences, fusing a formal literary analysis with an intercultural sensitivity theory typically applied to study abroad work. The multiple perspectives of the research plays well with the analysis of different voices in the fiction, voices of different race, gender, culture, or class, creating a work of research that truly combines the literary humanities and social sciences. My broad scope is a new direction in the study of identity and difference in literary characters, one that has practical applications in the “real world” as the novels and the characters in them, the conflicts they experience, provide modeling for accepting difference, adapting to it, and maybe even integrating with it rather than minimizing, denigrating, or denying difference.
Posthumanism and the Search for Meaning in Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kirsten Møllegaard, Evangeline Lemieux, Braden Savage
Using a deconstructionist cultural-studies lens, we will interrogate how meaning is constructed when we can recognize only the form, and not the content, of an illustrated text. Such is the reader’s experience when perusing Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus. The text of Codex Seraphinianus is all but indecipherable; yet we can tell that it does imply meaning, due to its organization into lists, labels, and other textual organizational features. Its indecipherability combined with the visual impression that it must mean something creates a lacuna in comprehension, which holds the potential to inspire childlike wonder in the reader. The book’s combination of fantastic images and unreadable text destabilizes familiar concepts, opens new perspectives on reading, and, by extension, on the instability of meaning. We can recognize familiar aspects of our world (people, food, tools, cultural practices), but our associations with them are no longer useful in interpreting the images’ meanings and reading the words. Serafini forces us to step away from preexisting knowledge and build new interpretations based purely on observation. Serafini’s world deconstructs binary distinctions between alive and dead, born and manufactured, animate and inanimate, human and nonhuman, and nature and culture. As a result of this, Serafini’s work produces a posthuman, deconstructionist narrative in which the hybridity of machines, humans, and other natural forms destabilizes an anthropocentric world order.
