Novel Approaches
Myths and Legends as Dynamic Socio-Cultural Constructs: A Study on Robinson Jeffers's Poems
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Alvin Joseph
This study aims to establish the idea that myths and fairy tales in various literary forms and environments are reflections of the socio-cultural constructs in a particular society. It is also the objective of this paper to bring out the different pros and cons of myths and fairy tales in the poems of Robinson Jeffers. This paper discusses the terms ‘myths’ and ‘fairy tales’ in brief and their role in poems as socio-cultural constructs. It is also the paper's objective to reconsider the purpose of poets and other creative writers in telling and retelling myths, legends, and fairy tales in literature and other artistic discourses. Besides, this paper also tries to have an analysis of the experience of traveling or journeys while meditating through different myths and fairy tales through wonderlands, miraculous worlds, elfin grots, and fairy castles along with the realization that all these provide a sufficient background for poetry, drama and literature with the purpose of constructing culture, the ideals and values accepted by society.
Child(ish)ness in Graphic Novels: Experiments with New Forms of Expression
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Maaheen Ahmed
Turning to three contemporary alternative publications from North America, France and Belgium, this talk delineates the contours of childish elements in graphic novels to show how they figure as the unsaid in a transatlantic comics history marked by the emergence of the graphic novel: in the zealous ‘growing up’ of comics, the childish and childlike has been reconfigured to acquire a more marginalized, heavily connoted space within comics for adults. In the now acclaimed, but once difficult to publish, comics by Lynda Barry, in Dominique Goblet’s partially autobiographical Pretending is Lying or more recently Disa Wallander’s Becoming Horses, the childish and childlike are activated to open the spaces and meaning-making potential of the graphic novel in overlapping but different ways. I examine the possibilities of understanding these graphic novels’ incorporation of childlike elements - ranging from the collaging of children’s drawings, the interweaving of imitations thereof, to the representation of children’s spaces, imaginations and logics - from the angles of affective connections, material interventions into the possibilities of communicating and expressing through drawing and the essence of drawing itself (use of childish colors, forms, techniques) to the hybrid, word-image spaces of the graphic novels themselves and how, ultimately, the very space of the book-object is reconfigured through childlike elements.
Six Memos for the Classroom: Italo Calvino, Lezioni Americane and Contemporary Collegiate Composition
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jackson Stephenson
Perhaps one of the most anticipated moments in postmodern literary theory was the publication and further implementation of Italo Calvino’s Lezioni americane. Considering their intrinsic value to literary interpretation, Six Memos for the Classroom attempts to place Calvino’s theories of this millennium’s writing technique within the scope of collegiate composition education. It is difficult to consider current composition pedagogy as not being fraught with heaviness– what American scholarship determines to be the Post-Process school of thought, is soaked by the weight of layered theory. After taking from literary thought, as so many previous composition theory studies have, there exists the possibility of teaching college composition through the lens of Calvino’s Six Memos. Using not only Calvino as a primary text, but additional theory from bell hooks and her contemporaries– the idea of what a college classroom looks, sounds and writes like can be uniquely altered to welcome a lightness that is contrary to most overly-saturated writing in globalized academia. We have spent the last two decades scouring the arguments, individual teaching, and our pedagogies at hand for an answer to the liberatory void left by early 2000's Process theory, the answer lies in Calvino. In a college classroom that is anything but localized, it is lightness, quickness, exactitude and the like that bridge the rhetorical, linguistic gap between students and their world. In doing so, we prove Calvino correct, but we also reinvent the ways we teach, perform and think of what it means to write at the postgraduate level.
