The Symposium is an annual literary conference for English majors who have participated in the Integrative Exercise (Comps).  It is held in May in the classrooms and hallway of Laird Hall, Second Floor.  The symposium offers students the opportunity to present their Comps projects to faculty members, fellow majors, their friends and families, and to everyone who wants to come!  This year the Symposium will be held in the morning, and the Department will provide muffins and beverages at 9:00 a.m. for participants and guests and lunch for all will be served at 12:25 p.m.

This year's English Comps Symposium will be held on Saturday, May 11, 2013, beginning (with muffins) at 9:00 a.m.

 

      ENGLISH COMPS SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE  - Saturday, May 11, 2013

Coffee & Muffins available  - Laird Second Floor Hallway – 9:00 am

 

WELCOME – Chair Kofi Owusu – 9:25 am

 

Session I – 9:30-10:30 am

A.   Pastoral & Emotion in Poetry - Laird 206

       Shavera Seneviratne, “Keats and the Sophistication of the Pastoral”

       Dan Antoszyk, “Accessing Emotion in Philip Larkin’s Poetry”

       Sophie Rouhandeh, “Pastoral Realism in Patrick Kavanaugh’s Poetry”

B.   Creative Writing I - Laird 211

        Brandi Branham – “Breaking Points” short stories

        Josh Kirschenbaum – “Freak Show Stories”

        Julie Besenbruch, “Downtown to Waimanalo: The Hawaii I Know” short stories

C.   Quest for Meaning in America - Laird 212

       Sarah Trautman, “An (In)finite Landscape: Science and Literature in Dillard and Thoreau”    

       Tim FitzPatrick, “A Runaway American Dream: Critique of Capitalism in Steinbeck”

       Pedro Fernandez, “Melville’s ‘Livid Hieroglyph’: The Exhaustion of Pierre” 

Session II – 10:35-11:20 am

A.   Project Comps - Laird 206

       Emily Altschul, “Fifty Percent Illusion: Creating the Madwoman”

       Leaf Elhai, “Teaching Text: Yamamoto’s ‘Seventeen Syllables’”

       Connor Lane, “Caliban and the Postcolonial Stage”

        Sophie Siegel-Warren, “Making ‘Choice(s)’”

B.   Creative Writing II – Laird 211

       Dan Peck – “When God Wrote this World and Wrote it Badly” short stories

       Lily Ferris, “Caught in the Soft Light,” a novel in the making

C.   Milton – Laird 212

       Rachel Porcher, “Fiction, Function, Occasion & Confusion in ‘Lycidas’”

       Jacob Styburski, “Lacking the Will to Repent: Bedeviled Freedom in Paradise Lost”

Session III – 11:25-12:25 am

A.   Sex and Power - Laird 206

        Monica Fleisher, “Surveillance, Authority, and Virginity Loss in Young Adult Fiction”

        Katie Neher, “Incorporate in Rome:  Weaponized Femininity in Shakespeare”

        Rachel White, “White Leda, Black Swan: Myth, Victim and The Sound and the Fury”

B.   Colloquium Group, “Dangerous Reading” – Laird 211

       John Gitta, Mara Kilgore, Ellen Levine, Forrest McKnight, Dan Sairsingh, Emily Steidel

C.   Legend, Adaptation and Meaning – Laird 212

       Jonathan Lin, “Trial and Terror: Dystopian Film Adaptations of Kafka and Truffaut”

       Aditya Menon, “Artists of the Floating Signifier:  Narayan & Ishiguro”

       Sarah Price, “The Lord of the Sagas: Tom Bombadil in Lord of the Rings”

 

RECEPTION / LUNCH – Laird Second Floor Hallway – 12:25-1:15 pm