Faculty Research Dialogue Series 2011-12
Every year the Mount's Research Office sponsors a series of talks by faculty from across the university who discuss their current research. This year, Dr. Karen Macfarlane will be speaking on October 21, 2011.
Dr. Macfarlane's paper argues that Lady Gaga’s performances of a glamorous body distorted by monstrous movements and associations plays on and with the Gothic position of the celebrity body – and the desire for that body – in popular culture. Her performance involves an unsettling taking on and blending of images of previous icons and other elements of popular culture to create a monstrous amalgam that distorts and disturbs the stability of its originary narratives. “Lady Gaga” is a monster of the digital age; a figure which disturbs precisely because it demonstrates that there is no escape from this repetition.
Dialogue Series 2010-11
March 18, 2011. Dr. Reina Green. "Ben Greet's Shakespeare: Performing Education"
Abstract:
Ben Greet was a mediocre actor who, in the early twentieth century, made a name for himself as a theatre manager who popularized open-air Shakespeare in England and North America. His goal was to introduce Shakespeare to new audiences, to rural communities and London schoolchildren, and he was knighted for "his services to drama and education" in 1929. However, Greet's desire to bring the bard to non-traditional audiences may have been motivated more by business acumen than by altruism. Recognizing an opportunity to make money, he literally ran with it, and then worked to overcome the suspicions of small-town audiences and London school boards. He did so by emphasizing the educational value of his productions. In so doing, Greet changed forever the way Shakespeare's plays are performed and taught. Generations of children have a lot to thank him for-or not.
January 21, 2011: Dr. Anna Smol. "Beowulf and The Boy Problem"
Dr. Anna Smol explored how the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf became a story for children in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She looked at how constructions of childhood, especially in popular guides like William Byron Forbush's The Boy Problem (1901), determined the reading materials recommended for boys. She will also examined how ideas about the child, the "savage," and the medieval -- converging in notions of Beowulf and boyhood -- have affected medieval scholarship and adaptations of the poem to the present day.
January 7, 2011: Dr. Graham Fraser. "'The Further Shelter of the Hand': Gestures of Need in Beckett's Late Work"
Abstract:
In an effort to express beyond the limits of words, Samuel Beckett pursues a mute language of gesture in his work. One key gesture -- the raising of the hand to the head -- is for Beckett an effort to achieve a "hieroglyphic" expression of the condition of artistic "need". Drawing on Beckett's aesthetic writings (especially those on the paintings of Avigdor Arikha), images of the gesture taken from Beckett' own work, Arikha's drawings of Beckett himself, and theories of language and gesture, this paper traces an etymology of this gesture across Beckett's oeuvre which illustrates not only the condition of the Beckettian artist, but the efforts Beckett makes to negotiate with or alleviate that condition of artistic need into a final state of "truce".
September 10, 2010: Dr. Susan Drain . "The One-Legged Doctor: A Victorian Medical Career"
