Oct 29, 2016 | 9:00 AM - 10:30 AM | LOFT 2

Mrs. Grace McCarthy, Master of Arts

Functions of Memory in "Richard III"

Memory and truth (or lack thereof) are common foci in Shakespeare scholarship. When critics discuss Shakespeare’s Richard III, however, they tend to focus on issues of Kingship and/or disability, rather than on the impact of memory. Memory, be it factual or fabricated, plays a critical role in Richard’s rise to and fall from power in the play, and current criticism has not adequately addressed the function of memory in this text.  My paper will address the function of memory in Richard III, and expand on Paige Martin Reynold’s assertion that women, as keepers of memory, bring about Richard’s downfall by closely examining Richard’s relationship with Lady Anne.

By examining the significant shifts in the power dynamics in the scene where Richard proposes to Anne, I reveal how distortion, suppression and fabrication of memories aids Richard’s solidification of his political position. The manipulation of memory in order to rise to power will be juxtaposed with Anne’s presence in the parade of ghosts in Richard’s nightmares. Anne’s presence as a ghost, and Richard’s declaration that there is no one alive who loves him, combine to reveal a foreshortening of his bloodline and memorialization upon his death; memory of him ceases to exist when all who would traditionally memorialize Richard predeceased him. I argue that, while Richard is skilled in manipulating memory, Anne’s position as a traditional keeper and creator of memory not only causes Richard’s eventual political and physical downfall, but also highlights the amount of power that women hold in Richard III because of their ability to choose which memories are created, and which will last. This project will shed light on the rarely acknowledged significance of memory and the manipulation of memory in William Shakespeare’s Richard III.

Dr. Maria Granic-White, Ph.D.

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Who Is the Biggest Liar of All? Or, Memory and Seduction: Reading and Discussing Charlotte Brontë’s

In the memory of most undergraduate students who read Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre, the text shapes as a great romance. Drawing from my teaching experience and previous research, I argue that the eponymous protagonist emerges as the most seductive liar in the plot, enticing the inattentive readers into believing in the plot as a love story, a story with which their imagination rewards her. Departing from Lisa Sternlieb’s claim that the relationships between Jane and Rochester and between Jane and her reader are built on a series of parallel confidences, this presentation proposes a way to debunk the reading of the novel as a romance through an examination that goes beyond these parallels and the question of the reliability of the first person narrator. The two-part presentation will first consider the ‘truth’ of selective memory, the recollection of narrated death, and active forgetting, the last term meaning, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s description in Untimely Meditations, a selective remembering of experiences that enables humans to step outside history. Although, one can argue, Jane is safe from history as an orphan, she is not spared the emotional impact of orphanhood on her as a child and as an adult. The second part illustrates Jane’s imagination and powerful creativity as reflected not only by her depiction of her condition as an orphan but also by her efforts to circumvent direct expression of emotions by making recourse to what other characters use liberally, lying. Hence, the plot consists of a web of machinations whereby characters lie to each other so as to achieve their goal. Nonetheless, Jane appears as the biggest liar and seductress of all, offering the readers a story dense with hidden truths and unappealing aspects of life as a love story.

Dr. Russell Cobb, PhD

The Platypus and the Feast: Truth, Politics, and Metaphors in the Nueva Cronica and the New Journalism

When they both burst upon the scene half a century ago, the Latin America nueva crónica and American New Journalism faced similar ontological problems. Were the writers of these texts--fact-based narratives adorned with literary and even lyrical aesthetics--primarily obligated to the empirical truth of the story or to the higher, Aristotelian notion of Truth? The latter, as stated in the Poetics, is not bound by the messy obligation of the fact, but rather the universal truth. Although each tradition has a similar approach to telling nonfiction stories in a literary way, each has developed a series of metaphors that complicate the slippery relationship between empirical fact and literary aesthetics. The Mexican cronista Juan Villoro has elaborated notion of the nueva crónica as a platypus--a beast that shares elements of completely different animals and is often stranger than fiction. Another metaphor comes from New Yorker contributor John McPhee, who compares creative or literary nonfiction to a feast cooked from scratch. The ingredients are all facts or true stories, but the result is a completely unique work of art to be enjoyed by the reader. But, as the critic Hayden White was fond of pointing out, “the fact cannot speak for itself.” The desire to narrativize the messy details of life can lead an existential crisis for these genres. There are dozens--if not hundreds--of examples of carefully crafted works of narrative nonfiction whose factual elements turn out to be embellishments, exaggerations, or outright lies.

My presentation comes from the perspective of a critic and a practitioner of literary nonfiction. I will weave in reflections from my own work in magazine journalism as I examine these two relatively new traditions and their slippery relationships to empirical truth, political engagement, and literary aesthetics.

Biographies

Grace McCarthy

Grace is a PhD student at Wilfrid Laurier University. She earned her MA and BA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Her primary research interests are Early Modern drama and Shakespeare. Her MA thesis was titled "The Evolution of the Patient Woman: Examining Patient Griselda as a Source for William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale." Grace's dissertation will focus on representation of disability in Early Modern drama and contemporary film adaptations of Shakespeare plays.

Dr. Maria Granic-White

Maria Granic-White is an Assistant Professor of English Literature and Language at Benedictine University at Mesa. A few of her research interests are the ludic drive, theatricality in Victorian literature and culture, the New Victorian Woman, the New Victorian Man, literary theory (particularly psychoanalytical theory), the figure of the father, and orphans in literature.  Among her most recent publications are “Failed Capitalist and Father: Restored Order in Thomas Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge.” French Association for Thomas Hardy Studies (pending) and “A Prohibitive Presence by Language: Never the Father, Always the Son.” In (Re-)Contextualizing Literary and Cultural History: The Representation of the Past in Literary and Material Culture, edited by Elisabeth Wåghäll Nivre, Beate Schirrmacher, and Claudia Egerer (2014).

Dr. Russell Cobb

Russell Cobb is a writer, journalist, and academic. He is Associate Professor in Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Alberta. His books include Heart in Darkness (2013) and the edited collection The Paradox of Authenticity in a Globalized World (2014). His literary nonfiction has won numerous awards in the United States and Canada. His scholarship has examined the intersection of politics, journalism, and literary publishing in the Americas during the Cold War. His current project is a historical novel about one family's story in the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921.

Peer-Reviewed Scholarhip [R] “Letrados and Caudillos in Hugo Chávez's Venezuela.” Delaware Review of Latin American Studies. Vol. 15. No. 1 August, 2014. [R] Editor, The Paradox of Authenticity in a Globalized World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. [R]“Outside the Labyrinth: The Premature Death of the Cold War in Latin American Literature,” in Human Rights and Transnational Solidarity in Cold War Latin America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, February 2013. [R] "Publish and Anguish: Reconsidering the Never-Ending Crisis of the Humanities." Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies,  December 1,  2010. [R]“The Congress for Cultural Freedom’s Quest for a Magazine of Ideas in Latin America,” in Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War. University of Massachusetts Press, March 20, 2010

Literary nonfiction: “The King and Us,” Ursa Minor: UC-Berkeley Art and Literature Review, Volume 1, 2016. “How We Gather Now,” This Land Press, Winter, 2016. Heart in Darkness: The Genetic Defect That Could Kill Me Toronto: Toronto Star, 2014. "Welcome to the Tribe." Essay featured as a Longreads Members' Pick and BuzzReads Feature, Media Redefined, et al. Originally published by This Land Press, August 1, 2014. "The Way We Talked." Schwa Fire, Issue 1, Season 1. May, 2014. "If you can't beat 'em, annotate 'em: Social media wows in the classroom." Vue Weekly. January, 2014. "Dear Tulsa." State of the Re:union Radio Show on National Public Radio. November, 2013. “Locker Room Confidential” This Land Press, December, 2013 “Our Man in Colonia: Letter from Puerto Rico,” This Land Press, January 2012. “Glorious and Free. Mostly.” Eighteen Bridges, fall 2012, 22-27. “Confessions of a Designated Hitter,” This Land Press, November 2012. “Where the Buffalo Drift,” This Land Press, April 2012.