The Phallus or the Cane? Re-reading the monstrous in Teen Wolf through disability and queer theory

Thursday 30 March, 1pm Milgate Room, AD Hope Bldg, SLLL

The growing body of academic scholarship on werewolves has often focused upon gender but rarely has it considered how sexuality and disability are reflected in lycanthropic narratives. Yet the werewolf can be read through these lenses, since it often disrupts normative ideas about the gendered body. These challenges to compulsory able-bodiedness and heterosexuality are the focus of this paper, which analyses MTV’s young adult television series Teen Wolf using disability studies and queer theory. I argue that while the intersection of disability and queerness is integral to the series’ construction of monstrosity, it is also is where the series is most progressive—and subversive. The queer re-reading in this paper is enabled through Marjorie Garber’s work on transvestites, specifically her concept of the detachable phallus. By analysing the monstrous disabled characters in Teen Wolf in terms of how their prostheses signify both their disabilities and their sexual agency, I demonstrate how the series contests heteronormative logic when queerness and disability entwine. Given the series’ popularity among young audiences who are negotiating their own transformation into adulthood, Teen Wolf may invite viewers to recognise that neither sexuality nor ability can be contained within a binary and that variance is not only possible but valuable.

Tania Evans is a final year PhD candidate in SLLL. Her doctoral project investigates the textual construction of masculinities in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and its television adaptation Game of Thrones. Her work has been published in Gothic Studies and Masculinities, and will appear in the edited collection Exploring Teen Wolf (McFarland Press).

Shakespeare and the Digital World: When scholarship meets global capitalism

Thursday 30 March, 1pm Milgate Room, AD Hope Bldg, SLLL
In order to understand the place of the academic in the commercially driven world of digital recording, archiving and dissemination of Shakespeare’s plays in text and performance I put together a volume entitled Shakespeare and the Digital World: Redefining Scholarship and Practice. In this book, which tackles the thorny issues of authority and power, Peter Kirwan, my co-editor, and I stress the importance of continually redefining what is meant by ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘the digital’. In this paper I scrutinise my own work to illustrate the importance of speculating about the future in order to help to form, as well as inform, it.

Christie Carson is Reader in Shakespeare and Performance in the Department of English at Royal Holloway University of London. She is the co-editor of The Cambridge King Lear CD-ROM: Text and Performance Archive (Cambridge, 2000) and the Principal Investigator of the AHRB-funded research project Designing Shakespeare: An Audio-Visual Archive, 1960-2000, which documents the performance history of Shakespeare in Stratford and London. She has published widely on the subject of contemporary performance and the influence of digital technology on audience interaction and research practices, including articles for Shakespeare Survey and Performance Research. She has co-edited four volumes of essays for Cambridge University Press.

Non-Scientists, Con-Scientists and the Rocky Horror Clown Show: Wondrous Science in the Australian Context

Thursday 23 March, 1pm Milgate Room, AD Hope Bldg, SLLL

Scientists seek to explore how nature works and ask how humanity can best comprehend different aspects of the world. In fictional and cultural contexts, scientists appear as rebels against the status quo and the ordinary. In the collections of the National Library of Australia, literary scholar Anna-Sophie Jürgens has discovered that some scientists even behave like artists: they are creative, skilled craftsmen, ‘imagineers’ or bewildering performers. By revealing how fictional and fictitious scientists do not merely domesticate the unknown, but also invent and stage it, she will provide new insights into the connections between scientific knowledge and the creative imagination in Australia.

Anna-Sophie Jürgens is a Humboldt postdoctoral fellow currently working “On the Origin and Evolution of a Species: Australian Scientists in Fiction”. She studied Comparative, Russian and French Literature in Germany and Russia. Her research interests include science in fiction, modern and contemporary circus fiction, the history of (violent) clowns, and aesthetics and poetologies of knowledge.

On March 16th, Gemma King (School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics, ANU) will be giving a Q&A after the film A Kid (Le Fils de Jean, Philippe Lioret). Before the film, there will be wine and cheese, and the event is being sponsored by the High Commission of Canada (the High Commissioner will be in attendance).

Gemma King’s second Q&A is on March 29th after the film Farewell, My Queen (Les Adieux à la Reine, Benoît Jacquot). At the reception beforehand, there will be sparkling wine and macarons, and the film is designed to tie in with the current Versailles exhibition at the National Gallery.

To book tickets for these events and to find more information about the festival, taking place this month, go to: http://www.affrenchfilmfestival.org/schedule.

Australian Society for French Studies Conference 2017: Truth and Representation

The Australian National University, 13-15 December

Confirmed keynote speakers:
Professor Nicki Hitchcott, University of St Andrews
Dr Chris Watkin, Monash University

What is truth and how do we represent it? For centuries philosophers, artists, theologians, and political thinkers have reflected on the nature of truth, each exploring the various rhetorical and visual strategies with which we might render its universality and its relativity. When we talk about truth, we call upon objectivity, authenticity, and verifiability. But we also inevitably evoke subjectivity, artifice, and mendacity. Indeed, to talk about truth is to recognise its intimate connection to lies.
In our current political climate, terms such as ‘post-truth’ and ‘fake news’ have become ubiquitous. In the wake of Brexit and the American presidential election, and leading up to the 2017 French election, politicians and the media continually call the status of truth and representation into question. How are we to determine what truth is when facts are manipulated to reflect and reinforce the opinions we already hold? How are we to retain our grasp on reality when we see our world increasingly through the mediation of the screen? Such questions bring to mind a much broader problematic surrounding our understanding of social, cultural, and political reality in the light of myriad and ever-evolving ideologies and theoretical orientations.
This conference seeks to reflect on these questions within French and Francophone Studies. What role can our interdisciplinary research play in negotiating the problems of truth and representation in the 21st century, from cultural studies and politics to literature and film? Our aim is to address these problems from a multiplicity of methodological approaches and areas of focus.
We invite proposals for individual papers (20 minutes) and for panels (3-4 papers of 20 minutes each) related to the theme of truth and representation. We will also consider proposals that do not conform directly to this theme. Possible topics for discussion may include, but are not limited to:

• Philosophical, theoretical, and historical/historiographical understandings of truth-making
• Representations of Otherness
• Reflections on language and the shaping of political discourse
• The role of truth in education, including plagiarism and academic dishonesty in the language classroom
• Film and the fluid boundaries of audio-visual representation
• Embodied truths, psychic truths, lived realities
• National myths and the politics of migration
• Life-writing/ Representing the truth of the self
• Truth and religious pluralism
• Postmodernism and post-truth
• Representation in (applied) linguistics and second language acquisition
• Imagination, or the truth of fiction
Please send your proposal of 250 words for papers in English or French to asfs_2017@anu.edu.au by 3 July 2017.

Organising committee: Leslie Barnes, Ashok Collins, Solène Inceoglu, and Gemma King, ANU.

The schedule for the Literary Studies Seminar Series is now available here.

Hope to see you on Thursdays at 1pm in the Milgate Room.

Thanks to Russell Smith for the organisation and for the magnificent design work.

Come along to the CuSPP Writing Group.

It takes place in the A.D. Hope Common Room (Room 113) from 10am each Monday of semester. We begin with an hour but we have the room for two. Please bring along the hot drink and writing apparatus of your choice.

Many thanks to Gemma King for her organisation and graceful time-keeping of the writing groups thus far.

Congratulations to ANU SLLL PhD Candidate Ashley Orr who has a blog post on 19th C ‘stunt journalist’ Nellie Bly over at the Dangerous Women Blog. Read more here: http://dangerouswomenproject.org/2017/02/26/nellie-bly/

‘Out of Place’: Diasporic travel writing and the impossibility of return

Professor Srilata Ravi (University of Alberta)

Seminar Room 2/3, Sir Roland Wilson Building, ANU, Tuesday March 7, 2017, 4.30-5.30pm

In the last fifty years forced and unforced migrations have resulted in some of the greatest upheavals and displacements seen in history. Refugees, economic migrants, and political exiles have moved away from their geographical places of origin to settle in foreign places, carrying with them (in multiple forms and to different degrees) memories of their past, tensions in the present and aspirations for their future.

While such movements have very often resulted in permanent dislocations, rapid developments in communication technologies and affordable transportation have provided some members of these dispersed communities the opportunity of “looking back” or returning (temporarily, repeatedly or permanently) to their homelands—to places “left behind” in the course of their migration. Through a reading of selected travel texts in the French language, this paper will examine how the affective consequences of such diasporic returns are textualized.

Srilata Ravi is Professor of French and Francophone Literature at the Faculté Saint-Jean of the University of Alberta. Her research interests are in Francophone Postcolonial Studies, Diaspora Studies and Indian Ocean Studies. Her recent publications include Translating the Postcolonial in Multilingual Contexts (with Judith Misrahi-Barak, in press); Sports, modernité et réseaux impériaux : Napoléon Lajoie, Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji, baseball et cricket au tournant du XXe siècle (with Claude Couture, 2017); Rethinking Global Mauritius: Critical Essays on Mauritian Literatures and Cultures (2013); and Ecritures mauriciennes au féminin: penser l’altérité (with Véronique Bragard 2011).