Body Project 2008 Conference (MU)
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The 2008 conference, titled "Anatomy, Relationships, and Representations: An Interdisciplinary Study," was the first meeting of The Body Project. The conference was sponsored by the Center for Arts and Humanities and the Graduate School, in collaboration with the English Graduate Student Association. Full text of the presentations are not available for this year.
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Item Mere Shadows of Human Forms: Intersections of Body Theory and Literary Adaptation in Jane Eyre [abstract](The Body Project, 2008) Zimolzak, Katharine Ellen; Body Project (1st : 2008 : Columbia, Missouri)I have recently developed an interest in cinematic body theory and the ways women are presented in mass media. Although current scholars recognize the limitations of psychoanalytic ideologies of spectatorship, their works are still too dependent on theories of the gaze. Scholars should be in search of new ways to theorize the female body in film. I believe that critiquing the gaze is only part of the necessary work: we cannot challenge preexisting models if we do not propose new ones. From my work in literature, I have come to believe that body theory intersects with adaptation studies -- a conflation that has not been widely explored in current scholarship. In this intersection between the two fields of criticism, I find a new model for theorizing the body that does not rely on the psychoanalytic gaze. Screen bodies represent cultural conflicts of what it means to be a woman, both in the society that produces the adaptation and in the society that produced the adapted text.Item Why Does The Birds Attack?: Teaching the Body in Hitchcock [abstract](The Body Project, 2008) Wise, Ramsay; Body Project (1st : 2008 : Columbia, Missouri)The body is a central feature in Hitchcock both in the way he shoots and cuts it and shoots and cuts it. True, his bodies are shot and stabbed; they fall off Mt. Rushmore, get chopped up and carried away in suitcases on rainy nights. However, Hitchcock's attacks on the body are not, of course, only about flesh. It is not simply visceral. The body always reflects psychology and/or society; the body always holds larger intellectual meaning. For instance, the unseen body hidden in Rope's chest is inextricable from the socially marginalized homosexual. The new Mrs. De Winter is made a powerless little girl sitting in oversized chairs and reaching toward the oversized doorknobs of Rebecca's mansion. Jefferies' broken leg is his fractured masculinity.Item We are not our faces [abstract](The Body Project, 2008) Wedel, Valerie A.; Body Project (1st : 2008 : Columbia, Missouri)One of the themes prevalent in my work is that the notion of "self" as separate from "other" is a mental construct. According to our senses we are separate and on those levels, we are. However, if we examine ourselves on a subatomic level, for example, we learn that our bodies are in continuous flux. On a subatomic level, there is no way to clearly differentiate between our bodies and the surrounding air. Many spiritual traditions, such as Zen Buddhism, make similar claims. Thich Nhat Hanh (1997), Zen monk and author, addresses this in terms of time: One day as I was about to step on a dry leaf, I saw the leaf in the ultimate dimension. I saw that it was not really dead, but that it was merging with the moist soil in order to appear on the tree the following spring in another form. (p. 151) According to this teaching, we must recognize that on some levels, such as on the subatomic and metaphysical levels, we are not separate from one another.Item Music and the body: modern pedagogical techniques for teaching Afro-Cuban rhythms [abstract](The Body Project, 2008) Warden, Loyd; Havens, Timothy C., 1976-; Body Project (1st : 2008 : Columbia, Missouri)Music is a ubiquitous part of our lives, inescapable and unforgettable. Its power moves our body, invokes peaks and valleys of emotion, and can cause vivid recollection of events long past. And why is it that an anatomist can identify a brain as belonging to a professional musician, but struggle to pair a brain with that of a mathematician, author, or painter? Humans that suffer from brain injuries that severely affect their speech, memory, or motor skills often retain their ability to play or sing music. Similarly, there are case studies that show that those who suffer from acute aphasia (the inability to comprehend or use words) are often still able to sing and can regain limited communication skills through music therapy (where other forms of intensive therapy often fail). Humans, as a species, are innately designed to perform, appreciate, and synthesize music. By combining the power of speech and movement, we tap into the musician in everyone to teach afro-Cuban drumming.Item A Wealth of Absence: Visualising the Body in Winckelmann, Lessing and Blake [abstract](The Body Project, 2008) Warburton, Andrew; Body Project (1st : 2008 : Columbia, Missouri)In Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (published 1755), Johann Joachim Winckelmann sets a precedent, through a series of metaphysical exclusions and affirmations centred on the nature of the soul, for an understanding of artistic beauty that would later be appropriated and reinforced in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's seminal essay Laocooen, published in 1766. Before we attempt to say more about these exclusions and affirmations by examining them in greater depth, let us question the source from which Winckelmann and Lessing's texts receive their authority in the first place -- namely, the exigency that requires them to impose their conceptions of beauty upon the imaginary artwork at the precise moment that these conceptions are apparently created in the artwork's image. We will see that the same exigency that inspired these two writers to attempt to fix the image according to their particular schema also inspires our own attempts to uncover the assumptions that inform their discourses. The exigency in question arises from the role that Jacques Lacan assigns to beauty in 'The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I' as a source of "homeomorphic identification" that is both "formative and erogenic" in nature (4). If, as Lacan suggests, beauty takes the form of a gestalt that is capable of reflecting and forming our understanding of what it means to be human through an internal "assumption of [its] specular image", sources of beauty and discourses on art inevitably become sites of contestation against which visions of humanity are played out.