English presentations (MU)
Items in this collection represent public presentations made by Department of English faculty, staff, and students, either alone or as co-authors, and which may or may not have been published in an alternate format. Items may contain more than one file type.
Items in MOspace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.
Recent Submissions
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Head Movement in Bantu DPs
(2010)Carstens argues against the approach of Cinque (2005) to deriving facts of adjunct order related to Greenberg's Universal 20, based on Shona data. Some implications are that head-movement exists in grammar and has syntactic ... -
Properties of Subjects in Bantu Languages
(2010)This handout discusses how subject words function in various Bantu languages. Bantu languages are pro-drop, hence null subject languages (NSLs). Our initial findings are that preverbal subjects can, in fact, be non-specific ... -
DP Positions in African Languages
(2010)A central concern of syntactic theory has long been to explain and predict the distribution of nominal expressions, henceforth D(eterminer) P(hrases), and their involvement in morphosyntactic relations. Where can they ... -
The Rhetoric of Guilt and the Body [abstract]
(The Body Project, 2008)Guilt is an emotion common to most individuals. It is also a less common rhetorical device used to persuade an audience toward making one decision or another. Yet, when we look at the history of rhetoric, Aristotle in ... -
The Posthuman Body in the Works of Andy Warhol, David Cronenberg and Matthew Barney [abstract]
(The Body Project, 2008)Today, it has been assumed that in the mixed reality of virtual and physical realms, the body is not perceived as a whole. The instances of how the unity and homogeneity of the body is challenged by technology come in a ... -
Binding the body, binding the mind : the limitations of empathy in John Gabriel Stedman's “Narrative of a five years' expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam” [abstract]
(The Body Project, 2008)John Gabriel Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796) is laced with discussions of cruelty -- to slaves, to soldiers, even to monkeys. Throughout, Stedman prides himself ... -
From Landscape to Body : The White Body in Contemporary American Fiction [abstract]
(The Body Project, 2008)"Whiteness," as both a field of study and an even an identity, has very often been viewed through its connections to postmodernity, most particularly with the assumption that whiteness equals a body situated within a ... -
Identifying and transforming normalcy : challenges to compulsory able-bodied oppression in the deaf community [abstract]
(The Body Project, 2008)This paper integrates excerpts taken from a fieldwork-based, thesis-length project that examines the personal experience narratives of Deaf and Hearing mothers of Deaf children. Driven by the goal of joining folkloric ... -
The Death of Maternity : Decaying Female Bodies in Mary Shelley's Fiction [abstract]
(The Body Project, 2008)In this paper, I examine the trope of the dying woman in Mary Shelley's early works, including Frankenstein, Mathilda, and her short fiction. Critics are in general agreement that two of Frankenstein's essential subjects ... -
Producing the Body : Habeas Corpus and Closure in Burney's Court Diaries [abstract]
(The Body Project, 2008)This paper is part of a larger project which investigates the ways in which eighteenth-century novelist Frances Burney's body of work (novels, plays, and life-writing) create a sense (or no-sense) of an ending. In this ... -
The Outer Space : Representations of White Bodies in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart [abstract]
(The Body Project, 2008)Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart uses white bodies to connote abnormalcy in African culture at the start of colonialism. Written as a counter-hegemonic strategical novel in response to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, ... -
Spying on Lazarus in the Cave: Keats and the Still Body in The Fall of Hyperion [abstract]
(The Body Project, 2008)If accepted for the conference, my presentation will be a critical exploration of John Keats' craft in The Fall of Hyperion, particularly his description of bodies. I contend that in his choice to describe still bodies, ... -
What You Looking At Me For? : The Black Comedian as Fetish Object [abstract]
(The Body Project, 2008)Through numerous descriptions of Africans and indigenous peoples, travel writing and other historical documents reveal that Europeans continually fetishized the bodies of the people they encountered. By thrusting the ... -
Mere Shadows of Human Forms: Intersections of Body Theory and Literary Adaptation in Jane Eyre [abstract]
(The Body Project, 2008)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 ... -
Why Does The Birds Attack?: Teaching the Body in Hitchcock [abstract]
(The Body Project, 2008)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 ... -
A Wealth of Absence: Visualising the Body in Winckelmann, Lessing and Blake [abstract]
(The Body Project, 2008)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 ... -
Écriture Féminine : thinking the female body through writing [abstract]
(The Body Project, 2008)Traditional feminist readings of Helene Cixous's theory of ecriture feminine have centered on the essentialist debate, overlooking the important contribution to gender studies her theoretical work constitutes. In this paper ... -
Annexing the planets : the colonization of the alien body in science fiction [abstract]
(The Body Project, 2008)Science fiction has its historical beginnings in the late colonial era, and the discourse of colonialism shares with the discourse of science fiction a terminology of discovery, exploration, conquest, mapping and the ... -
Jane Austen's Dirty Jokes [abstract]
(The Body Project, 2008)While folklorists, including Katherine Briggs, have asserted that Jane Austen's novels contain no folklore, Jill Heydt-Stevens and other Austen scholars have argued that Austen knowingly inserts obscene humor, puns, and ... -
Mighty Maidenhood: Medieval Women and the Attempt to Break Free from the Curse of Eve [abstract]
(The Body Project, 2008)Throughout the middle ages, women were seen -- and condemned -- as daughters of Eve, representing the flesh and sexual desire. However, women were not left with Eve as their sole role model, since Eve has an exact opposite ...