QUEUC (Quebec Universities English Undergraduate Conference)

I just got back from a wonderful weekend at Bishop's University.  It was the first annual undergraduate conference for English literature students in Quebec (QUEUC).  I went with five other students from Université Laval to present a paper on Frederick Douglass (see a summary at my blogpost here).  There were a large range of topics presented from students from Concordia, McGill, U. of Montreal, U. of Sherbrooke, as well as from Bishop's. Of course there were the standard Shakespeare papers read, but also works from more obscure authors.  As there were 55 presenters, I did not have the opportunity to hear all the papers, but those I did were excellent.  The conference was divided into 14 panels separated thematically.  The panel I was apart of was entitled "Patriarchy, Parenting, and Personas."  There was a comparison of the use of blues music in Langston Hughes' poem "The Weary Blues" with bebop in Jack Kerouac's San Francisco Blues.  Having read both Hughes and Kerouac this semester in my American novel class, her exploration of how music was central to their poetry was interesting.

The other three presentations were by students from Bishop's who commented upon Zora Neal Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Kurt Vonnegut's Bluebeard: A Novel (Delta Fiction).  The first presenter reviewed the role of patriarchy in the life of the main character, Janie, of Their Eyes Were Watching God.  Janie is a young black woman who had been raised by her grandmother.  After being "put on the marriage auction block" at the age of sixteen by her grandmother, she reluctantly marries Logan, an older man.  He expects her to do heavy work on his farm, seeing her more as a farmhand than a wife, so she runs off with Jody.  Once again she finds herself in a patriarchal relationship; Jody, the newly elected town mayor, wants her to be a trophy wife.  After being widowed, she falls in love with a vagabond, "Tea Cake" and finally finds an equal, although imperfect, marriage.

The second applied the framework of feminist psychoanalyst Nancy Chodorow to both Hurston's and Vonnegut's novels.  Based on Freud's Oedipus Complex, Chodorow expands the theory so that for both girls and boys the mother is the first love.  Hence, for males, the love for the mother is therefore replaced by the love for the wife, but for women, they can never truly love a man, so their love for the mother is replaced by the love of a child.  The presenter then revealed the how this theory was upheld in the novels and also how it was unreliable.

Lastly, the third of these presentations concerned autobiography's importance in the novel.  In Their Eyes Were Watching God, the narrative is orally transmitted to the protagonist's best friend, Pheoby, whereas Vonnegut writes Bluebeard as the fictional autobiography of the fictional painter, Rabo Karabekian.  In Bluebeard the writing style is affected as he experiences the events he writes about.  The presentation explored the differences in style and influence that these fictional "pretending to be" autobiographies had.

   

One of the other students from Laval spoke about murder in Hamlet and MacBeth.  The other four students from Laval spoke on American works.  Jonathan considered the change of Henry Fleming's identity throughout Stephen Crane's novel The Red Badge of Courage.  Simon revealed how "Ragged Dick" denied his true selfhood while pursing American Dream in Horatio Alger's children's book Ragged Dick.  And Jenny spoke on Nathaniel Hawthorn's transcendental tendencies (rather than the common Puritan beliefs of his era) in his own life and in his novel The Scarlet Letter.  Lastly Kathleen used PowerPoint slides to show Jacob Riis' influence on modern-day photojournalism, especially through his work How the Other Half Lives (referring to the poor of New York City).

   

Although, as you can tell, it was a very intellectual weekend (Jenny called it the most intellectual weekend in her life), we had soooo much fun!  It was great getting to know each other better.

Frederick Douglass, An American Slave

At the moment I'm reworking an essay I wrote last year about the ex-slave and abolitionistFrederick Douglass. My argument is that his title Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave reveals the paradox of the American slavery system in that someone could be both American (from a country that prides itself on being democratic, on capitalistic ideals of property ownership, and of being the home of the free) and Slave (a position of absolute submission without any rights). Here are the first two paragraphs, after the introduction, to this paper that I hope to present at Bishop's University's literary conference for English lit undergrads.

The status of Douglass' own parents exposed the absurdity of the dichotomy between "American" and "slave." His father was a white slaveholder therefore having all the rights of an American citizen. His mother, however, was a slave with no rights in American society. To further complicate the familial incongruities, his mother was most likely Douglass' father's slave. By introducing himself as an American slave, Douglass reveals the irrationality of such a system that would allow one's father to own one's mother. Through this persona, he also asserts that he should have the right to inherit his father's status, even though by law (established by white males to uphold the slave system) he inherits only the status of his mother."

"Frederick Douglass asserts his persona in the title of his autobiography, identifying himself to his readers as an "American Slave." The apparent oxymoron would shock his contemporary readers. It seemed impossible that a person could be both American: white, property-owner, free, rich, and proud and yet also slave: black, property, constrained, owning nothing, and humiliated. His choice of identifiers was deliberate. They displayed the inherent hypocrisies of American slavery. Douglass had been born in America, "the land of the free," the country that declared that "all men are created equal." Additionally, at the time he wrote his narrative, Douglass had attained freedom "in form" in the North, yet legally he continued to be a slave and could always be recaptured according to the Fugitive Slave Law (Douglass 78). He considered himself to be a "fugitive in slavery," not to be a "fugitive from slavery" (Fisch 208).

Get the book here:

Watch Danny Glover reciting one of Douglass' most famous speeches, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?.

(if you're lacking in time, watch from 3:40 - 5:21.)
Read it here.