2012 Paper Abstracts

Lindsay Bec

“Living Networks: Exploring Collaborative and Interdependent Textuality,” will explore texts as collaborative networks that continuously interconnect and evolve through non-linear points of departure. Using hypertext and the generative art piece "Floccus," my paper will look at text, as an infinite ensemble of open systems, in a visual and interactive landscape.

Stephanie Bedin

The Middle English manuscript for “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” has been studied in the past but the primary goal of the Cotton Nero A.x project is to examine the text with a level of accuracy that has not yet been achieved. The project will analyze the writing styles and patterns of the scribe through both diplomatic and critical editions.

Danielle Marie Bitz

The Men’s GOLF Manual is a creative attempt to confront the public dismissal of the criticism of language constructs in relation to feminisms through humour. The Men’s GOLF Manual offers a series of instructions to (primarily) men wishing to counter feminism. With a primary focus on language and language based interactions The GOLF Manual seeks to name the subtle elements of traditionalist backlash to feminism and present them ironically as conscious and deliberate acts.

Tara Bodie

Not a Marrying Man is an analysis of popular fiction's Sherlock Holmes that examines how reading the character as having an asexual orientation better explains his popularity in the Victorian era than other readings that position him as either heterosexual or homosexual. 

Thomas Brookes

What really exists outside of our language? Through an analysis of George Orwell’s 1984 this presentation investigates the relationship between the language we speak and the reality we perceive.

Brin-Chenille Bugo

(Re)Writing the Self examines how Theodore Fontaine and Mary Lawrence, both Canadian Residential School survivors, used writing to work through and overcome their traumatic pasts.

Tempest Emery

In “Voicing the Landscape: A Reading of Sid Marty’s Men for the Mountains and Leaning on the Wind: Under the Spell of the Great Chinook,” I will explore the way in which Marty uses several different expressions of the landscape’s voice and perspective to emphasize that human beings are not alone in their interactions with the natural world. Looking at specific examples I will demonstrate the way in which his writing illustrates how the natural world experiences those interactions uniquely. 

Sean Geddes

Sean’s paper will inquire into the highly wrought metaphors found in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and consider some of the less obvious factors that come together to create metaphorical meaning. It will place metaphor alongside considerations of etymology, diction, and word placement, and thus aim to confront the relationship between the specifically formal aspects of Shakespeare’s poetry and the “present/absent” meanings of his metaphor.

Katie Harris

Katie will be presenting on “Beauty and the Beast” and how the adaptations of the fairy tale challenge gender stereotypes.


Carmen Cookson-Hills


Agatha Christie’s Belgian detective Hercule Poirot performs various roles during his investigations to ensure his financial and professional success. His overt performativity is especially notable in the colonial murder mysteries such as Appointment with Death, Murder in Mesopotamia, and Death on the Nile. Amidst exotic settings and Oriental peoples, the foreign detective essentially becomes British by default and is consequently deemed the most appropriate means of law enforcement by the holidaying English social circles.

Kaitlin Kiddey

“Fear, Fascination, and the Female Form” is a study into the evolution of female representation in nineteenth-century American Gothic Literature and how the changing representation is emblematic of evolving societal expectations of women.

Doug Neilson

The “End of Scott’s Lake” is a creative look at the intersections of space, character making and the influences that our surroundings have on the ways we read ourselves and each other.

Katie Rudolf

"Beyond the Drawing Room" presents a feminist reading of Victorian novels. The Bronte sisters' novels advocate a new gender performative that challenges the prevailing notions of the early Victorian era.  During this time, women were restricted to an aesthetic education but the protagonists utilize this schooling as a means of attaining autonomy and becoming self-reliant. 

Maddy Sawyer

For this presentation, Maddy will be examining the use of the double in two classic Gothic novels, Frankenstein and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Specifically, she will look at how the double represents the repressed homosexual desire of the two main characters.

Caitlyn Spencer

(Not) Writing About Racism is a semi-autobiographical paper about the process of writing a semi-autobiographical story that confronts contemporary Canadian racism by, in true Canadian form, avoiding the subject, changing the subject, downplaying the subject, and getting distracted by iPhones and the petty minutiae of daily life. Sampling "Made of Glass," the story in question, this presentation aims to query whether or not form should always imitate content — is a story that dances around racism capable of confronting the subject? — and uses Barbara Trepagnier's concept of "silent racism" to suggest that when it comes to racism in contemporary Canada, what we think is every bit as damaging and dangerous as what we say or do.

Katrina Strauss

Katrina’s conference paper focuses on how postmodernist theory supports thereinterpretation of utopian and dystopian settings in speculative fiction, specifically exploring how subjectivity allows the individual imagination to construct its own ever-evolving perceptions of 'good' and 'bad' places.

Allie Watson

“Bodiless Users and Broken Links: Reconnecting the (Post)Human Subject to Hypertextual Networks” examines how hypertext theory, which predates our widespread engagement with digitally interconnected texts, can be productively critiqued through theories of affect and embodiment to re-examine and reconstruct the human subject as it expands and transforms through digital technology.


Schedule available here: http://ucalgaryenglishhonours.blogspot.com/p/2012-rescriptae-schedule.html