EGSA GRADUATE CONFERENCE • TAMPA, FL • 13–14 APRIL 2012

Re-conceptualizing CartographySPACE-TIME COMPRESSION AND NARRATIVE MAPPING

Colomb, J. C. R. “Imperial Federation.” MacClure & Co. 1886. Great Britain.

2012$EGSA$Graduate$ConferenceCo#sponsored*by*the*English*Graduate*Student*Association*and*the*English*Department*at*the*University*of*South*Florida

! Page 2

Friday, April 13, 2012

8:00 AM–3:00 PM: Registration (table located outside of MSC 3701 and 3702)

8:30–10:00 AMMSC 3701: Mapping the FantasticPanel Chair: Katherine McGeeMadonna Fajardo Kemp, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, “Carollian Geography: Setting Defined through Speech Act”Amanda Hill, University of Central Florida, “Meg’s Fantastic Journey: Understanding Initiation through the Lens of the Fantastic”Taylor Evans, University of Central Florida, “Infinite Horror in Thomas Hardy and H. P. Lovecraft”

MSC 3702: Navigating Literary WorldsPanel Chair: Cassandra BranhamDarrell Nicholson, University of South Florida, “‘Nothing But Trouble There’: Mapping the Meteorogical Horrors in Joseph Conrad’s

Gulf of Siam”Danielle Farrar, University of South Florida, “‘[M]y patient, my mad young traveller’: The Liminal Space of Travel as Both Object-

Cathexis and Physic in Brome’s The Antipodes”Nicole De Leon, Sonoma State University, “From the Abstract to the Concrete: Mapping a Way In and Out of Marianne Moore’s Poetry on Writing”

10:15–11:45 AMMSC 3701: Cognitive MappingPanel Chair: Alan ShawMargy Thomas Horton, Baylor University, “‘Irretrievably bewildered’?: Edgar Huntly and the Cognitive Mapping of America”Rebecca Mills, University of Exeter, “Charting the ‘Blue Frontiers’: Elegiac Mythical Spaces in Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘North Haven’”

MSC 3702: Urban Cartographies: Mapping the CityPanel Chair: Jennifer YirinecAllison Wise, University of South Florida, “The Waste Land as a Modernist Baedeker: Reading and Writing Biogeographies on the Urban Text”Kristina K. Groover, Appalachian State University, “‘The streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted’: Mapping Jacob’s Room”Rachel Scoggins, Georgia State University, “The Lay of the Land: Physical and Gender Mapping of Early Century New York in John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer”

11:45 AM–1:30 PMLunch Break

1:30–2:45 PMMSC 3702: Mapping Gender and the BodyPanel Chair: Jessica CookMahdie Mofidi, University of Strasbourg and Free University of Berlin, “Women’s Role in Mapping Gender Identity in Religious Theatre in Iran”Alisa M. DeBorde, University of South Florida, “Reclaimed Language: The Silence of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse”Stephanie Derisi, Florida Atlantic University, “A Rootless Wanderer: The Body as Mapping Place in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine”

2012$EGSA$Graduate$ConferenceCo#sponsored*by*the*English*Graduate*Student*Association*and*the*English*Department*at*the*University*of*South*Florida

! Page 3

Friday, April 13, 2012 (continued)

3:00–4:00 PMInformal ReceptionLocation: Grace Allen Room (4th Level of the USF Library)

Saturday, April 14, 2012

9:30 AM–1:00 PM: Registration (table located outside of MSC 3700)

10:00–11:30 AMMSC 3700: Not So Safe SpacesPanel Chair: Zachary LundgrenMelanie Graham, University of South Florida, “Mapping Murder: The African American Body as Landscape for Violence and Voice in Poetry”Michelle Gibbs, Brooklyn College, “Colonial Trauma of Dissociative Proportions in Dream on Monkey Mountain” (Skype)Melinda Keathley, University of Memphis, “The Restorative Power of Simultaneity in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-five”

4:00–5:30 PM: Plenary LectureLocation: Grace Allen Room (4th Level of the USF Library)

Dr. Robert Tally Jr., Texas State University“‘Shall I Project a World?’: Literary Cartography, Geocriticism, and The Condition of Postmodernity”

with an introduction by Dr. Laura Runge, University of South Florida

In his groundbreaking elaboration of the condition of postmodernity, David Harvey analyzed the phenomenon of “time–space compression,” an effect of the capitalist mode of production which appears to have reached its apotheosis under late capitalism. Indeed, the “sea-change” in capitalist accumulation has transformed the experience of space and time (189), and, as Fredric Jameson observed, the postmodern space seems to exceed “the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world” (44). Amid the hyper-hurly-burly of the postmodern condition, one tries to achieve a sense of place, if only tentatively. As Oedipa Maas, in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, wonders: “Shall I project a world? If not project then at least flash some arrow on the dome to skitter among the constellations and trace out your Dragon, Whale, Southern Cross. Anything might help” (82).

Literature itself offers such a projection, such a map. In Space and Place, Yi-Fu Tuan has noted that a given portion of space becomes a “place” once it occasions a pause, where it takes on meanings, the traditional bailiwick of “literary art” (161–62). And, one might add, vice-versa. That is, a literary work becomes infused with the places that it explores, places that make it what it is. In narrative fiction, the narrator maps the spaces of the narrative while also exploring them, often forcing the reader to project his or her own “map” of the text while attempting to follow the itinerary of the narrator through this space. As narratives move across borders, those spaces and places become all the more significant. In this talk, I will discuss literary cartography in narrative fiction, which actively determines the “real-and-imaginary” spaces (to use Edward Soja’s expression) that we encounter and explore through reading, which in turn enables our own attempts to map the spaces of postmodernity we occupy.

Robert T. Tally Jr. teaches American and world literature at Texas State University. He is the author of Melville, Mapping and Globalization: Literary Cartography in the American Baroque Writer, Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography, and the forthcoming Spatiality (in the Routledge’s New Critical Idiom series). Tally is also the translator of Bertrand Westphal’s Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces and the editor of Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies.

2012$EGSA$Graduate$ConferenceCo#sponsored*by*the*English*Graduate*Student*Association*and*the*English*Department*at*the*University*of*South*Florida

! Page 4

Saturday, April 14, 2012 (continued)

10:00–11:30 AMMSC 3702: Mapping Rhetorical and Digital SpacesPanel Chair: Megan McIntyreCarolyn Day, University of South Florida, “Value for Who?: Shared Value Creation as a Westernized and Rhetorical Form of Global Cultural Domination”Dr. Thomas Smith, Georgia Tech School of Literature, Communication, and Culture, “Digital Writing, Hypertext, and Spatiality: Using the Vertical and Horizontal Dimensions”Sarah Beth Hopton, University of South Florida, “Maps that Change the World: Mapping the Paths of Influence in Social Action Projects”

11:30 AM–1:00 PMLunch Break

1:00–2:30 PMMSC 3700: Reconfiguring Boundaries between Self and OtherPanel Chair: Jose AparicioDana Rine, University of South Florida, “‘The Garden was Still There’: Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Construction of Utopian Place in The Book of Not”Claire Niedzwiedzi, University of South Carolina and the University of Paris, “Landart: Mapping the Landscape”

MSC 3702: Cinematic CartographiesPanel Chair: Natalia Lauren FioreDr. Christian Long, University of Canterbury, “The Cinematic Locations of the American Past” (Skype)Hannah Stone, University of Maryland, College Park, “Mapping Duration: The Role of Cinema in Creating an Architectural Archive”

We would like to thank the members and officers of the English Graduate Student Association at the University of South Florida, particularly Megan McIntyre, Cassandra Branham, Katherine McGee, Zachary Lundgren, Alan Shaw, Jose Aparicio, Jessica Cook, Jessica McKee, and Allison Wise for volunteering to work at the registration table and/or to chair panels. We would also like to acknowledge and thank Enaam Alnaggar for designing the conference flyers and Natalia Lauren Fiore for donating her time to chair a panel. A special thanks goes to the English department at the University of South Florida for its support; we received much help from and are very grateful to Dr. Hunt Hawkins, Dr. Laura Runge, Lee Davidson, and Nancy Serrano, without whom this conference could not have been a success. In addition, we would like to thank Dr. Marty Gould for his contributions to our call for papers, Martina Spurlock for her management of our funds, and Michael Abrahams, our webmaster, for creating and continuously updating our conference website. We very much appreciate everyone’s assistance.

-- Cassie Childs and Jennifer Yirinec, EGSA Conference Coordinators