Tag: Corbett Upton

Pristine Nature and “Painted Forgeries”: Ecocriticism in The Faerie Queene

Presenter: Alison Goodwin

Mentors: Jessie Nance and Corbett Upton, English

Oral Presentation

Majors: English and Political Science

Under Elizabethan rule, Edmund Spenser wrote literature that both praised the queen and reflected the colonization of the New World (he himself took part in the colonization of Ireland in the 1580s and onward). Initially published in 1590, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene constructs unexplored, fantastical, and often dangerous lands. As a sprawling moral allegory, The Faerie Queene: Book Two depicts the overcoming of intemperance and idleness, particularly through the vehicle of nature. Scholars Amy Tigner and Arlene Okerlund have explored the function of nature and horticulture in early Renaissance writings. As Tigner detailed the constructedness of horticulture, Okerlund complicated this botanical purpose and additionally has argued that Spenser’s audience consumes both the art of the Bower and the art of Spenser’s language. Viewing Spenser’s poem through an ecocritical lens, I follow this scholarly tradition by reading representation of gardens and of the Bower of Bliss as commentaries on the distinct separation between the corruption of man and the authenticity of natural landscapes. While these scholars agree that the ecocritical approach illuminates the Bower’s dangerous veneer, I additionally argue that, by including a colonial perspective, my analysis carries with it an English fear of idleness and lack of labor that percolates from Spenser’s experience with colonialization. In The Faerie Queene: Book Two, the pristine essence of the natural, uninhibited land serves as both aesthetically pleasing as well as wild and tempting. Spenser juxtaposes pristine nature with constructed landscapes to distinguish the purity of the land from the danger of man-made contamination and idleness. Thus he illustrates English anxieties of idleness that stem from a built environment and stresses the necessity of utility over empty aesthetics in colonial expansion.

We’re Not Just a Team; We’re Also a Community: UO Poetry Slam Team

Presenter: Hannah Golden

Co-presenters: Alex Dang, Sarah Hovet, Sarah Menard, Dante Douglas

Mentor: Corbett Upton, English

Creative Work Presentation: C4 (Maple Room)

Majors: Journalism and Spanish 

The UO Poetry Slam (UOPS) was founded by Hannah Golden and Alexander Dang to build a community and audience for poetry on campus that embodies the inclusiveness and excitement of slam poetry. Poetry and language belong to all of us, not just a select few, and by foregrounding the form’s communal aspects, slam challenges hierarchical notions of what forms and experiences constitute art, specifically when it comes to poetry, and seeks to make poetry accessible to, and inclusive of, all voices, experiences, subjectivities. In this presentation, we will explain the origins of slam poetry and show how the form is distinguished from traditional poetry readings in both its ethics and its format, most obviously by the fact that poets’ work is limited to a 3-minute original poem scored on a 10-point scale by five judges randomly selected from the audience, and will conclude with performances by each slam team member. Additionally, we will detail the team’s journey to competing at the College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational (CUPSI), the top competition for college slam poets. In fall 2014, we held auditions, attracting a wide range of students, who competed in six bouts. After the dust settled, we had our team. Some of us had never performed or even written poetry before these tryouts. Throughout the process of recruiting and building a team that can be competitive anywhere in the state, we have held to our ideal of an inclusive, democratic community with an insistence on high-quality work and an atmosphere of mutual encouragement. We began the slam community here at UO to create a forum where all can express themselves – anyone can be a poet, and anyone can appreciate poetry. We are excited to show you our work now.

Money, Power, and Race: The US State’s Involvement in the Reproductive Lives of African American Women

Presenter: Dana Glasscock

Mentors: Jamie Bufalino, History; Corbett Upton, English

Oral Presentation

Majors: History and English

Within the United States, the relationship between the state and African American women’s reproductive roles has been complicated and contentious. In the brutal control of reproduction for profit within slavery the role of the state was to justify slave owners’ use of black women’s bodies without regard for the women’s choice. Contrasting this systemized reproduction for economic gain is the condemning attitude of the state toward African American women’s reproduction past reconstruction and into the 20th century through financially punitive and manipulative means including Welfare reforms, Social Services policies, and sterilization policies that disproportionally affected African American women as a result of lingering biases. In the context of the second half of the 20th century this role of the state was still economically motivated as an effort to avoid spending on mothers or children deemed less deserving. Legal and social historians including Linda Kerber and Dorothy Roberts have noted how the paternal and pejorative elements of state legislation and public efforts resemble the methods of manipulation found under slavery. Though the specifics of the state’s actions differ, examining the similarity in root justifications and their connections to legal and economic motivations of the state allows for clearer understanding of the tense relationship between the state and African American women’s reproduction. My work seeks to explore specific legal and political tactics, motivations, and implications of the role of the state in the lives and reproductive experiences of African American women, focusing on two periods of the US: slavery and the second half of the 20th century.

Sense of Place in Contemporary Female American Poets: Indigenous and Immigrant Voices

Presenter(s): Sarah Hovet − English, Journalism

Faculty Mentor(s): Corbett Upton

Oral Session 1SW

Research Area: Humanities

Funding: Humanities Undergraduate Research Fellowship

In current national discourse, what it means to be “American” has become a polarizing issue. In a country built on immigrant labor, the otherness of immigrants has become a point of extreme xenophobia, while indigenous culture continues to be erased. In this context, my research intends to explore the poetics of three Asian-American, Latinx, and indigenous American female poets, respectively, to determine how they construct senses of place in contemporary America and, in the words of Wilbur Zelinsky, how these women “see beyond the dominant culture” and establish counter-places within it. Focusing on Louise Erdrich, Ada Limón, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil as three case-studies, all poets well-recognized for the role of place within their work, this project will apply an array of lenses, political, environmental, and social, to determine the intersections of identity and place these poets trace. This project will examine the intersections of ethnicity and gender in order to understand how these poets present a particularly social or communal sense of place. Critical sources include selections from Wendell Berry’s Home Economics on environmentalism; texts devoted to an indigenous sense of place, such as Louise Erdrich’s Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country and works by Leslie Marmon Silko and Winona LaDuke; and essays by Doreen Massey and Janice Monk that address the role of gender in the construction of a sense of place. The purpose of my research is to create a richer and more inclusive understanding of the spectrum of American identity in contemporary poetics.

A River Runs Through: An Analysis Of Ken Kesey’s Sometimes A Great Notion Exploring the Mirroring of a Fictional River to the Flow of the Novel Through Syntax and Form

Presenter(s): Alison Hamilton − English

Faculty Mentor(s): Corbett Upton

Oral Session 3O

Research Area: Humanities, Literature

In this project I will be analyzing Ken Kesey’s novel Sometimes A Great Notion, and discussing how his stylistic choices and singular form bring the world of the novel to life, and highlight the significance of the river within the novel. This story finds its own flow and cohesion using first person, second person, and third person narration, while also switching between many different characters. Almost every character in the novel has their consciousness explored as we see the story from their perspective. We also encounter an omniscient third person noncharacter narrator who begins each section of the novel and occasionally interjects with their own thoughts. Throughout the novel Kesey changes his syntax and appearance of sentences and paragraphs to show the changes in character, perspective, and time. A glance at any page of the novel shows an abundance of differing appearances of the text: from italics, to parentheses, to punctuation, to font size. Using these tools Kesey gives the readers visual cues to who is speaking, what time it is, and what perspective is being presented. I Sometimes A Great Notion n, Kesey has managed to create a portrait of a town and its people. He shows how a river can connect people far and wide and through time, and he creates that river through his unique structure and narrative choices. I will show how the flow of the novel itself emulates the flow of the river within the story.

“Bannabees,” Bananas, and Sweet Potatoes: Claude McKay’s Songs of Jamaica and Traditional Jamaican Foodways as a Nationalist Expression

Presenter(s): Sarah Hovet

Faculty Mentor(s): Corbett Upton

Oral Session 1 M 

Jamaican poet Claude McKay is largely anthologized for a handful of poems he contributed to the Harlem Renaissance, but his early work authored in Jamaica has long been dismissed for a variety of racist and xenophobic reasons.This overlooked material includes his first two poetry collections, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads, both authored in Jamaica before he moved to New York. Even his friend, benefactor, and mentor Walter Jekyll characterized Songs of Jamaica as “naive” in his introduction to McKay’s complete poems. However, these two collections, which mix traditional English forms with Jamaican peasant dialect, constitute vital parts of McKay’s oeuvre. Songs of Jamaica in particular exhibits a mastery of Jamaican peasant dialect in combination with extensive allusions to traditional folkways in order to make an anticolonialist, nationalist assertion about Jamaica, the country McKay so loved. I will analyze the role of Jamaican peasant dialect and foodways in making this nationalist assertion in order to advance my claim that McKay’s early poetry is at least as sophisticated and versatile as his subsequent collections authored in the States. By turns, McKay praises native Jamaican crops such as the banana, sweet potato, and Bonavist bean for their gustatory, nutritional, and economic superiority to crops imported by colonialism.

The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems: A Haunting Maternal Presence in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Poetry

Presenter(s): Martha DeCosta—English (major) and Creative Writing (minor)

Faculty Mentor(s): Corbett Upton

Session 3: Beyond a Melody

The image of the ideal mother as a self-sacrificial caretaker for her children echoes in Edna St . Vincent Millay’s Pulitzer Prize winning poem “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver”: “She sang as she worked, / And the harp-strings spoke; Her voice never faltered, / And the thread never broke .” Although deserving of its high praise and reception, this sentimental ballad’s appearance in The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems collection seems somewhat incongruous, given the nature with which Millay’s other poems explore the roles of motherhood . She depicts speakers who regard children, or the absence of children, with detachment and pity for their unsettled lives, reinforcing underlying anxiety or association with death and suffering . This volume deals with darker themes such as domestic violence, neglect, and imagined realities, embodying various forms of motherhood and not a traditional depiction of gentleness and love . Much of the excitement and the controversy surrounding Millay focuses on her bisexuality and compelling voice for the early twentieth century’s New Woman . However, critical lenses historically discuss her poetic themes in connection with her biographical background . They leave unexplored gaps in their research by minimalizing or overlooking her poetic representations of alternate women’s roles . To enhance and expand the larger and perhaps limited literary discourse about motherhood in The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems, I analyze Millay’s portrayal of a haunting maternal presence throughout this unique volume .