Tag: Forest Pyle

Aestheticism: A Curious Crucible of Pain and Pleasure

Presenter: Sean Pebler

Mentors: Forrest Pyle and Corbett Upton, English

Oral Presentation

Major: English 

Walter Pater’s “The School of Giorgione” appealed to me because it addressed a concern I had with aesthetic texts. Most texts largely ignore the sensory training it requires to behold an aesthetic experience. I refuse to believe that art can attack just the senses alone. This theory would necessarily mean that each person is as capable of experiencing extraordinary aesthetics as the next. While this idea- utilitarian in concept- is appealing, I believe it takes some previous ability to apprehend notions of Beauty. I was struck by this realization while walking away from class a few days ago. It came after we had discussed Pater’s essay, specifically the notion that all art aspires towards musical qualities. While walking and listening to Beethoven: Piano Concerto #1, I began to view objects as if music were emanating from them. Not only did I view plants and buildings this way, but human interaction as well. It was this synesthesia, this mixing of the aural and visual that prompted goose bumps in me. What could possibly be wrong with such unexpected, tingling joy?

Another Girl Bites the Dust: Motherhood and Futurity at the End

Presenter(s): Megan Schenk − English

Faculty Mentor(s): Forest Pyle, Casey Shoop

Oral Session 2O

Research Area: English (Humanities)

Funding: Presidential and Summit Scholarships

A post-apocalyptic setting is a particularly potent arena for sexist narratives precisely because such an environment allows the author control over depicting how people will naturally act when stripped of modern conventions in order to survive. “Masculine” traits often appear favorable if not necessary to survival in the midst of a futuristic wasteland, while “feminine” qualities like hysteria, sentimentality, and domesticity deem an individual submissive, weak, and utterly incapacitated. Within these exaggerated patriarchal structures, women are simultaneously linked to a failing, stagnant past while providing the only true form of creation: motherhood. My research focuses on how women writers like Megan Hunter, Claire Vaye Watkins, and Louise Erdrich confront and repurpose certain apocalyptic tropes to force readers to reevaluate preconceived notions about male dominance, femininity, and motherhood, specifically in interaction with a post-apocalyptic environment. By engaging with existing literature on gendered heroics in apocalyptic media, intersectional feminist histories in speculative fiction, feminist theory in futurism studies, and the representation of motherhood in popular film and literature, I illuminate how these authors demonstrate that the nurturing of motherhood, not masculinity, is the ultimate means of conquering a decaying world. My research contributes to the important and growing feminist criticism of popular media that works to reveal how we think about the world and how that might (and hopefully, will) change.

The Experience of Hyperobjects: From Percy Shelley to the 21st Century Instagram User

Presenter(s): Tucker Engle—English

Faculty Mentor(s): Forest Pyle

Session 1: Oh, the Humanities!

My project performs a comparative and analytical study of the romantic poetry of the 19th century, in particular that of Percy Bysse Shelley, with contemporary literature and digital texts of today . Examples of contemporary texts my project will examine are the 2018 film Eighth Grade (dir . Bo Burnham), the 2017 poetry book Nature Poem by Tommy Pico, and Douglas Rushkoff’s 2013 work Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, among others . I bring the cultural and literary criticism of the 20th century in as an intermediary between these two distinct literary eras and traditions . The project focuses on the work of the critical work of theorists such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Giles Deleuze, and Fredric Jameson to accomplish this end . Each of these moving parts is strung together by Timothy Morton’s concept of Hyperobjects and ecological thinking . My work shows how the internet and technologies which produce culture today have created manifested as Hyperobjects which greatly occupy the artistic bandwidth of the modern subject . The relationship with self and culture experienced by poets in the romantic period has erupted to exist everywhere in the Internet age . Through building on the work of the 20th century cultural theorists and Shelley’s poetry, I will begin to piece together what this all means for the 21st century reader and critic .