Tag: Helen Southworth

Woolf and Tolkien: The Significance of Literary Illustration

Presenter: Tyler Lantz

Mentor: Helen Southworth

AM Poster Presentation

Poster 23

British essayist and novelist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was a notable literary presence in the Modernist literary movement of the early 20th century. In her 1919 short story Kew Gardens, Woolf’s texts are accompanied by her sister and acclaimed artist Vanessa Bell’s illustrations. Bell was a critically acclaimed painter of the time, and was often compared to male artists of her time, such as to the painter William Blake by critic Diane Gillespie in her 1988 essay “The Sister’s Arts”. The importance of illustration to Woolf’s writing can be compared to J.R.R. Tolkien’s self-illustrated 1937 fantasy novel The Hobbit. There are some notable similarities between Tolkien and Woolf’s motivation for including illustrations in their works. First, both Tolkien and Bell’s simple ink drawings provide a subtle guidance to the stories without compromising the imagination of the reader. Second, both sets of illustrations provide a distinctive accompaniment to the tone and intentions of the works. Woolf’s friend and colleague Roger Fry addresses the significance of literary illustration in his 1926 “Transformations: Critical and Speculative Essays on Art”.

Early Medieval Perceptions of the Environment: A Wondrous, Weird, Supernatural Land

Presenter: Becca Marshall

Mentors: Michael Peixoto, Honors College History; Helen Southworth, Literature

Oral Presentation

Major: Environmental Studies 

In the past religious concepts of creation mediated a relationship between humans and their surrounding environment. During the early Middle Ages literature and the presence of the Church in the landscape worked in conversation with biblical and metaphorical interpretations of nature to shape humans’ perception of their place in the environment. The central role of religion and its influence on environmental depictions emerges in chiliastic sources, such as Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Within these texts lands and specific sites are imbued with religious/divine qualities and values. Additionally, a large amount of environmental mentions in monastic annals depict wondrous and fantastical events. Which provides insight into the significance of these happenings for the people of the medieval period. Along with this, the work of Ellen F. Arnold on monastic culture in the Ardennes forest suggests a diverse understanding of monks connection to nature including their views of the natural world as a wilderness, a source of human salvation, and even as a pastoral heaven. Other important depictions of the land and its association to the supernatural exist in poetry, medieval folklore, and popular stories such as Beowulf. All of these literary mediums frequently contain religious undertones and illustrate ways in which people are connecting to the land. Medieval cosmological views framed a world that moved ever closer toward the last judgment and the ultimate end of the world. This teleological focus, particularly prevalent in millenarian and quasi-historical writing, situated/informed man’s encounters with nature as fundamentally ephemeral while also imbuing them with deep symbolic significance. By analyzing chiliastic and literary sources from the early middle ages my research presents the way in which the literature and religion in the early Middle Ages worked in tandem to inform the peoples’ perception of the environment. Hence, a greater sense of humans’ tenor of life at this time can be unearthed by examining the multi- dimensional role of nature-as their physical abode, and as a symbol of the divine and the harsh, unforgiving reality of existence.

Borges: Time, Nostalgia, and Modernity in Evaristo Carriego

Presenter: Felicia Hamilton

Faculty Mentor: Mayra Bottaro, Helen Southworth

Presentation Type: Oral

Primary Research Area: Humanities

Major: Romance Languages

What is the purpose of nostalgia in literature? How does it respond to modernity? And what is its function as a temporal tool? These are the driving questions behind my research, which will focus on Evaristo Carriego, an early work by Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges. This eponymous biographical work serves more to paint a picture of Buenos Aires in development than to chronicle the life of the man himself. Borges uses popular and historical mythologies to construct a mythic image of the neighborhood Palermo during the early twentieth century. Because of this, the work is often read as a “pre-text”, that is, a history that the rest of Borges’ writings would reference. I aim to build on this, examining how this particular work creates counternarratives to modernity. I propose the idea that nostalgia (a sentiment born of temporal or spatial distance) is a key tool in the timelines of and counter to modernity. Beyond simply reading and explaining Carriego as a pre-text, I hope to draw broader conclusions about the impact of various iterations of time in a modern and postmodern culture.