Tag: Mark Whalan

James Baldwin Across Literary Forms

Presenter: Samuel Rodgers

Faculty Mentor: Courtney Thorsson, Mark Whalan

Presentation Type: Oral

Primary Research Area: Humanities

Major: English, Economics

Funding Source: Humanities Undergraduate Research Fellowship, Oregon Humanities Center, $2500

My research focuses on the work of 20th-century American author and activist James Baldwin. Fifty years after his career started, our country is still facing a deeply troubling racial divide, and we consistently turn to Baldwin’s words to reconcile this divide, rather than the words of his contemporaries. Broadly, I wanted to know why. Specifically, I posit that this lasting political utility and cultural relevance stems from Baldwin’s adaptability to the various literary forms he uses to address these complex ideas around race and identity. I highlight three forms throughout my project, and analyze the ways in which Baldwin adapts the same general arguments to each.

The first section, on Baldwin’s Another Country, argues that the novel’s central metaphor of indebtedness is crucial for understanding Baldwin’s enduring approach to racial hatred. In the second section, I read two films that Baldwin appears in as extensions of his written work, and explicate the ways that these public appearances reiterate the underlying political element of his writing. The final section is on non-fiction, and here I draw comparisons between The Fire Next Time and Ta-Nahisi Coates’ 2015 book Between the World and Me. The collective goal of these three sections is to illustrate Baldwin’s rhetorical versatility, account for his current political utility, and redirect his value back into the literary context in which it originated.

Literary Racialization: The Function of Children in Southern Gothic Literature

Presenter(s): Anika Nykanen

Faculty Mentor(s): Mark Whalan

Oral Session 1 SW

Children, who occupy a unique position as creatures of innocence in the American psyche, have haunted the pages of American Gothic literature from its inception, vulnerable figures in whom cultural and psychological anxieties find fecund ground. As such, they have featured critically in racial discourses as well, from slavery and abolition to Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement. Gothic literature’s exploration of the dark, antagonistic elements of the human mind enables Southern Gothic writers to examine the violent underbelly of the American dream—the removal of indigenous peoples, slavery, and white supremacy—with unique license. This project investigates how relatively underexamined Modern Southern Gothic works such as Eudora Welty’s “Delta Cousins” and Richard Wright’s “Big Boy Leaves Home” reimagine American Gothic’s traditional depiction of race in the South as “the specter of otherness”(Ellen Weinauer, Cambridge Companion to Gothic Literature) by portraying the racialization of children. From the foreclosure of black male childhood to the adopted innocence of white girlhood, Gothic children become a device by which the South’s history of racism, playing out in the lives of literary children, is critically explored. I will examine the work of these authors with a variety of lenses— gothic, historical, racial, and modernistic—looking at Teresa Goddu’s Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation, Fred Botting’s Gothic, Robin Bernstein’s Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, as well as the seminal Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison.