Antagonistic River: Reading Nature through Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion

Presenter(s): Scott Zeigler

Faculty Mentor(s): Gordon Sayre & Stephanie LeMenager

Oral Session 1 SW

This research evaluates the representation of the fictional Wakonda Auga River as a character in Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel Sometimes a Great Notion. By investigating Kesey’s personal journals and correspondence, I show how Kesey took his native Oregon, the natural world in which he lived, and wrote it into his story. Rivers are traditionally viewed in English literature as a component of setting or as a metaphorical representation of some human dilemma. Occasionally, a fantastical work gives nature agency by applying human characteristics like speech or movement or some combination thereof. Yet, a river is a force unto itself, and it interacts with the human animal in its own ways, both positively and negatively. Ecocriticism offers a method for exploring how rivers can be given agency without adding anthropocentric characteristics. Through the ecocritical theoretical lens, readers can evaluate the natural components of a text, understand the figurative or metaphoric meanings, and still read nature for its powerful literal meaning. I will use this lens to evaluate the text and show how Kesey represented the Wakonda Auga River in the novel as both a fictive place, one based on the actual Siuslaw River, and as an antagonistic character in conflict with other characters in the story. By reading Sometimes a Great Notion in this way, readers gain access to the historical world of Kesey’s Oregon and the fictive world of an Oregon mill town in the 1960s, and they are encouraged to explore today the natural places associated with both.

Caliban Yisrael: Constructing Caliban as the Jewish Other in Shakespeare’s the Tempest

Presenter(s): Deforest Wihtol

Faculty Mentor(s): Kate Myers

Oral Session 1 SW

This paper seeks to introduce new data into the centuries-long discussion of William Shakespeare’s portrayal of Jewish people through intertextual and close reading of Shakespeare’s plays The Tempest and The Merchant of Venice, sections from the Geneva Bible, and primary documents discussing Anglo-Jewish life in the Elizabethan era.

Shakespeare’s relationship to and purported views of Jewish people have been scrutinized for centuries. However, almost all conclusions put forth by scholars about Shakespeare and his ties to Elizabethan Jewish communities and anti-Semitism have been drawn from one work, The Merchant of Venice. Merchant contains Shakespeare’s only explicitly Jewish characters, Shylock and his daughter, Jessica, although she happily converts to Christianity. In this paper, I propose that Shakespeare has an implicitly Jewish character lurking in The Tempest: Caliban, the play’s main antagonist, a native to the island, and Prospero and Miranda’s slave. I will support the interpretation of Caliban as a Jewish-coded figure through cross-reading The Tempest with The Merchant of Venice, sections of the Geneva Bible, and non-fiction testimonials from English residents during and before the Elizabethan era. Using both these plays alongside other scholarly and historical texts, I will bring cultural and historical context to these portrayals in order to explore a deeper understanding of the complicated and nuanced portrayals of Judaism in Shakespeare’s work and the dynamics of modern scholarship on Shakespeare’s relationship to Judaism.

The Unofficial Story and the People Who Paint It: An Investigation of Urban Art’s Mobilizing Power in Oaxaca and Mexico City

Presenter(s): Kendra Siebert

Oral Session 1 SW

Although parietal writing – the act of writing on walls – has existed for thousands of years, its contemporary archetype, urban art, emerged much more recently. An umbrella term for the many kinds of art that occupy public spaces – graffiti, murals, stencils, etc. – urban art can be accessed by whoever chooses to look at it, and has roots in the Mexican muralism movement that began in Mexico City and spread to other states like Oaxaca.

Over the course of three years, I have been developing my undergraduate thesis, which looks into the Mexican Revolution and the origins of the Mexican muralism movement, before narrowing in on the function of urban art – specifically in times of unrest. In both 1968 and 2006, two points in Mexico’s recent history that birthed national social movements, urban art emerged as a visual form of testimony when other outlets like public radio became restricted and censored. Today, it continues to take on new forms and meanings, reflects culture from a different perspective than that of the government, leaders, corporations, etc.: that of the people.

I first traveled to Mexico City and Oaxaca for three weeks in August 2017 to investigate this topic, and returned on a follow-up trip this past winter term. My objective has remained the same since I first started exploring this topic: to bring the voices and unique perspectives of contemporary Mexican artists to people in other parts of the world. To accomplish this, I conducted one-on-one interviews with more than 25 urban artists in Oaxaca and Mexico City and asked questions ranging from “What do you think is the function of urban art” to “Is all art in the public space inherently political?” I also dove deeply into the existing body of relevant literature, toured museums and national monuments, and embedded myself in the artistic community as best as I could.

Additionally, I created a digital archive of photographs from 2017 and 2019 that highlight the changes I myself have witnessed on walls in Oaxaca and Mexico City. Through the various methodological approaches I have used in this project, I have identified four functions urban art can, and has served, in Oaxaca and Mexico City: 1) It can act as a form of identity affirmation – one that reflects everyday people, regardless of status or affiliation; 2) It places cultural testimony in public spaces; 3) When combined with other approaches, it can lead to social mobilization; 4) in the aftermath of a movement, it can preserve the collective memory, rather than a dominant hegemonic narrative.

My objective is to challenge common perceptions surrounding urban art and encourage people to go see these works for themselves. It was made possible thanks to support from UROP and HURF.

The Role of Intonation in Japanese Politeness

Presenter(s): Allene Shaw

Faculty Mentor(s): Kaori Idemaru

Oral Session 1 SW

The purpose of this study is to examine linguistic relationships between phonetics (the way people sound) and politeness in Japanese. Prior studies investigated voice characteristics in Japanese deferential speech (addressed to persons of superior social status) and non-deferential speech (used with persons of equal or inferior status). They found that the Japanese language exploits phonetic features to express politeness (Idemaru et al, forthcoming). Their study, however, observed overall intonation for entire utterances. I propose to conduct a more detailed analysis of their data, by dividing utterances into meaningful phrases in order to determine where in a sentence intonation is employed to express politeness. Understanding how and where important social cues like politeness are embedded in speech is critical for understanding how communications work in Japanese society and also for developing language and cultural fluency, particularly for non-native language learners.

Traditional research on politeness typically focused on type of words and grammatical features used to communicate politeness in various languages. However, a new wave of research began examining other dimensions such as voice characteristics and gestures (e.g., Winter and Grawunder, 2012; Brown et al 2014; Idemaru et al., forthcoming) with the theoretical view that speakers employ multiple politeness strategies to ensure successful communication. Their results indeed demonstrate that multiple linguistic and non-linguistic features contribute to produce the intended meaning of politeness. This study attempts to advance these efforts further. I will use the same data analyzed in Idemaru et al. (forthcoming) to measure and analyze important acoustic features (pitch, intensity, voice quality) at critical regions within words or phrases. This study will yield a more accurate understanding of the phonetic basis for one of the most fundamental Japanese social cues – politeness.

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.

Migration and Ideas of “Foreignness” in the Late Bronze Age Near East

Presenter(s): Alice Harding

Faculty Mentor(s): Lindsey Mazurek

Oral Session 1 SW

This project (serving as an undergraduate thesis) will explore migration in the Bronze Age Near East. It will focus specifically on times in which migrants emphasized their own “foreignness,” arguing that this most often occurred when such difference would be beneficial. The Amarna letters—correspondence between the rulers of several Bronze Age kingdoms, notably Egypt and Babylonia—mention the movement of people such as craftsmen and royal women to other polities, illustrating the importance of migration for international relations. Despite these mentions, most scholarship focuses exclusively on Bronze Age kings and their priorities. This project aims to combine archaeology with literature to offer a new, more holistic approach. It will focus on four types of migrants often omitted from previous works: craftsmen, brides, forced migration (as of captives), and even gods.

These people’s perspectives differ noticeably from those of the kings—the elite male view, in other words—that is most often discussed in relation to the world of the Amarna letters. The case studies can reframe our understandings of these groups: rather than being those making decisions and deciding their own movements, these groups were most often controlled by those with power. This project thus aims to re-examine narratives of Near Eastern mobility during the Bronze Age through these groups and their migrations, and offer new perspectives that complement existing histories.

Negotiating Freedoms: Women Experiencing Homelessness in Eugene, OR

Presenter(s): Violet Fox

Faculty Mentor(s): Lamia Karim

Oral Session 1 SW

Why is there such an increase in homelessness, particularly among women, in the United States? I propose to study this phenomenon among homeless women in Eugene, OR. Recent scholarship and federal counts of homelessness show that the number of homeless people has been steadily increasing since the 1980s, with a sizable increase in women and their children. Research from Europe, Canada, and large U.S. cities show the insecurities that women face living on the streets are different than men’s and in the last 10-20 years frameworks have emerged to better understand their lives. Oregon, however, has one of the largest homeless counts in the country, currently ranking fourth in the nation but has little to no targeted qualitative or ethnographic research on women. Women’s unique social vulnerabilities and responsibilities make their experiences an important site of study in order to understand the causes of homelessness, as well as to offer pragmatic solutions. This is an urban anthropological research project that is composed of (a) archival research on public policy changes from 1980s onward in Eugene as well as existing relevant theoretical literature; (b) oral histories from 5 homeless women as to the causes and experiences of homelessness: and (c) interviews with the directors of three homeless shelters in the city of Eugene.

The objectives are to examine the causes of women’s homelessness in America, Oregon, and Eugene, as well as analyze and give voice to the gendered experiences and impacts of homelessness on women. My preliminary reading of the literature shows that women experience homelessness due to domestic violence, inability to pay medical and rental bills, and mental illness. However, there are also women who never expected to be homeless due to middle-class lifestyle that they lost unexpectedly.

My research will explore key reasons for homelessness in Eugene, OR as expressed by the interviewed women and shelter personnel, as well as compare how homeless women navigate between the unstructured street life and the highly structured shelter life, and if that is a handicap to their assimilation into the housed world. I have three current hypothesis; one is that the women will express feeling stifled by the restrictions and policing of shelter life, two is that the women will feel frustration at the absence of a transitional “wet shelter” in Eugene (as opposed to a dry shelter), and three that shelter personnel will confirm that women are an increasing demographic in Eugene, as well as the greater state of Oregon and country of America.

Dialect Variation in English: An Investigation into the Disappearing Word Effect

Presenter(s): Cydnie Davenport

Faculty Mentor(s): Melissa Baese-Berk

Oral Session 1 SW

Recent research (e.g., Dilley & Pitt, 2010) has demonstrated that manipulation of speech rate influences listeners’ perception of syllables in English. For example, when a sentence like “Don must see the harbor or boats” is spoken quickly, the portion “harbor or” can blend together, creating an utterance that is ambiguous with a sentence like “Don must see the harbor boats.” Slowing down the surrounding speech rate can cause a listener’s perception of the sentence to switch from the harbor or boats version to the harbor boats version. When listeners hear a slower speaking rate, they expect to hear fewer words than when they hear a faster rate, an effect described as the “context speech rate effect.” This behavior has only been investigated in “standard” American English, not in dialects that may differ in terms of their pronunciation and how they can be perceived. Research has also not yet considered how social context influences this effect. This project asked how various dialects of American English impact spoken word segmentation. This is critically important because dialect information in someone’s speech can result in both social judgments, and can significantly impact how speech is understood. By investigating how various dialects interact with cognitive mechanisms like this context speech rate effect, we also raise the question of how social and cognitive factors interact during human communication.