SOURCE 2019

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Kell Jacobson - Unexplored Worlds and Familiar Territories: Subversion and Reinforcement in the Tempest and Other Works
In this paper I argue that, beginning with Shakespeare’s The Tempest, fiction and science-fiction have used unexplored and untouched locales as a geographical tabula rasa where contemporaneous hopes and prejudices are overlaid and examined. Science fiction, owing a debt to The Tempest, both subverts and reinforces settler-colonialism in its treatment of unexplored locales, using the tropes and motifs of the genre to decenter the reader. This paper traces a direct lineage from Shakespeare’s The Tempest to Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau and explores a film adaptation of each work. I argue each work uses an ‘exotic’ and decentered location to examine, subvert, and simultaneously reinforce settler-colonialism in their respective historical contexts. Wells’ 1896 novel subverts Victorian mores and social Darwinism, while reinforcing Western civilization’s intellectual superiority. 1956’s The Forbidden Planet thrusts American imperialism and hegemony into the 23rd century, while exploring humankind’s intrinsically primal nature. Finally, the paper discusses the 1996 film The Island of Dr. Moreau, which exemplifies late-capitalism and postcolonialism, yet reinforces Western anxieties of civil unrest in burgeoning economies. Each of these works both entrench and depart from the colonialist ideologies of their respective eras, building upon the Tempest’s use of the ‘untouched’ island as a staging ground to examine human nature, ethics, language, and technology.

Benjamin Jelinek - Ghosts of the Tortured Past: Foucauldian Themes in “An Eddy on the Floor”
his paper argues that fictional literary texts, especially obscure ones, can function as windows into history much the same as classic historical documents. In this case, Bernard Capes’ ghost story “An Eddy on the Floor” shows the reader firsthand how the penal landscape of the 17th-19th centuries was changing from one based off of corporal punishment to one of spiritual reform, coinciding with a rise in idealism more generally, hence the ghost story format, a very popular medium of the time. These ideas are placed into context via Michel Foucault's theories outlined in Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison, where he observes how, throughout the Georgian-Victorian eras, punishment morphed from that of the body as public spectacle to that of the mind being reformed behind closed doors. In short, the paper examines how his ideas of power and knowledge which completely altered the prison and reformatory systems can be found in literary texts that were being written at the time of these changes. Finally, the possibility of a value-judgment of these changes is speculated upon.

Michaela Barrett - The Companionship and Consumption of Animals; Can They Coexist?
As Donna Haraway proposes, animal rights and human relationships produce contradictory sets of relationships, where animals are companions who can also be consumed for their flesh and labour. As Haraway proposes “There cannot be just one companion species; there have to be at least two to make one” (12). Following Haraway, I argue that animals, specifically dogs, can be companions as well as consumed by their human counterparts, but that we must differentiate between positive and negative forms of consumption. I specifically use Grant Morrison’s comic series We3 to examine how forms of animal consumption does not affect their ability to be companions, providing this consumption is not unidirectional and does not render animals as devoid of inherent purpose.  We3  follows the adventure of a dog named 1, a cat named 2, and a bunny named 3. The animal companions are bioengineered to be used as military slaves, but escape certain death, and eventually become companions to a human who positively consumes their distinction and intellect for companionship. In this sense, We3, I argue, extends Haraway’s ideas that animals are thought to lack purpose until they are bestowed with intention, which creates a separation between human beings and animals, and places humans at a higher position in the social hierarchy. I ultimately propose that We3 conveys that although animals can be consumed by humans in a negative way, positive and mutual forms of consumption can coexist within animal-human companionship, which highlights the complexities in the social atmosphere of animal lives.