RSS 2011 Program

 

Thursday 6:00-7:15

Reception welcoming the participants

7:30-9:00

Daniel Cavicchi, Professor of American Studies, Rhode Island School of Design, “Fandom Before 'Fan':

Shaping the History of Enthusiastic Audiences”

 

Friday

8:00-9:15

1. Reception in the Classroom

Chair,  Robin Gallaher

Marcus Meade, “Reintroduction to Literature: Course Goals and Reception of Popular Texts”

Stancy Bond, “To Read or to Do: Student Comprehension of Teacher Feedback”

Catherine Clark,  Outlier Writers: Writing Expectations and First-Generation Students”

 

2. Negotiations in the Nineteenth Century and Beyond

Chair,  Shirley Samuels,

Sharon Hunter, “On Lydia Maria Child’s Earlier Fiction”

Sydney Bufkin, “Sensation, Sympathy, and Disgust: Competing Affective Responses in the Reception o

f Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle

 

9:30-10:45

3. Race, Region, Reception: The U.S. South and Its Audiences

Chair,  Paul Dahlgren

Jeremy Wells, “How magazine and newspaper reviewers responded to Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s

Army Life in a Black Regiment (1869)”

Sarah E. Gardner, “On Lyle Saxon’s 1937 novel Children of Strangers

Emily Satterwhite, “South-as-Other, South-as-Self: Ethnicized Appalachia and Mission, Tourism, and Identity

in Fan Mail about Christy (1967)”

 

4.  Who’s your Mammy? Critical Responses to Tyler Perry, For Colored Girls, and “Meet the Browns”

Chair, Patsy Schweickart

Stephanie A. Allen, “Who’s your Mammy? Tyler Perry and the Limits of Black Spectatorship”

Heather Finch, “Looking like you looking”: Representations of Southern Black Men in Tyler

Perry’s Meet the Browns

Lydia Magras, “Whose Audience?  A Look At For Colored Girls: Nearly 35 years later and

considering Tyler Perry”

 

11:00-12:15

5. Lost in Translation

Chair, Joseph Sullivan

Jonathan Stalling, “Validation or Contamination: Does Chinese Literature need Western Readers?”

Liangyu Fu, “Reading Western Notes: Visual Presentation and cultural Complexities of Translated

Music in China during the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries”

Jarrod Stringer, “Shakespeare’s Poe-tic Stamp on American Articulation of the Precariousness of Life”

 

6.  Producing Reception

Chair, Phil Goldstein

Sharon McQueen, “The Story of The Story of Ferdinand: The Reception of a Classic and the

Creation of a Cultural Icon”

Cecily Garber, “Rose Macaulay’s Publishers and the Pluralist Public Sphere”

Kinohi Nishikawa, “Negotiating The Negotiations: How a Black Book Didn’t Cross Over”

 

12:30-1:30: lunch

 

1:30-2:45

7. The Library as a Site of Reception: Marginalized Readers and the Limitations of Literacy

Chair, Phil Goldstein

Barbara Hochman, “Failed Promises of Literacy: Nella Larsen's Booklist” 

Emily Drabinski, Reading Lesbians in the Library”

Jane Greer, “Rural Receptions: Literacy, Libraries, and Literature in the Moonlight Schools”

 

8. Public & Private America

Chair, Jim Machor

Gillian Silverman, “The Time of Reading”

Vanessa Steinroetter, “Dead Letters, Absent Bodies, and the Uncertainty of (Re-)Union:

Representations of Letter Reading in American Literature of the Civil War”

Olga Kuminova, “The Virtual Reader-Author Relationship and the Nourishment of Subjectivity in

HBS’s Letters to George Eliot”

 

9. Readers as collectors

Chair, Joseph Sullivan

Elizabeth Lenaghan, “Media’s Material MeaningsL Book Collectors as ‘Alternative’

Audience”

Tom Koenigs, “The Commonplace Waldern: Commonplace Notebooks and the History of

Reading in Antebellum New England”

Joseph Sullivan, “Our Controlling Metaphor: Shakespeare’s Complete Works as ‘Secular Bible’”

 

3:00-4:15

10. A roundtable discussion of Jim Machor’s Reading Fiction in Antebellum America

Phil Goldstein

Barbara Hochman

Amy Blair

Patsy Schweickart

 

4:30-5:45

Shirley Samuels, Flora Rose House Professor and Dean, Cornell University, “Reading

 the American Novel, 1780-1850”

 

6:30-8:30: cookout at Mozingo Lake

 

Saturday

8:00-9:00: Business meeting

 

9:00-10:15

11. Contemporary Cinema

Chair, Walter Metz

Rebecca Gordon, “The Girl With the Killer Archive: Photomontage and Viewer

Experience”

Amanda Nell Edgar, “Never Say Never: Bieber Fever and the Re-gendering of the

American Dream”

Melissa Click, “Taking a Bite Out of the Twilight Fandom: Exploring fans’ active and

passive responses to the vampire franchise

12. The Long 18th Century

Chair, Jim Machor

Michael Davey, “Cooper’s The Pioneers: Novels, Readers and Class in the American

Long Eighteenth Century.”

Bryan Mangano, “‘Amicable Halves’: Enlightenment Friendship in Eighteenth-Century

Authorship”

May Sung, “Blake and Surrealism”

 

13. Reading the feminine

Chair, Cecilia Konchar Farr

Ashley Barner, “‘Penny is Panicking’: Evaluations of Realism in Fan Culture”

Shannon Thomas, “Perfectly Feminine: the Atlantic Monthly’s Male Poetess”

Lesley Larkin, “Erasing Precious:  Reading Percival Everett Reading Sapphire”

 

10:30-11:45

14. First Person Narratives across Genres and Media

Chair: Ildi Olasz

Nikki Delp, “To Tell the Truth”: Reader Deception in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

Adam Drici, “This Statement is True: Your Reading is False”: Rereading Metanarration in P

hilip Roth and David Foster Wallace

Matthew Loudon, “Just the Way She Is: Text/Film Authenticity and Reception in Bridget

Jones’s Diary

 

15. Cinema and Reception

Chair, Walter Metz

David Blanke, “Stardom, Studios, and Spectacle: A Case Study of Audience Reception

in Early Hollywood”

Eirik Frisvold Hanssen, “Auteur Gazing: Notions of Spectatorship and Auteurism in Fan

Mail to Film Directors”

Walter Metz, “Men Who Hate Cinema and the Critics Who Love Them”

 

16. Reading in the Academy

Chair, Paul Dahlgren

Charlotte Templin, “How Irony Happens: The Ironist, the Text, and the Reader”

Tobias Meinel, “From the Ivory Tower to the Iconoclast Reader: Reading Practices in the

Academy Since 1945.”

Jennifer Lozano, “Reading Into Things: The Intersections of Latino/a Literature, Identity

and Activism among Latino/a studies Faculty”

 

12:00-1:00: lunch

 

1:00-2:15

Jonathan Gray, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison,

“The Audience of the Rest of the Text: Hype, Spinoffs, Extratexts, Paratexts, and Reception”

 

2:30-4:00

17. Frustrated Expectations, Misreading, Genre Technologies

Genevieve West, Chair

Kelly Mathews, “The Road of Good Intentions: Trust and Loathing in Flannery O’Connor’s

‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’”

Jeremy Gulley, “Beckett and Basketball– Playing the Game of Structuralism

Ildi Olasz, “Genre Conventions across Centuries: The Changing Reception of Mystery

and Detective Elements”

Genevieve West, “Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Bits’ and the Problem of Genre”

 

18. Focus on Format

Chair, Cecilia Konchar Farr

Katie McCollough, Borderlines:  Blog Reading as a Site for Creative Activity

Molly Travis, “The Future of Reading: the Book as App.”

 

19. Television Reception Studies

Chair, Walter Metz

Holly Holladay and Lars Kristiansen, “Let's Hug It Out, Bitch: An audience reception study

of hegemonic masculinity in Entourage

Pedro Curi, “How Global is Global Consumption?: Brazilian fans watching American TV”

HyunJi Lee, “Developing Identities:  An online ethnography of the Gossip Girl fan community

in Korea”

 

4:15-5:30

20. “The Present Future of Reception Studies

Chair, Jim Machor

Paul Dahlgren – “Badiou as a reception theorist”

Phil Goldstein – “How to Read Fiction”

Jim Machor -- "The Present (and Future?) State of Reception Studies."

 

21. Film and Media Reception Studies

Chair, Walter Metz

Brian Myers, “Gender, Guns, and Gestures: Understandings of Humiliation in the Halo

Video Game Series”

Anne Gilbert, “How Comic Con Institutionalized Audience Subcultures and Fan Practices ”

Jackie Gold, “Elephant Boys and Slumdogs: British Responses to Films about India in the

Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries

 

6:30-9:00: Banquet