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Saturday's Schedule of Events

Please note: Some panels are running concurrently. See the specific Zoom link associated with your session. 

Panel 9: Saturday, 8:00 - 9:30 AM EST

The Pleasures of Narrative Inutility: Limits, Uses, and Potentialities

  • Ben Hoover (he/him), Indiana University Bloomington

    • ​“The Second Shepherds’ Play, the Critique of Pretension, and the Limits of Inutility” 

      • Abstract: The Second Shepherds' Play negotiates a desire for inutility with the expressed need for intra-estate cohesion. This mediation manifests in a playful critique—expressed via the Shepherds' retributive, albeit mocking, punishment of Mak—of pretension to more prestigious social identities. Such retribution re-inscribes socio-economic boundaries—locating social grief not only with hegemonic structures of power that risk the bodies of rural laborers, but also with individualistic pursuits of status. Nonetheless, as the narrative of the play realigns from farce to the biblical story of the nativity, the shepherds come to embody the position of the magi, offering gifts to the infant Christ. In this final moment, shepherds become kings, surpassing the limits of Mak’s social climbing, and, in their beseeching of infant’s favor, the three take comfort in reciprocal community rather than harmful exploitation.​
         

  • Hannah Lee (she/her), Indiana University Bloomington

    • "Planting Labor and Leisure in Andrew Marvell’s 'The Garden'”​

      • Abstract: In Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden,” the peaceful idleness of the garden provides a sanctuary for the poem’s speaker, who is free from the urban English cityscape. Marvell’s “The Garden” is a pastoral setting; the garden is an idyllic representation of rural life in which the misanthropic speaker can luxuriate in an Arcadian enclosure. The garden creates its own network of labor and productivity to maintain the pastoral fantasy. This paper suggests that Marvell’s pastoral garden is a space that requires its ecosystem to be a site of productivity and labor while providing the human with a place that is outside of time and beyond an understanding of the physical world.​

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  • Grace Miller (she/her), Indiana University Bloomington

    • "Laboro Ergo Sum: Plotting Refusal in My Year of Rest and Relaxation’s Antinovellic Turn to Sleep"

      • Abstract: Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation tells a story of refusing time; it is an example of the contemporary “antinovel” whose unnamed heroine attempts to sleep for a year-- aided by a cacophony of prescription medications-- in an attempt to embody her alienation, and paradoxically heal her tedium. This Ambien-soaked protagonist is not an anomaly, but rather exemplary of a deliberately (un)conscious turn in contemporary fictions reacting to the maladies of postcapitalism. Thematically, Moshfegh’s narrator’s desire to herself lose track of time embodies the antinovel’s refusal of plot itself-- the prose becomes an irony-filled, ephemeral negation of the linear narrative structure of the high modernist novel. Administering a kind of Victorian rest cure by nature of its temporal incoherence, the antinovel performs a forced regard to the space outside of novel time. In other words, in seeking to loose track of time, My Year of Rest and Relaxation attunes us to our being in time.​​​

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  • Erin Walden (she/her), Indiana University Bloomington 

    • "‘Radiant In Its Immobility’: The Potentiality of Stasis in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée"​

    • Abstract: Through its use of archival documents, deployment of cyclical language, and attention to geological processes, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée reveals itself to be text uniquely interested in static time. Historically, critics have viewed Dictée’s stasis as corresponding to a deprecative mode which necessitates an overcoming—marking stasis as fundamentally negative and ignoring the potentiality of Cha’s static time. By considering scholarship on still life painting and the temporality of landscapes, however, this paper suggests that Dictée’s stasis serves not as a representation of fracture but as an invitation to embrace an eco-temporal sensibility which regards and honors non-human timescales.

Panel 10: Saturday, 8:00-9:30 AM EST

Goblins in the Classroom

  • Sunday Adegbenro (he/him), University of Kansas

    • "Cultural Perceptions of Leisure and Productivity: An African Scholar’s Reflection on ‘Goblin Mode’ in American Academia"​

      • Abstract: This study explores the cultural practice of merging leisure and productivity in American academia, in contrast with distinct separations of these activities in Africa. The study, framed as an African scholar's ethnographic reflection on 'goblin mode' in American academic culture, employs narrative analysis and participant observation. It focuses on the integration of leisurely coffee drinking with academic reading. Anchored in postcolonial theory and cultural relativism, the research aims to understand 'goblin mode' as a reflection of societal shifts towards self-care and resistance to hyper-productivity and provide insights into global cultural differences in work and leisure perceptions.​

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  • K.M. Begian-Lewis (they/them), Wayne State University

    • ​"The Freedom in--and Importance of--Doing a 'Bad' Job"

      • Abstract: The idea of “goblin mode” can help us interrogate the fact that, sometimes, the only thing standing between a student and their writing is the fear of doing a "bad" job. Can encouraging students to get into goblin mode and try, maybe fail, and try again help them get through the fear of doing a "bad" job? What does it mean to do a "bad" job? Why are students worried about doing a "bad" job? What is the worst that can happen when a student does a "bad" job? What do we learn from doing a "bad" job?

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  • Ankita Ganguly (she/her), Jawaharlal Nehru University

    • "Pleasure is Political: Unravelling the Goblin Mode of Uncritical Reading in Academia"​

      • Abstract: My presentation will deal with the goblin mode of uncritical reading in academia.

Panel 11: Saturday, 9:45 - 11:15 AM EST

Feminist Engagements with Capitalism

  • Kelsey Taylor Alexander (she/her), Indiana University Bloomington

    • "'A Labor of Love?': Feminist Anti-Work Discourse and Academic Labor"​

      • Abstract: As anti-work discourse has seen a resurgence in the current zeitgeist, I propose a deeper, analytical understanding of such discourse through a rhetorical feminist lens. Building upon a feminist-Marxist critique of academic labor while using embodied rhetorics’ methodology, I provide an ethno-graphic study of my personal experience in academia that lends to a critique of gendered immaterial labor that is undergirded by a critical theoretical investigation. What might happen if we begin to shift away from the neoliberal work ethic? To privilege life over work? While these questions seem utopic, it just might be this utopic way of imagining that creates real affective change.​

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  • Sophie Bradley (she/her), Lehigh University

    • "Economics of Personhood: The Weird, the Foreign, the Other​"

      • Abstract: Christina Rosetti’s “Goblin Market” has long been considered in terms of sexuality and gender, quite frequently in terms of queer sexuality of the two young women. Deemed a “textual crux for feminist critics” (Gilbert and Gubar 566), many have explained Rosetti’s work in light of a push against male authority. I argue Christina Rosetti’s “Goblin Market” is a cautionary tale reinforcing proper gender roles for women in Victorian society, by establishing a socially constituted female biocitizen who is a wife and mother through economic and sexual threats.​

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  • Erica Joan Dymond (she/her), East Stroudsburg University 

    • "Self-Care Vs. Neglect: Gender Disparity as Depicted in a Getty Images Search for 'Goblin Mode'"​

      • Abstract: A basic search of Getty Images (a source used by many in advertising, website design, publishing, etc.) produces fascinating if not profoundly problematic results for the term "goblin mode." There is a distinct disparity in how men and women are portrayed. This presentation seeks to truly explicate these intriguing images and formulate an opinion on how we view "goblin mode" as it pertains to gender (as presented by Getty Images).

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  • Rachna Pandey (she/her), Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology, Shibpu and Averi Mukhopadhyay 

    • "Environment and Women’s Identity: An Attempt to Unveil Care- Politics"​

      • Abstract: Patriarchal dogmas place women in an airtight compartment of ‘care givers’ which is often noticed in the domestic lives of women in the form of motherly care and protection. The idea of care concocts the linear flow of affection and the unswerving efflux of intent of protection from one end to other, that is, from women to nature or vice versa. Both women and nature are treated as subservient. This paper questions the identity of ‘absolute caregivers’ and examines how the overburdening of care affect women’s psychological stability. It also investigates the denial of moral obligations that are imposed on women and whether nature and art—as the elements of ecology—provide an escape to women or not.

Panel 12: Saturday, 9:45 - 11:15 AM EST

Deviant Readings

  • Peper Langhout (she/her), Indiana University Bloomington

    • "Holding our pleasures closer than our ethics: Transgression, mediation, and guile in Paul Beatty’s The Sellout"​

      • Abstract: Using Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai’s framework, I explore the nuanced role of comedy in Paul Beatty’s acerbic novel The Sellout (2015, winner of the 2016 Man Booker Prize). Berlant and Ngai claim that contemporary comedy generates anxiety by intensifying guilty pleasures and blocking them at the same time through perceived and subjective transgression. Likewise, global reception of The Sellout exhibited both initial praise and critical anxiety about contemporary satire’s social functions. Despite being the first American novel to win the Booker, the novel’s publication history reveals an uneasiness in the global fiction market about African American humor. The novel's provocative, inventive comic style is alert to the objections it might provoke, and thus responds directly to critical marginalization of Black humor. Guile emerges as a central theme: Beatty’s unrelentingly irony negotiates complex in- and out-group relations by transgressing group expectations, producing a beguiling interplay of playfulness and social criticism. Ultimately, this paper positions Beatty’s humor as a powerful, multifaceted vernacular form that mediates the intricate intersections of identity, social criticism, and literary reception. By treating the comic form as a discursive mode which mediates between in- and out-groups with sometimes uneasy playfulness, rather than with direct argumentation, it widens the range of expression and intersubjectivity. Beatty models how comedy can mix hyperrealism, irony, and alienation, in order to speak lucidly about race, intersubjectivity, and the author’s ethical relation to the real.

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  • Artemis Papailia, Democritus University of Thrace

    • "Defying the Norm: 'Goblin Mode' in Children's Picturebooks"​

      • Abstract: This study delves into "goblin mode" in children's picturebooks, analyzing characters who defy, indulge, and reject societal norms. These narratives, seen in books like "No, David!" by David Shannon, "Olivia" by Ian Falconer, and "Where the Wild Things Are" by Maurice Sendak, showcase characters exhibiting traits of rebellion and non-conformity. By embodying "goblin mode," these characters challenge traditional expectations, offering young readers a chance to question societal norms. The research suggests these stories not only entertain but also critique societal standards, promoting individuality and critical thinking among children. Additionally, it discusses the educational value of these narratives in encouraging discussions on creativity and the importance of challenging conformity. The study concludes that "goblin mode" characters are pivotal in empowering children to question and redefine the norms of society.

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  • Sruthi Venkateswaran (she/her), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), India

    • "The Case of the Deviant Don: Detective Fiction, Misbehavior, and Ways of Reading The Moving Toyshop"​

      • Abstract: In my presentation, I would like read moments of misbehavior – of disobedience, trespassing, interrupting – in The Moving Toyshop, a work of detective fiction by Edmund Crispin, and examine what possibilities such moments bring into being. Detective fiction is largely a conservative genre, with the detective considered an infallible agent of rationality and good, and therefore it would be a mistake to read these moments of misbehavior as subversive. Instead, I would to argue that these moments of the detective entering the “goblin mode” encourage us to be “bad readers,” and help us in reorienting our position as readers and critics.

Keynote Address: Saturday, 11:30 AM - 1:30 PM EST

"How to Do Things with Goblins:
(Notes Towards a Goblin Theory)"

Taking the concept of “goblin mode” as a starting point, this talk, presented by Dr. Sean Grattan, will ask what does it mean to theorize like a goblin? Combinatory, furtive, hoarding and horde-ing, goblin aesthetics and goblin theorizing flits through the underbrush, reusing, rehashing, and recycling at a time when the privileging of immediacy, individuality, and consumption intersects with anthropogenic climate chaos. This talk will take seriously what going full-goblin in our reading practices might look like and what might be gained by figuring the goblin as a methodological model.

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Following Dr. Grattan's presentation, Dr. Haffey and Dr. Grattan will engage in dialogue before inviting questions and comments from the audience. 

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