14th annual Comparative Literature Intra-Student Faculty Forum (CLIFF) 2010
Thursday, March 25th:
5:00-6:00 p.m. Keynote Address: Cary Wolfe
Friday, March 26th:
9:30 a.m. Breakfast
10 a.m.-12 p.m. First Panel: Human/Animal Landscapes
Patrick Tonks (U of M) "Welcoming the Animal In: Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City"
Emily Goedde (U of M) "Birth in a Rural Village"
Christine Hume (Eastern Michigan University) "Feral Materiality in Bhanu
Kapil's Humanimal"
12-1:30 p.m. Lunch
1:30 p.m. -3:30 Second Panel: Domestication, Pet-Keeping & Sport
Shannon Winston (U of M) "Cats in Joyce"
Anna Feuerstein (Michigan State University) "Scolding Parrots, Curious Cats and
Problematic Pets: The Novel Animal Subject in Robinson Crusoe"
Edward Plough (Purdue University) "'The saluage beast embost in wearie
chace:' Blood-Sport as Dramatic Poetry in The Fairie Queene"
3:30 - 4p.m. Coffee Break
4:00 - 6:00 p.m. Third Panel: Animality, Racialization & Colonialism
Rachel Macaulay (U of Texas--Austin) ""Profit Derived from all Nations"
Gen Creedon (U of M)- "Animality in Uwe Timm's *Morenga*"
Bria Koser "Ornamental Beasts: Cartier, Lalique, and the Tiger"
Saturday, March 27th:
10:00 a.m. Breakfast
10:30 a.m.-12 p.m. Fourth Panel: Darwin & His Times
Oren Abeles (UNC-Chapel Hill) "Untangling Darwin's Causality"
Etienne Charriere (U of M) "Of Apes and Parrots: Signifying Beasts in Nineteenth-Century Greek Prose Fiction"
12-1p.m. Lunch
1:00 -3:00 p.m. Fifth Panel: Animals & Poetics
Richard Pierre (U of M) "Between Bat and Man: Poetic Oscillation in Rilke's Eighth Duino Elegy"
Katrina Dodson (UC-Berkeley) "The Creaturely Lyric of Elizabeth Bishop's 'Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics'"
John Rowland (U of M) "Animal Aesthetics in 18th Century Poetry"
ANIMALITIES
Perhaps no other category of beings has been used to generate kinship and otherness with equal conflicting tension in relation to humans than animals. While contemporary research in biology progressively confirms physiological and behavioral similarities between the two, it is often more revealing to note the divergent but always available criteria--such as anima, sentience, intelligence, and language--used through different periods to connote a persistent distinction between humans and animals. Some of the questions this conference is interested in exploring include: How has the notion of the animal shifted in different time periods? What does it mean for us to represent animals? In what ways do zoological representations illuminate the human-animal rapport aesthetically and ethically? More broadly, how could we theorize the human-animal rapport? How has it remained static? What roles then do animals or conceptions of animals play in different academic disciplines? This year's CLIFF conference provides the opportunity to examine a range of questions surrounding the animal. Ideally, the conference will also be a forum to assess the potential implications of animal studies as an emerging interdisciplinary field.
