The Junior Year Writing Conference in Comparative Literature took place on December 4, 2023, and featured presentations of original research by ten undergraduate students.
- 8:30-9:20 Breaking Bounds (Moderator: Nefeli Forni) • Margaret Wynne, Legacy and Literature: How the Publishing Industry Shapes Genre, Narrative, and the Mythological Renaissance • Nora McClellan, A Litany of the Madwoman in the Attic: Postcolonial Perspectives on Madness and Mental Illness in Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys and Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi • Ved Shankavaram, Centuries Apart: Is There Meaning in Don Quixote and The Simpsons
- 9:20-10:10 Shaking Norms (Moderator: Aishwarya Marathe) • Erica Larsen, “They’re Already Taking My Future”: Gender as Survival-Motivated Performance in The Hunger Games • Javor Stein, Hysteria and Sinthome in Sphinx: A Queer Lacanian Reading • Serena Hughes, The Politics of Memory and Forgetting in The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa (1994)
- 10:10-11:20 Untangling Class, Truth, Language, Trauma (Moderator: Prof. Jessica Barr) • Delaney Brunvand, Cultural Capital, Language, and Finding One’s Purpose in Elif Batuman’s The Idiot • Asher McMahan, Mapping Class Struggle in Tove Jansson’s Moominpappa at Sea • Avalon Fedder, Posited Peace for the Battle of Mary Magdalene in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code • Andrea Tchesnovsky, Trauma and “Sapiosex” in Sally Rooney’s Normal People