Keeping Jane Austen Weird at MLA in Austin, TX
Join us for session #548. at the Modern Language Association Convention in Austin, TX this week, for "The Public Jane Austen in Austin; or, How to Keep Austen Weird." The session will be held on Saturday, 9 January, 12:00 noon–1:15 p.m. in room 8C of the Austin Convention Center.
Speaker bios and my short introduction to the session are also below. Janine Barchas promises to be wearing this t-shirt!
Presiding: Devoney Looser, Arizona State Univ., Tempe
1. "Jane Austen and the 'After 9/11' Question," Mary Ann O'Farrell, Texas A&M Univ., College Station
2. "Will and Jane, at Four Hundred and Two Hundred," Janine G. Barchas, Univ. of Texas, Austin; Kristina
Marie Straub, Carnegie Mellon Univ.
3. "Some Like It Hot: Love and Sex with Jane Austen," Nora Nachumi, Stern Coll. for Women
keywords: Austen, Novel, Celebrity, History, Reception Presiding: Devoney Looser, Arizona State Univ., Tempe
Session Introduction: Austin, TX has a beloved slogan, “Keep Austin Weird,” so it’s only fitting that we’d have a chance to talk about keeping Jane Austen weird at the Austin MLA. Jane Austen’s weirdness at the Convention is notorious, perhaps never more so than in 1989, the year Eve Sedgwick gave her brilliant MLA paper with its famous and infamous title, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl.” As Sedgwick herself would later write, her title became the “Q. E. D. of phobic narratives about the degeneracy of academic discourse in the humanities” (Tendencies, p. 109). This moment may be either a high point or a low point in Jane Austen’s academic afterlife, depending on your perspective, but it's a moment that continues to resonate. I was in conversation recently with a retired eighteenth-century professor who dates his decision never to return to MLA to the appearance of “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl." So even in 2016, Jane Austen’s weirdness continues to have exceptional rhetorical power in our profession and beyond. I do not know whether anything so notorious or incendiary is going to happen at this session. All I can say is that on that question is that I consider myself, like Captain Wentworth, to be half agony, half hope. It’s my pleasure to introduce our four speakers and their three tantalizing-sounding papers.
1. "Jane Austen and the 'After 9/11' Question," Mary Ann O'Farrell, Texas A&M Univ., College Station
Mary Ann O’Farrell is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University in College Station. She is the author of Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-century English Novel and the Blush (Duke, 1997) and co-editor of Virtual Gender: Fantasies of Subjectivity and Embodiment (Michigan, 1999). Her most recent articles have appeared in PMLA, Persuasions, and The Henry James Review. Her work on the novel engages the traditions and practices of manners and the relationship between materiality and knowing. She is completing a book on Austen’s appearances in contemporary popular culture and political discourse.
2. "Will and Jane, at Four Hundred and Two Hundred," Janine G. Barchas, Univ. of Texas, Austin; Kristina
Marie Straub, Carnegie Mellon Univ.
Janine Barchas teaches Austen right here in Austin as Professor of English at UT. Her most recent book is Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location, and Celebrity (Johns Hopkins UP) and her most recent project is the “What Jane Saw” website, which digitally reconstructs two Georgian museum exhibitions witnessed by Jane Austen in 1796 and 1813. Together with Kristina Straub, she is co-curator of an upcoming brick-and-mortar exhibition, entitled “Will & Jane: Shakespeare, Austen, and the Cult of Celebrity,” at the Folger Shakespeare Library in fall 2016.
Kristina Straub is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University where she teaches eighteenth-century British studies, performance studies, gender studies, and sexuality studies. She is most recently the author of Domestic Affairs: Intimacy, Eroticism, and Violence Between Servants and Masters in Eighteenth Century Britain (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009) and is currently co-curating “Will & Jane” with Janine Barchas, working on a new anthology and sourcebook of eighteenth-century drama (with Misty Anderson and Daniel O’Quinn) for Routledge Press, and a book on performances of masculinity in Shakespearean theatrical productions in eighteenth-century London.
3. "Some Like It Hot: Love and Sex with Jane Austen," Nora Nachumi, Stern Coll. for Women
Nora Nachumi is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Stern College for Women, which is part of Yeshiva University in NYC. Since the publication of her book, Acting Like a Lady, in 2008, she has been dividing her time between eighteenth-century celebrity culture and Jane Austen and film. "Some Like It Hot" is inspired by her work on a collection of original essays by novelists, filmmakers, denizens of the internet and scholars of Austen (including this session’s participants Looser and O’Farrell) entitled Doing Jane Austen: How We Talk About Love and Sex When We Talk About Austen.
Speaker bios and my short introduction to the session are also below. Janine Barchas promises to be wearing this t-shirt! Presiding: Devoney Looser, Arizona State Univ., Tempe
1. "Jane Austen and the 'After 9/11' Question," Mary Ann O'Farrell, Texas A&M Univ., College Station
2. "Will and Jane, at Four Hundred and Two Hundred," Janine G. Barchas, Univ. of Texas, Austin; Kristina
Marie Straub, Carnegie Mellon Univ.
3. "Some Like It Hot: Love and Sex with Jane Austen," Nora Nachumi, Stern Coll. for Women
keywords: Austen, Novel, Celebrity, History, Reception Presiding: Devoney Looser, Arizona State Univ., Tempe
Session Introduction: Austin, TX has a beloved slogan, “Keep Austin Weird,” so it’s only fitting that we’d have a chance to talk about keeping Jane Austen weird at the Austin MLA. Jane Austen’s weirdness at the Convention is notorious, perhaps never more so than in 1989, the year Eve Sedgwick gave her brilliant MLA paper with its famous and infamous title, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl.” As Sedgwick herself would later write, her title became the “Q. E. D. of phobic narratives about the degeneracy of academic discourse in the humanities” (Tendencies, p. 109). This moment may be either a high point or a low point in Jane Austen’s academic afterlife, depending on your perspective, but it's a moment that continues to resonate. I was in conversation recently with a retired eighteenth-century professor who dates his decision never to return to MLA to the appearance of “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl." So even in 2016, Jane Austen’s weirdness continues to have exceptional rhetorical power in our profession and beyond. I do not know whether anything so notorious or incendiary is going to happen at this session. All I can say is that on that question is that I consider myself, like Captain Wentworth, to be half agony, half hope. It’s my pleasure to introduce our four speakers and their three tantalizing-sounding papers.
1. "Jane Austen and the 'After 9/11' Question," Mary Ann O'Farrell, Texas A&M Univ., College Station
Mary Ann O’Farrell is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University in College Station. She is the author of Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-century English Novel and the Blush (Duke, 1997) and co-editor of Virtual Gender: Fantasies of Subjectivity and Embodiment (Michigan, 1999). Her most recent articles have appeared in PMLA, Persuasions, and The Henry James Review. Her work on the novel engages the traditions and practices of manners and the relationship between materiality and knowing. She is completing a book on Austen’s appearances in contemporary popular culture and political discourse.
2. "Will and Jane, at Four Hundred and Two Hundred," Janine G. Barchas, Univ. of Texas, Austin; Kristina
Marie Straub, Carnegie Mellon Univ.
Janine Barchas teaches Austen right here in Austin as Professor of English at UT. Her most recent book is Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location, and Celebrity (Johns Hopkins UP) and her most recent project is the “What Jane Saw” website, which digitally reconstructs two Georgian museum exhibitions witnessed by Jane Austen in 1796 and 1813. Together with Kristina Straub, she is co-curator of an upcoming brick-and-mortar exhibition, entitled “Will & Jane: Shakespeare, Austen, and the Cult of Celebrity,” at the Folger Shakespeare Library in fall 2016.
Kristina Straub is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University where she teaches eighteenth-century British studies, performance studies, gender studies, and sexuality studies. She is most recently the author of Domestic Affairs: Intimacy, Eroticism, and Violence Between Servants and Masters in Eighteenth Century Britain (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009) and is currently co-curating “Will & Jane” with Janine Barchas, working on a new anthology and sourcebook of eighteenth-century drama (with Misty Anderson and Daniel O’Quinn) for Routledge Press, and a book on performances of masculinity in Shakespearean theatrical productions in eighteenth-century London.
3. "Some Like It Hot: Love and Sex with Jane Austen," Nora Nachumi, Stern Coll. for Women
Nora Nachumi is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Stern College for Women, which is part of Yeshiva University in NYC. Since the publication of her book, Acting Like a Lady, in 2008, she has been dividing her time between eighteenth-century celebrity culture and Jane Austen and film. "Some Like It Hot" is inspired by her work on a collection of original essays by novelists, filmmakers, denizens of the internet and scholars of Austen (including this session’s participants Looser and O’Farrell) entitled Doing Jane Austen: How We Talk About Love and Sex When We Talk About Austen.
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