POETICS OF THE PERIPHERY
An undergraduate symposium at McGill University, hosted by The Channel and Canvas
With keynote presentations from Dr. Angela Vanhaelen and Dr. Carmen Mathes
The theme invites inquiry into the peripheral realms of art—be they visual, literary or performed.
MARGINAL IMAGERY: Quests into the borders of media and the edges of representation. How does marginalization manifest physically or figuratively? How do ambiguity and fragmentation function in creative gestures? How do artists mobilize the periphery as a space of resistance, tension, or transformation?
NEGLECTED NARRATIVES: Analyses attending to the politics of obscurity. What works, voices, or forms have been excluded or overlooked, and why?
THE AESTHETICS OF THE ABSTRUSE: Explorations of the esoteric, the invisible, and that which is shrouded in mystery. How can the enigmatic reframe knowledge and perception?
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Support for this event was generously provided by the Arts Undergraduate Society of McGill and McGill’s Department of English Students’ Association. Read the literature research presented below:
“What the Light Conceals: Feminine Resistance and Periphery in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,'” by Anna Seger
Gilman interweaves Hawthorne’s light and dark realms with gendered binaries—femininity and masculinity, the unintelligible and the normative—to configure them in a more explicitly political manner.
“The Author’s Self-Creation: Female Authorship, Lesbian Desire, and Male Athleticism in H.D.’s HERmione,” by Gaëlle Perron
Forging a path for her development as a female author, H.D. carves a space for herself out of the patriarchal structures of the “Dorian ideal” and pederastia.
“Literature in Conversation: An Analysis of George Washington Cable and Charles Chesnutt’s Use of Frame Narratives,” by Olivia Cordeiro
Chestnutt’s frame narrative in The Conjure Woman subverts Cable’s frame narrative in Old Creole Days by deromanticizing the plantation setting and bringing forth the voices of enslaved people.
“Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, Whose Story Matters Most of All?: Psychoanalysis and the Narrative Erasure of Black Women in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea,” by Moyọ Alabi
By privileging white femininity, the novel ultimately recentres white female suffering at the expense of Black female subjectivity, silencing the Black women who surround Antoinette and revealing the racial limits of Rhys’ anti-colonial narrative.
“The Body of the Mystic: A Reflection of Christ,” by Maia R. Becerra
The body of the female mystic is a space for building systems of knowledge through the embrace of women’s subjectivity and their creation of a sense of self within oppressive and patriarchal hierarchies, such as the Catholic Church.
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If there are ghosts to raise,
What shall I call,
Out of hell’s murky haze,
Heaven’s blue pall?
Raise my loved long-lost boy
To lead me to his joy. –
There are no ghosts to raise;
Out of death lead no ways;
Vain is the call
Thomas Lovell Beddoes, “Dream-Pedlary,” 29-37.
Image:
Caspar David Friedrich, The Monk by the Sea, 1808-10. Oil on canvas. 110 cm × 171.5 cm. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin.