Dan Burns, assistant professor of English, recently presented at the American Comparative Literature Association’s annual meeting, held this year at the Palais des congrès de Montreal from March 14-17.

Burns, who is co-coordinator of the Global Film & Cultures minor, was a panelist at this year’s American Comparative Literature Association conference—the principal learned society in the United States for cross-cultural literary study and scholars that teach and write across nations, languages, and cultures.

The three-day seminar, titled Writerly Worlds and Worldly Writers: Transcultural Receptions of German Literature, explored how various nations, cultures, translations, and technologies shape the reception aesthetics (Rezeptionsästhetik) of German-language texts and writers.

Burns’ paper examined American writer-director Orson Welles’ 1962 film Le Procès (1962), an adaptation of the celebrated 1925 novel The Trial (Der Prozeß) by the Czech-German author Franz Kafka. A French, Italian, and West German co-production, Welles’ adaptation was met with a notoriously negative reception in its original release but has enjoyed a critical reevaluation in recent years. Following the recent turn in Kafka scholarship to a focus on European visual culture and experimental psychology in the author’s work, Burns analyzed Welles’ cinematic approach to the competing cognitive demands of attention and distraction in Kafka’s novel through innovations in mobile framing, continuity editing, and deep focus compositions.

The American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) promotes the study of intercultural relations that cross national boundaries, multicultural relations within a particular society, and the interactions between literature and other forms of human activity, including the arts, the sciences, philosophy, and cultural artifacts of all kinds.

DiFrango, the first prize winner, received the $1,000 prize and an all-expenses-paid trip to Thomas Jefferson’s home at Monticello, in Charlottesville, Virginia, for her essay titled “Down Monument Ave.” Davis received second place and received $500. Lancaster and Guidi tied for third, and they both received $100.

On Nov. 23, 2021, a 7-foot bronze statue of Thomas Jefferson was removed from the New York City Hall where it had stood for 106 years. Because of Jefferson’s history as a slaveholder, officials unanimously voted to move the statue to the New York City Historical Society, where it will be on loan for 10 years. The original cast of the statue still stands in Washington D.C.’s Capitol Rotunda.

No statue of Jefferson stands on Elon’s campus. However, 25 years ago Phillip Carret, a New York investor and admirer of both 51±¬ÁĎÍř and Thomas Jefferson, generously endowed Elon’s Carret Essay Contest with its focus on Jefferson. When creating the endowment in 1997, Carret mandated that the contest must include “the ideals and principles embodied in Thomas Jefferson’s life and career.”

This year students were given the following information before being invited to respond to the following prompt:

“Much as the Jefferson statue has been recontextualized from a seat of government to a site of historical commemoration, recent Carret contests have attempted to reconceptualize Jefferson’s legacy within the bounds of the endowment’s requirements. Is recontextualization sufficient in challenging harmful historical legacies, and what is the value and/or potential harm in continuing to focus attention on Jefferson?”

The four winners will present their essays on Student Undergraduate Research Forum (SURF) Day on Tuesday, April 25 at 10 a.m. in the Koenigsberger Learning Center, 127. A question-and-answer session will follow.

The address, titled “Listening with Empathy, Writing for Change,” discussed ways that teachers can facilitate difficult conversations in the writing classroom. After considering ways that high school and college students learn to talk and listen across difference, the address provided strategies teachers can use to promote perspective-taking and empathic listening.

Lindenman also facilitated a workshop, titled “Seeking Multiple Perspectives in the Writing Classroom,” for all conference participants.

From the club's announcement: 

“Our speaker Nicole Galante, will present "Writing for Children." Nicole is a senior at 51±¬ÁĎÍř majoring in English with concentrations in Literature and Professional Writing & Rhetoric, and minoring in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is from Concord, North Carolina. After she speaks, she along with Doris Caruso, will offer a short writing exercise.

Nicole’s research examines structures of power within young adult literature. Literary critics argue that the genre’s most notable characteristic is its exploration of young adult power. Simultaneously, youth rights theorists and social critics cite adolescence as a period void of power and repressed by adult influences. In order to examine the difference between these two ways of thinking about the genre, Nicole performed a close reading and analysis of 20 contemporary realistic, award-winning novels, focusing on power structures in mental health representations, LGBTQ relationships, book banning incidents, and narration strategies. Nicole’s research demonstrates contradictions surrounding adolescent power that reveal the intricate relationship between young adult literature and power and how literature shapes ideas about the kinds of power young adults can or should wield.

Nicole is an Elon College Fellow, a Summer Undergraduate Research Experience participant, a Provost
Scholar, and a recipient of the Rawls Endowed Research Grant. Following graduation, she plans to earn a
master’s degree in Higher Education.”

Membership in the club is not required. Visitors are welcome.

Contact Elizabeth Solazzo at 336-578-8072 or elizabeth.solazzo@gmail.com for additional information

Elon’s English Language Teaching Symposium will feature two renowned experts in English language pedagogy, Suhanthie Motha, visiting from the University of Washington, and Mandy Stewart, visiting from Texas Woman’s University.

Registration for the symposium is still open, and details can be found on the English Department website . All attendees will be provided with lunch, coffee, and snacks, as well as documentation to attain CEU credit with their district. At the symposium, participants will have opportunities to learn alongside other educators through group discussions, presentations by educators within the community, and interactive keynote presentations.

Eidum and Kobos would like to thank 51±¬ÁĎÍř’s Leadership Prize, the 51±¬ÁĎÍř Teaching Fellows, the Intellectual Climate Award Committee and the Fund for Excellence Committee for making this event possible.

analyzes projects composed by high school participants in a community writing partnership. The article argues that the high school students use strategies that may predispose the audience members to see others’ concerns as part of a collective experience.

Lindenman and Lohr’s research is based on a community writing partnership, Writing for Change, founded by Lindenman in 2012. The program aims to empower high school students to catalyze social change through creative, multimodal writing projects.