Conference Presentations by Jason C . Hogue
Shakespeare Association of America (virtual), March 30-April 4, 2021
Drawing on queer, feminist, and new materialist scholarship, Melissa E. Sanchez demonstrates how ... more Drawing on queer, feminist, and new materialist scholarship, Melissa E. Sanchez demonstrates how pregnancy as represented in Measure for Measure challenges heteronormative notions of the “human” and “life,” not only resisting reproductive futurism but also opening possibilities for imagining alternative material futures that would encompass “reproduction without sex.” In my paper, I investigate the possibilities of asexual reproduction and queer futures in As You Like It. Following Vin Nardizzi’s proposal to unite ecocriticism and queer studies when reading this play, I focus on queer intersections of human and plant—in particular the voyeuristic reporting of the two lords to Duke Senior about Jaques and a “peeping root.” I argue that Jaques is an important centerpiece for analyzing the intersection of homoerotic human desire in the play and its implicit inclusion of nonhuman vegetal (a)sexualities. The asexual capacities of plant reproduction productively engage with the asexual readings that emerge from the queer dynamics operating subtly within/across the ekphrastic space created by the lords’ description of Jaques, whose body is in proximity to the body and body parts of one of Arden’s oaks. I suggest that the asexual emerges in surprising moments like this one, in the midst of this ostensibly heterosexual play/forest. Like Measure for Measure, As You Like It also “allows us to appreciate the difficulty of drawing a line between virtuous and shameful sex,” positing and reproducing a “non-virtuous” a-sex, one that is complexly entangled with the affective expression of “shame” in the context of the play’s repressed homoerotic gaze(s).
Modern Language Association, Seattle, WA, January 9-12, 2020
Elaine Scarry’s brilliant work on bodily pain shows signs of its age with its unassuming allegian... more Elaine Scarry’s brilliant work on bodily pain shows signs of its age with its unassuming allegiance to a humanist exceptionalism that recognizes “bodies” only in the form of human bodies. With the posthumanist turn in literary studies, we must acknowledge the possibilities of reading nonhuman pain, not only in the realm of nonhuman animals but also in the vegetal kingdom, especially in light of the advancing science of the cognitive behaviors attributable to “plant-thinking,” to use philosopher Michael Marder’s term. I contend that paying attention to vegetal affect in texts and in the world opens interpretative doors toward re-theorizing bodily pain in more-than-human contexts. In her discussion of tool-making, Scarry considers the human body “sentient” but the body of a tree as “nonsentient surface” (The Body in Pain, 175-76). She sees the “marks on a series of trees” to alter human sentience “without hurting,” as human sentience is projected into these “intentional objects” that, from a botanical perspective, are actually living beings. I read Scarry’s theories of sensation alongside Marder’s notion of vegetal “non-conscious intentionality,” as well as Steven Shaviro’s divergent view that “living organisms, beyond and beneath their cognitive accomplishments, exhibit something like nonintentional sentience” (Discognition, 18). Scarry emphasizes the importance of human “voice” in relation to constructions of “self” and “world,” but her claim that physical pain “annihilates language and consciousness” must be re-evaluated with respect to nonhuman language and consciousness, which, though maybe silent to human ears, still constitute the making of sentient selves and worlds within our shared spaces of existence (54).
Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, University of California, Davis, June 26-30, 2019
Shakespeare’s Elizabethan comedy As You Like It (1599) takes place primarily in the forest of Ard... more Shakespeare’s Elizabethan comedy As You Like It (1599) takes place primarily in the forest of Arden, which was a vast pollination network for oak trees, among other arboreal species, during the sixteenth century. Today, those trees have all but vanished, but a few of them remain, representing dendrochronological growth and flowering cycles dating back hundreds of years. I read the flowers of the oak – known by botanists as the most promiscuous of trees – as implicitly operative in As You Like It, their male (catkins) and female forms involved in and actively participating amidst the romances of the human characters. Invoked five times throughout the play, wind is the inorganic vector that pollinates oaks. Amidst this windy arboreal pollination, I zero in on tree trunks and roots that become characters’ resting places, reading these spaces “under the greenwood tree” as synecdochal sites into which acorns fall. The separated acorn acts synecdochally because it contains the material potential to form the sprawling tree towering above it. Reclining humans likewise make their way into this space and enter into proximity with the arboreal reproductive zone that accommodates pollinating oak flowers, the female variant of which become acorns. The human characters, both male and female (including a cross-dressing Rosalind) also become acorns, transformed into nuts by Shakespeare’s figurative wordplay. Trained in literary eco-theory, I bring modern scientific viewpoints such as palynology and paleoclimatology into conversation with earlier botanical knowledges to locate human-vegetal intimacies populating the pages and stages of Shakespearean drama. By merging these disparate approaches to the botanical world, ecocritical scholars of all periods might court the possibilities of pollination operating in arboreal spaces, where the queer agencies of recently “dropp’d” acorns lie in tangible nearness to sleeping human bodies and the slowly moving roots of ancient oaks, with their wind-pollinating mothers/fathers above.
International Association for Robin Hood Studies, University of Auburn-Montgomery, June 16-17, 2017
We Need to Talk About Kevin is a disturbing but powerful story told from the perspective of Eva, ... more We Need to Talk About Kevin is a disturbing but powerful story told from the perspective of Eva, a widowed mother whose 15-year-old son Kevin commits a fictional mass murder at his high school in Nyack, New York. The 2003 novel by Lionel Shriver was praised by critics, as was its 2011 film adaptation of the same name, written and directed by Lynne Ramsay and starring the talented Tilda Swinton as Kevin's mother. Much has been said about the novel and the film related to motherhood, gender, masculinity, school violence, and many other topics; however, one conspicuous aspect of We Need to Talk About Kevin that critics have left largely un-talked about, in both film and novel, is the defining role that Robin Hood plays for the young psychopath in these texts. In this presentation, I demonstrate that Ramsay's adaptation emphasizes Robin Hood far more than Shriver's novel does; Ramsay retains all of the Robin Hood material present in the novel, but she embellishes it, drawing upon iconographic elements of the Robin Hood tradition familiar to modern audiences to achieve a cinematic effect of essentially portraying a bad Robin Hood. We Need to Talk About Kevin certainly comments on the contemporary problem of massive school shootings as well as the ongoing issue of mass shootings in general. For the purposes of this conference, however, I am only concerned with the extent to which this story is a Robin Hood story; and if it is, what is achieved in depicting Robin Hood as a homicidal American teenager? In the novel, the narrative begins subsequent to Kevin's homicidal spree. In epistolary form, Eva (Kevin's mother) writes to her deceased husband, whom Kevin had also murdered on the day of the school shooting; Eva tells her account of the events leading up to her son's bloody actions, which includes a long personal history of contention between her and Kevin as she attempted to raise him. Even at his birth, Kevin shows aversion to his mother, and the two of them butt heads
English Graduate Student Association, University of Texas-Arlington, April 7-8, 2016
For those of us who live in urban and suburban environments like the Metroplex, we often don't th... more For those of us who live in urban and suburban environments like the Metroplex, we often don't think too much about the animals that live around and among us, in our backyards, our parking lots, our garbage dumpsters. In this presentation, I consider our relationship with one such animal-the common crow, a member of the corvid family. There has been a lot of buzz around crows recently because scientists are realizing how incredibly smart they are. Researchers have conducted a number of studies on corvids, significantly moving forward our understanding of corvid cognition, showing that crows are capable of tool-use and higher order thinking. Some researchers are now pushing for neuroscientific research on corvids based on the similarity of human and corvid brain architecture. Offering stunning insight into the minds of corvids, the findings of these studies push strongly against anthropocentric beliefs and biases that hold on to the concept that humans stand above the rest of nature, exceptional, the sole possessor of reasoning abilities. I am interested in the laboratory space of corvid cognition studies because it brings into sharp relief a seldom acknowledged companionability and commensurability that exists between humans and corvids by bringing their bodies into a more proximal and explicit relationship as they labor together to produce new knowledge. I suggest that these experiments are important not only for their groundbreaking work in understanding animal cognition, adding yet another chink in the armor of human exceptionalism, but also for their ability to highlight the entanglement of material bodies in complex relationships. These proximal and provisional laboratory relationships between humans and corvids may lead us to deeper ethical considerations of the many similar relationships we share with others in the human and the more-than-human world, whether this be our relationships with beloved pets or with the many so-called pests with whom we share the urban environment.
Papers by Jason C . Hogue
Adaptation, 2023
This article investigates the presence of Robin Hood as a key figure in Lionel Shriver’s novel We... more This article investigates the presence of Robin Hood as a key figure in Lionel Shriver’s novel We Need to Talk About Kevin and its film adaptation, directed by Lynne Ramsay. I argue that the film emphasizes Kevin’s ‘whiteness’ in the way that it adapts the Robin Hood material from Shriver’s novel, embellishing his role in the story and complicating his affiliation with the teenage killer by tapping into Robin Hood’s status in popular visual culture; in so doing, the film critiques America’s ‘copycat’ appropriation of a similar strategy used by earlier nationalist writers in Britain. In the scene that depicts a Robin Hood children’s book, Ramsay superimposes multiple Robin Hood texts into one, polyphonically performing the Bakhtinian concept of dialogism. Therefore, despite the fact that Kevin appropriates Robin Hood for his own evil ends, Ramsay dialogically inserts multiple voicings from the Robin Hood tradition to speak against a hegemonic backdrop of white masculinity (mis)informed by racist discourses affirming Anglo-Saxonist ideas of white heritage.
Amsterdam University Press eBooks, Mar 7, 2023
Shakespeare, 2023
Focusing on 1 and 3 Henry VI, this essay analyzes the ‘vegetal’ performances of Shakespeare’s fir... more Focusing on 1 and 3 Henry VI, this essay analyzes the ‘vegetal’ performances of Shakespeare’s first history tetralogy, informed by insights about the more-than-human world from the fields of new materialism and critical plant studies. Specifically, I argue that the roses the original performers wore onstage should be viewed as vegetal co-stars in Shakespeare’s dramatisation of the wars that bear their name. In close proximity to the players who wore them and mobilised them, the roses are at once highly objectified symbols and agential co-participants in the meaning-making of the plays constructed by both the players and the audience during performances. These roses were plant-agents among Plantagenets, exerting their own volitions and idiosyncrasies onstage, amidst the actors who wore them on their person. Thus, this essay intervenes in conversations about the agency of objects such as props and costumes on the Elizabethan stage, asserting a special place for objects that really should be viewed as subjects, this plant material representing the staged appearances of once living biological entities whose bodily idiosyncrasies could assert a material presence and even resistance to the humans with whom they shared the theatrical space.
The Bulletin of the International Association for Robin Hood Studies
This article brings posthumanist and new materialist perspectives to bear on the enmeshment of “t... more This article brings posthumanist and new materialist perspectives to bear on the enmeshment of “the human” with and among the materialities of the greenwood in early Robin Hood ballads, focusing on Robin Hood and the Monk. The article suggests that medieval outlaw tales offer ecocriticism a site within medieval literature that not only challenges and deconstructs prevailing notions of human exceptionalism and anthropocentrism, but also portrays the medieval forest as a storied place, what Wendy Wheeler calls a “meaning-bearing field of agency,” imbued with interacting stories of both animate and inanimate life, such as the deer hunted by Robin and his outlaws, and also less obvious beings, such as the famous Trysting Tree.
Food and Feast in Modern Outlaw Tales, 2019
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
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Conference Presentations by Jason C . Hogue
Papers by Jason C . Hogue