My rants have been heard, the dust has settled and I have organised my thoughts enough to be able to reflect on last week’s Textualities Conference. I was lucky enough to witness a truly eclectic mix of presentations covering topics that were completely different from my own areas of interest. While the lineup had been split into four panels covering Character and Identity, Gender Rules and Expectations, Nature, Space and Place and Traces of the Gothic in History, there was huge variation even within these categories.
I initially decided to examine attitudes towards disability as reflected in 19th century horror and contemporary film. My main obstacle was choosing a focus and narrowing my topic down to fit the snappy ‘Pecha Kucha’ presentation format. I also have a tendency to ramble a bit because I find the topic so fascinating! I started by researching ableism in the Victorian era and relating my findings to the main text I had chosen, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by R.L. Stevenson. The presence of the scientific in this novel and the implications of Mr Hyde’s corrupted form had always been striking to me since I first studied it in a Gothic Literature seminar during my undergraduate. In my presentation I linked the rise of Darwinist theory and increases in industrialisation to negative attitudes around disability in the 19th century. Disability scholars have highlighted Mr Hyde’s intangible deformity and “mark of decay” as he physically changes to reflect his alternate, evil personality, linking this to the Moral Model of Disability wherein physical disability is viewed as reflecting inner corruption. In the end I opted to compare this text to “Split”, dir. M. Night Shyamalan. In choosing two texts focusing on multiple personalities, I hoped to highlight how attitudes towards disability and mental illness have changed over time, although they may not necessarily have entirely improved. I had already done a considerable amount of reading into ableism in modern horror, so I encouraged the audience to ask about this as I had a lot more to say than could be fit into a six minute talk!
During the day, I learned about the grotesque in short stories, the greenhouse and colonialism in Romantic texts, Arthur Conan Doyle as a Naturalist and Murakami’s love of ears. There was a real sense of pride at the end of the day, having seen the culmination of my peers’ research condensed into short talks that were infomative, fascinating, hilarious and even shocking. The Pecha Kucha style was a daunting but welcome challenge and the ideas I encountered in preparation will doubtlessly help in my thesis research. I have a lovely sense of accomplishment and the day has certainly set the pace as we brace to begin writing for our theses.