English Symposium Finals

Despite having a hectic schedule and not being able to attend the presentations I had wanted to and that I thought most directly could have helped me on my assignment (due to being called in to work from 7am-5pm on Thursday), I was pleasantly surprised by some of the insight I got from listening to the contestants in the final 3MP Competition.

I have actually started writing this while waiting to hear the winners (I hope they choose the people I voted for). Anyway, I'm just going to talk about some parts that stood out.


1) Homophones — Tanner Call (Honorable Mention). His presentation was kind of stiff, but his use of statistics was really interesting to me (because I do that kind of thing in my major too) and he made a great argument about the different patterns of specificity in male vs female language.

2) Sense and Sense-ability — Jenny Rollins. I thought her topic was interesting (physical senses vs emotional) but mostly her presentation was engaging because she slimmed her paper down into slam poetry (which was super cool).

3) Fairies
"They are either fat or they're stupid. Usually they're both." Fit, more screen time. Either way it reinforces negative societal views. I thought that this topic was interesting but again, her presentation was good, she made use of the whole stage and used her voice to express a lot.

5) Katniss Everdeen: Feminist Fighter or Teen Bride? — Baylee Vasquez - 3rd place (people's choice)
I felt like this gave me a good example of what kinds of comparisons and literary critiques can be made in YA novels. She talked about how even though Katniss was a very strong character who defined herself through her actions, consumers of the Hunger Games focused on who the 16 year old girl was going to choose as her boyfriend; thus proving that society has a ways to go before reaching true gender equality.

For her research she looked at how many different magazine articles addressed Hunger Games and what they talked about (Team Peeta vs Team Gale). I think she also must have done some close reading to really understand Katniss' character.

For my paper I'm still deciding what route I should go; identity, language, or folklore.
If I chose to do identity, there would be a lot more close reading and analyzing the main character and her relationships with others (similar to Baylee analyzing Katniss). I could also pull in some research about adolescence and developing self-esteem/confidence, which would be fascinating. However, if I chose to analyze folklore, there would be a lot more intertextuality and less directly from the book. Ok, through writing this I just figured out that I don't want to write my essay about that (even though there are really interesting things in the book that I could write about, like "There are so many tales, so strange and beautiful and perfect. They are not what are real, but better. The tales tell us what they can. The rest is for us to learn. The question is, are we smart enough to figure out for ourselves.").
If I did language, I could pull in a lot of different research about the learning of languages (more science-y things) as well as looking at how learning languages affects someone (culturally), etc.