05/06/19
HAYS, Kan. – Fort Hays State University’s Dr. Pauline Scott, professor of English, and graduate students Stacie Rupp, Vanessa Schumacher and Karel Webster presented their research at the College English Association 2019 national conference in New Orleans.

Scott’s paper, “‘Stars, hide your fires’: Hallucinations and Hidden Things in the Shakespeare/Nesbo Macbeths,” compares Shakespeare’s classic play with a modern work of noir fiction by Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbo.

The 16th-17th-century playwright, she says, produced work intended to honor a new king and at the same time warn him about the “corruptive potential of great power.” Nesbo’s work, though a “depiction of the hidden machinations of power within a polluted, economically bleak urban landscape,” yet makes Shakespeare’s work “more relevant than ever.”

Rupp’s presentation, “Operating in the Dark: Blinding Consequences in Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein,’ ” is a study of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” She finds in the novel another story of the corruption of power.

Victor Frankenstein, having found a way to create life, is blind to the monstrous nature of his creature and thus “is rendered powerless.” The monster, however, realizing its own power, “begins taking life rather than conceiving it.”

Schumacher’s “Operating in the Dark: Literal and Figurative Blind Spots in Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’ ” focuses on themes of blindness, especially the physical blindness in the case of Gloucester and a failure of perception in Lear. Each, operating out of his own infirmity, makes tragic errors of trust and are led to doom.

Webster’s study of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic American novel “The Great Gatsby,” “‘Start Him? I Made Him!’: Blindness of the Mentoring Tradition in The Great Gatsby,” analyzes the dynamics of mentoring as depicted in the feelings of love, family and sexuality in the relationship between Jay Gatsby and his mentors and then between Gatsby and his guidance for the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway.