Posted on Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Dr. Matthew W. Sivils, Westminster College assistant professor of English, participated in a trio of events related to literature of the early American Republic.
He attended the 18th annual American Literature Association conference in Boston, where he chaired the James Fenimore Cooper Society panel. The conference is one of the most respected of its kind.
Sivils traveled to Worcester, Mass., to attend the 2007 American Antiquarian Society Summer Seminar on the History of the Book, "Re-Reading the Early Republic: From Crèvecoeur to Cooper." Attendees at the seminar are chosen from a large pool of applicants. "It was a great honor to be invited to attend. The seminar was one of the most rewarding experiences of my professional career," Sivils said.
Sivils presented a paper, "Cooper's Grassy Sepulchres: The Grotesque Landscapes of The Last of the Mohicans and The Prairie," at the 16th annual James Fenimore Cooper Conference at the State University of New York College at Oneonta. At the same meeting, he was re-elected to the board of directors of the James Fenimore Cooper Society.
"I explored how Cooper's use of the literary grotesque plays a role in his portrayal of the natural landscapes of his novels. By drawing on the work of the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, I argue that these two novels stand as powerful examples of how Cooper's portrayal of violence warps, destroys, and ultimately incorporates the human body into his fictional landscapes, creating an ever-present, inescapable, and oddly natural American condition," he explained.
Sivils has been with Westminster since 2006. He earned his undergraduate degree at Arkansas Tech University and his master's and Ph.D. at Oklahoma State University.
Contact Sivils at (724) 946-7350 or e-mail sivilsmw@westminster.edu for additional information.
