Chris Foss, Professor of English, recently published a chapter entitled “Building a Mystery: Relative Fear and the 1990s Autistic Thriller” in Bloomsbury Press’s Kidding Around: The Child in Film and Media, a collection of essays edited by Alexander N. Howe and Wynn Yarbrough.
Foss Provides Remarks on Autism as Roundtable Participant
Chris Foss, professor of English, served as one of five panelists for a session entitled “Paid in Full: Autisms, Debts, Dissents” at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association on Nov. 22 in Washington, D.C. Foss’s remarks focused on the ongoing efforts by both autistic self-advocacy groups and individual bloggers to counter the largely cure-based agenda of the most powerful autism organization today, Autism Speaks. For many autistics, and an increasing number of their allies, Autism Speaks engages in relentless stereotyping and fearmongering (while simultaneously co-opting and ultimately weakening self advocate-driven efforts geared instead toward acceptance and affirmation). Most frustratingly of all, this organization purporting to stand in for the voice of autism does not value autistic opinion or representation, still persisting as it does in not having any autistic membership on its Board of Directors or other important advisory boards. Groups like the Autistic Self Advocacy Network and bloggers like Paula Durbin-Westby are actively expressing their dissent and discontent not only through more traditional means such as physical protests and organized boycotts but also through Facebook movements and flash blogs. The extent to which the powers that be, and Autism Speaks itself along with them, might begin to listen to and actually heed these significant autistic voices remains to be seen.
Chris Foss Publishes Book Chapter
Chris Foss, professor of English, has published a chapter entitled “Oscar Wilde and the Importance of Being Romantic” in Wilde Discoveries: Traditions, Histories, Archives. The book is a collection of essays from the University of Toronto Press (Canada’s foremost university press) edited by Joseph Bristow (one of the most renowned Wilde scholars in the world today). Foss’s chapter delineates how Wilde’s American lecture “The English Renaissance” establishes that, for Wilde, a properly Romantic aesthetics is antisystematic and disseminative in nature, emphasizing parody and process over self-realization and synthesis. Casting Wilde as a Romantic Ironist rather than a Romantic Egoist productively illuminates how the insincerity that for many so defines the mature Wilde actually is an extension, rather than a rejection, of the Romanticism he emphatically embraced at the beginning of his career.
Chris Foss Publishes Review
Chris Foss, professor of English, published “Toward a Transcontinental (or, InterEurasian) Canon,” a review of a set of companion texts by Mary Ellis Gibson–her scholarly monograph Indian Angles: English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore and her critical anthology Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780-1913–in the July 2013 number of English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920. Now in its 56th year, ELT is one of the most established venues for scholarly work on literature from the late Victorian, Edwardian, and early Modernist periods.
Chris Foss Presents at Inaugural Conference in Italy
Chris Foss
Chris Foss, professor of English, presented a paper entitled “Erin Go Bharat: Political Affiliations with Ireland in Fin-de-Siècle Indian English-Language Poetry” at the historic first-ever supernumerary joint meeting of the North American Victorian Studies Association, the British Association of Victorian Studies, and the Australasian Victorian Studies Association. The conference took place during the first week of June in Venice, Italy.
Chris Foss Presents at Conference
Chris Foss, professor of English, presented a paper entitled “The Aesthetics of Bharautism: The Articulation of Autistic Identity and Indianness in Raam, My Name Is Khan, and How Can I Talk If My Lips Don’t Move?” at the 43rd annual national meeting of the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association on Wednesday, March 27. This year’s conference, which featured more than 3,000 program participants, was held at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park.
Chris Foss Presented Paper
Chris Foss, professor of English, presented a paper entitled “Engaging Eastern Enjoyment(s): Poetic Renderings of Hindu Festivals in Ghosh and Naidu” at the annual meeting of the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies Association on Sunday, March 17. This year’s conference, hosted by the University of Virginia, was held in Charlottesville.
Chris Foss Presents at Conference
Chris Foss, professor of English, organized a roundtable discussion on autism studies at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association Annual Convention in Raleigh/Durham, N.C., on Nov. 10. For this special extended session panel, Foss joined four prominent national voices in offering short presentations to introduce threads of discussion that initiated a two-hour conversation on topics such as the nexus of autism and aesthetics, the nexus of autism and neurocosmopolitanism, and the nexus of autism and rhetoric.