Behind the Scenes: Synthesizing BYU's English Symposium

BYU's English Symposium was packed to the brim with interesting sessions to attend. I had the opportunity to glean from Allie Condie's Q&A session/reading as well as British Literature and Social Change.

Allie Condie Q&A session, as well as the reading of her latest book, Summerlove (an Edgar Award finalist for Best Juvenile Mystery of 2016) was filled some tasty morsels of advice. One fun anecdote she shared was a quoted tweet from her unnamed friend. It went something along the lines of, "Writing book number five of a series is like playing a self created Pac-man". Essentially she was commenting on the universal plight of authors restricting their characters by the rules and previous experiences they have set in place. Thinking from the perspective of Biographical Criticism, I wondered if the nature of quandary authors write themselves into parallel their life experiences. Biographical Criticism is also relevant to the excerpt of Summer Love she read to us. Specific details were recounted from her life and yet the reader can't ignore the retrospective filter each memory goes through. I got the impression that the book is more romanticized because of those two factors, as opposed to someone trying objectively portray a pre-teen friendship.

The British Literature and Social Change plunged deep into the depths of Marxist and Feminist Criticism, as was to be expected, but I found another supplemental criticism that played a large role. Elizabeth D. Smith  looked at opposing satires from the late 18th century in her essay, "Challenging a Stereotype: Female Nature in Rape of the Lock and ‘Saturday. Small-Pox. Flavia'". As she investigated the inner workings of the separate writings, it became clear to me that in order to wring all the juice from a satire, one has to rely on the use of New Historicism. 'Saturday. Small Pox. Flavia.' written by Lady Montagu, is an aggrandizement of the insufferable consequences a lady in the late 18th century went through after receiving small pox. In her poem, she condemns society for restricting her power to such a wilting source as beauty, and bemoans her fate without it. If one stuck to a formalist critique, they would be ignoring crucial implications of the time. The specific jabs at how women were restricted in Montagu's era wouldn't be recognized, and the implications for change would be passed over. The impact of her work would be lost. An integral aspect of satire is the hyperbole, and without looking to the habitat it was created in, it can't be measured.