This Week in English | November 18-24, 2024

Jansen Presents on the Gimmick in Professional Wrestling Today at Noon

On Monday, November 18 at 12:00 pm in Dunn Hall 424 (and via Zoom; contact Haley Schneider for the Zoom meeting link), Brian Jansen will be giving a talk as part of the Department of Communication and Journalism’s 2024-2025 Colloquium Series. 

His talk, titled “‘He’s Gonna Try’: Work and the Gimmick in Professional Wrestling” considers the gimmick in professional wrestling and its links to broader understandings of labor in contemporary American life. The gimmick—that set of traits, mannerisms, movements, in-ring maneuvers, and tics by which a professional wrestler becomes legible for an audience—is central to wrestling as performance art. Nevertheless, the gimmick is undertheorized, perhaps because, as Sianne Ngai suggests, it “defends itself from intellectual curiosity in a way that puts any person seeking to analyze it at a comical disadvantage.” Ngai’s Theory of the Gimmick, in linking aesthetic judgments to capitalist form, argues that the gimmick is the only aesthetic judgment we have that indexes how value, labor, and time are linked in capitalism. Ngai’s analysis of the gimmick as a labor-saving device that nevertheless “tries too hard,” Jansen argues, has utility for the study of professional wrestling, and in turn how professional wrestling might help us consider categories of work and labor more broadly. His talk takes up the gimmick in wrestling, with particular interest in wrestling’s literalization of the gimmick’s irony: that it saves labor, though ultimately toward the ignoble end of generating more labor.

Writing Studies Scholar Visits English on Monday and Tuesday

Angela Rounsaville, a writing studies scholar whose work undergraduates are reading in the common sequence of English 100 and 101, and first-year graduate students are reading in English 693, will be visiting the English Department today and tomorrow..  

On Monday, Rounsaville will be holding a professional learning workshop for teachers. The workshop is called “How Paradoxes in Transfer Research Can Deepen the Teaching of Writing.” It is scheduled for 2pm on Monday, November 18, in the Writing Center.

On Tuesday, Rounsaville will be giving a public talk titled “Genre Writing across Worlds: Learning from Scholars at Odds with Convention.” This talk will be at noon on Tuesday, November 19, in 125 Barrows Hall.  Everyone is welcome to attend, so please help spread the word.

New Writing Series Hosts Millay Prize Judge and Winners on Thursday

The poet and critic Daisy Fried will read in the New Writing Series on Thursday along with the winners of this year’s Millay Prize for Poetry, MA students April Messier, Miracle Gant, and Will Lathrop. The event, which is free and open to the public, will take place in the IMRC Fernald APPE Space (Stewart Commons 104) at 4:30pm. A Q&A with the audience will follow the reading. Our friends at Briarpatch Books will be on hand with selected titles by NWS authors, including Fried. 

In the summer of 2009, Frank and Helene Crohn generously provided the National Poetry Foundation (now the Center for Poetry and Poetics) at the University of Maine with the means to establish an Edna St. Vincent Millay Prize for Poetry. The Millay Prize seeks to reward achievement in poetry at a crucial early stage in a writer’s development while commemorating the legacy of one of Maine’s best known and most loved poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay, who herself received the gift of an education at Vassar College in part through the generosity of Caroline B. Dow.

The external judge for the 2024 award was the poet Daisy Fried, who selected the following manuscripts for the Millay Prize:

• First prize to Will Lathrop for “Phloem and other poems”
• Second prize to Miracle Gant for “lung-home”
• Third prize to April Messier for “Curative Voicing”

Faahad Kabir, Sam Keeton, and Jacqueline Knirnschild received honorable mentions and more than ten thousand dollars in prize monies were distributed to the poets.

Will Lathrop is a first-year graduate teaching assistant concentrating in Poetry and Poetics. He received a BA in Religion from Princeton University in 2017 with minors in Creative Writing and Environmental Studies. He studies modernism and New American poetry, with interests in publishing histories, countercultures, and ecocriticism. Now in Bangor, Will previously lived and worked in Somerville, Massachusetts and Burlington, Vermont. He is a canoe guide and has paddled extensively throughout New York’s Adirondack Park and the Maine woods. He is originally from New Jersey.

Miracle Gant is a second year M.A. student and teaching assistant concentrating in poetry and poetics. Originally from Round Rock, Texas, right outside of Austin, she graduated from the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in May of 2020 with a B.A. in English and a minor in drawing. Currently, she studies the lasting impact that the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts movement have on contemporary Black creativity. In her own poetic practice, she enjoys exploring what the relationship between language and imagery can tell us about the depths of our psyches.  

April Messier is currently at the University of Maine working on her master’s thesis—a manuscript of original poetry and poetics. Her work explores the relationship between lineage and identity as well as the healing capacities of language and the natural world. She gathers inspiration from her deep connection to this land that her ancestors have steward for many generations, and which she herself has farmed for over a decade. April also enjoys spending time with her partner Eric, two dogs and the peace of woods and water—so easily accessed from their coastal Maine home. 

Purvis Production of Birth and Afterbirth Continues This Weekend

Tina Howe’s Birth and Afterbirth is a significant contribution to contemporary American theatre and her pioneering effort to bring motherhood literally center stage, incorporating the “female gaze” into the genre of absurdism. This production of the play, which was written in 1976 but not produced off-Broadway until 2006, is directed by Libra Assistant Professor of Theatre and English Rosalie Purvis and runs November 15-24 in the Cyrus Pavilion Theatre. Tickets are $12; free admission with student MaineCard.

Calls for Submission

The Department of English and Philosophy at the University of West Georgia is home to an undergraduate journal of literary research, LURE: Literary Undergraduate Research in English, that is published annually. The guidelines for submissions, which close on January 8, can be found here.

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University of Maine Land Acknowledgment