Cassi Miller
Cassi is an Iowa native who earned her B.A. in English in 2007 from Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa. Her current research interests include establishing a place for collaborative writing in first-year composition classes and examining the language used to describe “group work” in a classroom setting. Her passions are varied but include teaching, writing, classic rock/blues music, traveling, laughter and an inexplicable addiction to Guitar Hero.
Ross Kurtis Tangedal
Ross currently researches and composes material on th Southern Gothic period of 20th Century American literature. He is specifically interested in the “misfit-outcast-other” ideology found in the period with particular focus on William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O’Connor, Truman Capote, and Carson McCullers, to name a few. The South gives him everything he needs in terms of interest, breadth, and emotion. He also reads and writes poetry voraciously, serving as poetry editor for Read This Magazine (MSU’s Literary Arts Publication). Nothing interests him more, however, than the research, passions, and ideas of his colleagues. Working as part of an overall department allows for a wealth of ideas, something he finds most helpful in his own research.
Lauren DeGraffenreid
Lauren received her bachelors degree from Tulane University in 2008, and is currently working toward her Masters in English at MSU. Having spent many years abroad in both Malaysia and Venezuela, she is an avid traveler and seeker of novelty. Her current professional interests involve the work and life of Stephen Jay Gould and the writing of science. She also studies geopolitics (particularly McCarthyism) of the graphic novel, superheroism in postcolonial literature, and psychosocial implications of the 1980’s slasher film. She enjoys zydeco music and a heaping plate of red beans and rice.
Carl Beideman
Derrida suggests while quoting Descartes in his late lecture The Animal That Therefore I Am that “if ‘the human order is distinguished from nature,’ it is, paradoxically, because of an imperfection, because of an originary lack or defect in man, who has, in sum, received speech and technics inasmuch as he lacks something” (122). In my current research I wed this lack to the sense of alienation in the modern world. In so doing, we discover that to dominate the natural world is a perverse manifestation of the lack that humanity feels in the absence of God. Environmental degradation, in terms of mass species extinction, urban sprawl, habitat destruction and pollution reduces humanity’s original connection with the natural world as mutual co-existence. I contend that, in line with David Harvey who suggests that “what many now look upon as the first surge of modernist thinking, took the domination of nature as a necessary condition of human emancipation”, this hierarchical ascension of moving toward the creator by way of separation form the natural only serves to reinforce alienation (The Condition of Postmodernity 249). Furthermore, degradation reveals a perversity in that we treat the lack cited by Derrida as a sore that we perpetually scratch. As such, I suggest a union of ecocriticism and philosophy that would address this connection between modern alienation and perverse degradation. Personally, I find that if humanity studies itself through the lens of the natural other, we begin to understand that the resolution of alienation involves a reconciliation with the natural through a call to responsibility cued through acknowledgment of wronging by domination. This shame as cued from the gaze of the natural other as a calling into question of ourselves as hierarchically separate is what I believe should be the focus of ecocentrism. As C.S. Lewis has stated in The Abolition of Man, “Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man” (59). My interest is to understand the causes and implications of this anthropocentrism by confronting humanity’s original relationship with the natural as union: not separation.
