Cycles of Awe Project: Prototype Three

I have my three poems completed. I plan on putting them on my own personal blog (my personal angle) and on Google+ with tags specific to my topic. Hopefully this generates interest and responses from relevant and interested online communities. Any comments or suggestions are welcome.

Cycles of Awe Treatment

Treatment of Final Paper: Click through for the Google Doc. Basically I will be examining the psychology of awe and how people go through cycles of awe as children or as adults, how we encounter awe differently, and what happens when we have an "awe moment" but do nothing with it.

Prospective Venue: I haven't found anything that exactly correlates with what I'm writing about, but I think I could swing my paper for these potential venues.

1. http://www.cfplist.com/ has a lot of options for current calls for paper. I highly encourage all of you to take a look if you're having problems finding venues.
2. Scottish Studies is interested in readings of Peter Pan and perpetual childhood. Since I will be looking at Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan in terms of perpetual awe and childhood, I think it could be interested in at least some aspects of my paper.
3. SF/F Now is interested in exploring the current research into the fantastic and the ways in which fantasy and "the weird" grapple with and illuminate social issues. Since I will be talking about Wonderland and Neverland and why these places are sources in which children return to, I could talk about the social contexts of why people return to fantastical or "weird places" as sources of development or escape.
4. 100 Dubliners invites any paper on Dubliners (since it's the 100 anniversary of the book) which is brilliant since a good portion of my paper will be analyzing several of the short stories contained in Dubliners.
5. Previous post for possible venues is another collection of places I could look to for other venues if previous ones don't work.

What's Next: I need to start getting concrete details and proof for my points. Quotes, more analysis, maybe even more secondary sources that look at the psychology of Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and Dubliners. I also need to make sure that my outline works and isn't just a list with too much explanation that loses the reader.

**side note: I think for my creative project I might do a roundel poem because those are a bit easier to write compared to reverse poetry or palindrome poetry. Same ideas will apply to this style of poem as they wound have with those other poetry forms as I mentioned in my comments to Tara and Greg.

Project Prototype One

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Road to Neverland by imsad

My final paper will be examining the psychology of awe and the cycles of it. Why do we turn back to the same sources of awe (like Alice to Wonderland or Peter Pan to Neverland)? Do we get caught in a cycle of experiencing an awe moment, then returning to the mundane (like the people in Dubliners)? I want to incorporate these cycles, and have decided to take one, two, or all of the options below as my final project.

Option 1: Mirrored or Palindrome Poetry

In case you don't remember, a palindrome is a word, phrase, verse, or sentence that reads the same forward or backward. In a mirrored or palindrome poem, the words read the same backwards or forwards like in these two examples. I could try this and incorporate the books I'm going to explore as the subject.

Option 2: Reverse Poetry
Where reading a reverse poem, one direction tells one meaning, then reading it backwards tells another message. Just last week a teenager's reverse poem went viral on twitter. It would be brilliant to tell something about the cycles of awe reading negatively one way, then positively the next. I just have to really practice this style of poem.

Option 3: Circle Poetry
There are a couple different variations of circle poetry. There is visual poetry where I could write poems in circles or circular styles. This book contains one variation of visual circle poetry. It's very simple. This blog section is dedicated to another style, though some of these poems I have a hard time understanding. Another aspect to circular poetry includes repeating first and last lines, or coming back to the same places in the start and finish. I'd like to be able to do that too.

I could put these poems online with specific labels or tags under the creative commons license to give people access to them. Or I could write one of these poems and make a simple YouTube video to cultivate my ideas there too. Any thoughts would be great on how I could get these poems out there. Or if you have any idea of a specific audience to target that would be great too.

Venues for Me

I'm researching cycles of awe and the psychology of awe. I'm still deciding exactly which stories I will look at, which avenue I'll take, etc. I do know I want to look into James Joyce's idea of epiphany, possibly Alice and Wonderland, and psychoanalysis/psychology. Here's what I've found so far.

1. The James Joyce Center. I found this website by searching #jamesjoyce on Twitter. This organization has reading groups, a blog, and a curated list of useful links to other resources concerning James Joyce and his works. This will help me find niche communities talking about the epiphany concept in Joyce's Dubliners, as well as bring me to other websites dedicated to facts about him and calls for papers.
2. The International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures. I found this website by following several links from an initial site I found by Google searching "James Joyce call for papers." It has an entire list of call for papers that could be potential sources to submit final paper. It also has a section for research related to Irish studies that can lead to more communities talking about Joyce works.
3. James Joyce Quarterly Blog. After searching "James Joyce call for papers" on Google, I also found this blog that has plenty of updates on upcoming Joyce-related activities and CFP. Again, this will help me enter the discussion of Joyce works and his idea of the epiphany.
4. The Evolution of Wonderland. This website is dedicated to interpretations of the book Alice in Wonderland. It includes a post about psychoanalysis of Alice and her adventures in Wonderland. This will help me think in terms of psychology of awe, which I want to explore in my final paper. I found this website by searching "psychoanalysis Freud" in Google.
5. Association for Psychological Science. I searched "awe in psychology" in Google+ and found several people linking articles from this association. The article that the link provided goes to talks about awe and psychology. This will be helpful in my research on the psychology related to awe, why there are cycles of awe, and why we return to these moments. It will help me find articles and journals by people who know more about psychology than I do.

Humility in Awe

When we experience humility in awe, we take a moment to think about things we cannot fully understand. The complexity of life and death can often humble us or bring us to stand on a threshold of things we do not fully comprehend. This idea is evident in James Joyce's Dubliners short story "The Dead."

Towards the end of the short story, Gabriel Conroy goes to a hotel with his wife hoping to share a romantic night together. He recalls an entire list of memories of their past that, for him, are some of the most important moments in their relationship. When Gretta (his wife) emotionally recounts the story of a former and deceased love interest, it's clear to Gabriel that his marriage hasn't been what he might have wished. In this sobering moment, he thinks about the dead and their ties to the living.

"Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes... His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling."

James Joyce calls this "the epiphany" - the moment when a character goes through something that becomes manifest, or there is a deep realization that changes their self or world view (awe too as been associated with a transcendent moment, a spiritual or secular realization moment). Where Gabriel had earlier made a division between the past of the dead and the present of the living, he now humbles himself and recognizes the lines between life and death are blurred. He sees himself "flickering" in the place where the living and dead meet. Michael Furey's memory lives on in Gretta's life. As Gabriel looks out of the window at the snow, Joyce continues to blur the lines between life and death.

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Dean Molyneaux / geograph.ie
Ballynahinch, City Republic of Ireland

"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight... It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

Joyce uses this epiphany moment for the character as an epiphany moment (or a humbling-awe experience) for readers as well. Furey's grave is being covered in snow, just as the snow covers those living. Life and death is "covered in snow," but the difference is this: will we be remembered after death? We are humbled to think that the memory of someone dead could be stronger than the memory of someone alive.

This reminds me of +Jane Packard's research on awe vs pragmatism. She discusses how Wordsworth wrote his poetry in "awe-land." His experiences with awe are in literature and daffodils where pragmatism and death are the end of awe. Joyce blurs the lines of life and death, exploring the idea that death can provide more life because of living memories (like Furey's life in Gretta's memories), where our pragmatic lives can become mundane and perhaps meaningless (like Gabriel's life).