relevate

We like to categorize things—put them in neat little boxes with defined walls, with simple labels, and expect that nothing will ever challenge or break free of those molds. We do this with people, with media, and clothing, we even do it with tools. We assign something, anything, a function, and we rarely think about the ways in which it might work outside of those parameters. 

Take the computer for example. We have expectations for our computers. We want them to be good at math and processing data. We want them to assist us in our daily tasks, to look things up when we don’t know the answer. To store our documents and photos. 

What we don’t expect our computers to do, is help us understand what it might feel like to die, or assist us in evoking an emotional response through heart-wrenching musicality. These, in our categorized belief system, are human endeavors—distinctly separate from science and innovation. 

Yet, computers can do these things, and they are, all of the time. 

Dr. Nicholas Laudadio has been examining this relationship between technology, music, humanity, and art for the better part of the last twenty years. His research has looked at the many ways in which electronic music, especially analog synthesizers, have been infused into the genre of Science Fiction media. In studying this blurring of lines between man and machine, between musical performance and technology, a paradigm shifts in our own understanding of what it really means to be human. 

Alice Corbin Henderson did not want to leave Chicago. The mid-west born and raised poet and editor had everything that she needed right there in the city. She was in with the hot and happening poets of the day, she was the co-editor of the most popular and influential of the city’s poetry magazines, and she was receiving considerable acclaim as a rising poet herself. When her husband told her that he was moving the family to Sante Fe, she felt that her world was ending. 

Yet, it didn’t end, even if it did almost kill her. She moved to New Mexico in 1916, and found something there she never could have imagined, a muse. Her entire worldview shifted, gazing upon the vistas of pueblos and cacti, and she quickly became one of the most prominent advocates for Midwest poetry and indigenous midwestern culture. The move proved not to be a career ender, but a catalyst for her most prolific and meaningful era as an artist. 

Henderson kept editing her Chicago based periodical remotely, and her newfound midwestern influence would come to heavily shape national poetry taste. This change made her grapple with her own relationship with place, with the notion that real art only happened in cities, and that real poets were an urban commodity. Living out in New Mexico, she found a true appreciation for the rural, for the small-town, for the outskirts of American civilization. She realized that her move had forever changed not only her poetic sensibilities, but her outlook on life. 

Rachel Williamson is a graduate student here at UNCW, and her thesis is dedicated to Alice Corbin Henderson’s career and poetry. In her own writing, she analyzes the changes that Henderson underwent, and considers the widespread effects that her writing had on American poetry. In doing so, she asks us all to consider the effect that place has on our day to day lives. She encourages us to wonder, is true art only made in the cities? What is the value of a life on the outskirts? For a small coastal town with its own vibrant community of poets, songwriters, and artists, I feel that Wilmington is exactly the kind of city that needs to hear a message like Henderson’s. A message of hope, of creation, of finding peace and community right there, right where you already are.

In the 2014 film, “Gone Girl”, which was adapted from the novel of the same name by Gillian Flynn, scorned wife Amy Dunne delivers a legendary monologue. If you haven’t seen the movie, or read the book; It’s a thriller about a couple who seem perfectly happy on the outside, but are rotten to the core within. When Amy fakes her own murder—fed up with her miserable marriage to a man she despises—she leaves a trial of incriminating breadcrumbs right to her semi-innocent husband. 

For Nick, the world turns upside down, and the perfect picture of their marriage begins crumbling down around him, and all of his darkest secrets start to float up to the surface.

In both the book and the film, Amy delivers this monologue, ripping apart the falsehood of the “Cool Girl.” The Cool Girl, which she admits to having been, is a lie, a broad lie told by all sorts of women. She lambastes the men who succumb to this ruse, and is no less kind to the women. 

Recently, this monologue resurfaced, blowing up on TikTok and other social media. The women of the internet have rekindled their love of this scene, and their mutual fascination with Amy Dunne. Gone Girl is experiencing a moment of relevation, it’s been brought back into the discourse, which is exactly what this podcast is about. 

Meg Giuliano is a Junior here at UNCW, and she has been examining this scene. She’s been thinking about its place in the cultural moment, and looking deeper into what Flynn is doing within the language of Dunne’s legendary monologue. By analyzing these linguistic structures, a new narrative is exposed between the lines, a narrative of disempowerment and illigetimization. 

Gone Girl movie audio courtesy of 20th Century FOX. All rights reserved.

Food-hacks. Supplements. Fad diets. Nootropics. In the expansive landscape of online marketing campaigns, social media, and algorithms, it feels like half of all that you read or hear online boasts some form of posthuman biological optimization. These products promise a gambit of health benefits and biological improvements to the human body. Some claim to help your brain function at a faster speed or capacity. Some claim to regulate your gut—to make your input and output as efficient as a hybrid automobile. 

In all of this, there is a common appeal to self-betterment—a tug at the universal belief that we could be smarter, stronger, less anxious, with just a little help from technological innovation. 

But, these products, and their claims, have dipped into the realm of the uncanny. In the promises they offer, there is a darkness lying below the surface—a sense of existential dread and mortal panic. 

Dr. Jeremy Tirrel has been examining this phenomenon. In his upcoming book, which is tentatively titled: Strange Consumptions: the Gothic Rhetorics of Nutrition, he and Dr. Kate Maddalena look at the relationship between humanity’s nutritional discourse and the weird, eerie rhetoric that surrounds it. 

By utilizing a Gothic lens, they hope to illustrate how these adverts prey on our discomforts and anxieties, working to make us desperate for scientific intervention. 

Laird Hamilton once said, “If you don't understand the wave, you can't respect it. And if you don't have respect, it's only a matter of time before the ocean teaches you to get some.” I find that often, the same can be said of our work in the Humanities. To properly respect a novel, a poem, or even an essay, it helps to have a basic understanding of the forms and structures—the work that it took to get a piece from a genesis to a final presentation. 

In the dojo of writer’s craft, there is no better place to learn this respect than composition. Most universities across the country require at least two semesters of basic English composition or writing. This is because these classes provide necessary skills and knowledge that every single person will take through the rest of their major. Learning to write is not a practice reserved just for writers and humanists, it’s a fundamental tool for success.

Professor Andrew Tolhurst knows an awful lot about respecting both waves and compositional structures—He’s seen his fair share of wipe-outs and rough drafts. He is a surfing enthusiast, a father of two, a prior high school teacher, and now: a professor of English composition and writing. Today we are going to dive into what English composition can teach us more broadly, and how a surfing mentality ties into it all.

“What is it that you do in the English Department?”

“What can you actually do with an English Degree?”

“Don’t you all just end up as high school teachers?”

These questions are ones that all English majors endure every time they dare talk about their studies. For decades, the Humanities have been the punch line of any joke regarding liberal arts education. It’s something that has always been taken in stride and brushed off. But recently, the perception of the nation’s Humanities departments has gone from annoying, to catastrophic. The running jokes have worked their way into budget cuts, enrollment deficits, and unprecedented levels of scrutiny.  This turn does not speak to some mass degradation of Humanities colleges nationwide, it illuminates a profound cultural blindness. 

The OED defines “relevate” as the act of “elevating, or lifting up (a person or thing) literally or figuratively.” More specifically, it is to do so again—it is to re-elevate that which has been forgotten or lost. Relevation is precisely what we do in Humanities research. We find those things that have been lost to time, ignored, or simply under-analyzed, and we bring them back into the discourse.

So that’s what this podcast aims to do. It aims to enlighten and to correct the discourse—to relevate the relevation that is being done in Humanities departments all across the country. 

Every Monday, we are going to talk to either a student, a grad student, or a faculty member from a Humanities department. We are going to discuss the groundbreaking research they are doing, what changes they are making in their communities, what discoveries they have made in their research, and why their work matters for everyone. We are going to pull the curtain back on the humanities, show how important the field really is, and explain what people can actually do with their studies.