Discourse Chronicle

[Tomorrow morning, I am presenting a Superman paper titled, “Superman’s America: Audience, Reception, and President Lex” (which is also following me to Atlanta, GA in April for the 2006 National Popular Culture Association conference) for a conference hosted by the English department. Each year, I always look forward to open grant season and the conference circuit, but tomorrow is different. Presenting at “Cultural Collisions” is the first real opportunity to show all of my colleagues one way that my comic scholarship works. Many of my fellow graduate students and professors hear me talking about comic books and listen to me work through ideas that I pursue for term projects, but nobody at Texas A&M University has seen my work in action, so there is a lot riding on tomorrow’s presentation.

I am confident about my article, which is being published this summer in Astra, the University of Wisconsin’s McNair Scholars’ Journal and know that I have a solid 20-minute presentation. Tomorrow will be the fifth time I am presenting it for people and I am prepared with my handouts. I will be presenting with two other presenters and I am planning on wearing a full suit constructed from my suit separates. People who know me during any time before graduate school will easily say that I love dress clothes and that my idea of “dressing down” is putting on a T-shirt and a long-sleeved overshirt instead of a dress shirt with dress pants and shoes. I am not, however, an authoritarian nor a disciplinarian. I believe that dress clothes convey a visual message about who is in control of a situation, so a good personality and communication style help students remember that you are a person and not a rigid suit.

Anyway, I am excited about an opportunity to talk comics and hopefully things go well for me because of how much is riding on tomorrow’s presentation. I notice that I am presenting early in the morning. Based on my previous four years of conference presentations, I remember that early morning and late afternoon time slots usually do not attract the largest crowd. Hopefully I am wrong. BK]

category: Life