European Association for American Studies Conference Ovidius University, Constanta, Romania April 22-25, 2016 Abstracts Adeleke, Tunde, Iowa State University, usa: “The Black American Experience as a Lens for Europe

Grgas, Stipe, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia: “Pynchon and the Question of Capital”
My presentation will begin with the following contention: Pynchon’s last three novels (Against the Day, Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge) as well as the conjucture in which they were published - “the current capitalist-informatic ecumene” (Sloterdijk ) – prompt us not only to attend to the way they engage the current economic order but, retroactively, recast the manner in which Pynchon’s other work has been read. In my view the foregrounding of capital in these texts was not only occassioned by developments outside the text but by Pynchon’s decision to bring to the fore and engage a lurking presence in his earlier novels. In my presentation I will sketchily attend to the earlier novels and argue that capital has been an overriding concern in his work. More specifically, on this occasion I will return to Gravity’s Rainbow and show that the economic problematic has always already been inscribed in Pynchon’s novels albeit in various degrees of visibility. I will be arguing that that visbility is manifest both on the content and the formal level of his narrative practice. In my conclusion I will propose that the emergence of this “economic Pynchon” problematizes the approaches to Pynchon which see him as the master player of “ontological improvisation”.
Grigore, Irina Elena, Ovidius University, Constanţa, Romania: “The Hunter and the Pray in Don DeLillo’s Libra”
This paper aims to examine how the conspiracy behind the assassination of the president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, led to shaping a vulnerable citizen into a victim of political manipulation, as it happens in Don Delillo’s novel Libra. The main character of the novel who will later become the victim of the conspiracy is Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald’s communist political views caused him difficulties in fitting into the American society and he appeared to be against the American government. He became a political tool for three CIA agents who were dissatisfied by the invasion of the Bay of Pigs, and so, they chose Oswald to be the main pawn of their plot against the president.
Grivet, Simon, EHESS, Paris, France: “History as a Narrative Tool Box for Mad Men”
The seven seasons of Mad Men offered viewers a formidable rediscovery of the 1960s. A flurry of details concerning costumes, sets and music helped making Mad Men a fully esthetic experience and one of the most accomplished historical shows on television in recent memory. The series plot is loosely structured by the main historical events of the decade. The presidential election of 1960, the Cuban missile crisis, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War…all appeared in the show at some point. This paper looks at the treatment of those events in the show. Mad Men cannot be described as an historical show per se. It is not primarily focused on politics, international or domestic. But since the center of the show is an ad agency in New York, major events have to reverberate on those creative minds. I would argue that Mad Men skillfully demonstrated how the meaning of historical events is altered by those who witnessed them. Only D. Draper’s Afro-American maid seems to be following Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech in August 1963. By contrast, the mostly Republican milieu of Mad Men appears profoundly shocked, as the whole nation, when receiving the news of the Kennedy assassination on November 22nd, 1963. Later, the show cleverly demonstrated how the irruption of Civil Rights demands would upset a workplace dominated by white males. Historical events on Mad Men form a rich and lively backdrop for the main story: the fate of Don Draper, Peggy Olson and other characters. More deeply, I would also argue that the show displays a great sensibly not completely different from what practitioners of the Nouvelle Histoire once advocated. Neglect main political events and focus on the history of sensibilities ! Thus the series featured an employee becoming insane because of the presence of a computer at the office. The show presents hundreds of references to elements of the 1960s culture (from poetry to music and movies). More generally, Mad Men is also fascinating by its attempt to chronicle the evolution of the 1960s sensibilities. In that sense, the show makes very ambitious and interesting claims on the history of the decade.
Gross, Andrew S., Georg-August University Göttingen, Germany: “Black Box: Covert Literary Humanism in the Age of Digital Surveillance”
Jennifer Egan’s Black Box was published as a series of 60 tweets by The New Yorker in 2012, then in the print magazine. The novel follows a minor character from Egan’s award-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), grown from a pre-teen to a woman in her thirties, who takes on a secret mission for the US government. Just who the enemy is remains vague. The protagonist is also nameless—although we know her to be Lulu from the previous novel—and trained to masquerade as one of the interchangeable “beauties” who populate the harems of enemy agents. Her observations constitute the narrative of the story but with an innovative twist. The approximately 140-character tweets represent Lulu’s thoughts, recorded in real time on a device implanted at her hairline, and formulated in the second person to serve as a field manual for future agents. This recorder is the black box contained in her body, and it is designed to function like the black box in planes in the event that Lulu is killed. Agents are vulnerable; and in this fictional world they can only be used once before they are compromised for clandestine operations anyway. They are not exactly disposable but on the verge of obsolescence, encouraged to protect the data they store even if they must sacrifice their lives to do so, just as they are encouraged to subordinate themselves to the greater patriotic good. Egan’s dystopic adaptation of the familiar James-Bond-formula responds to two contemporary fears of globalization: fear that the aggression unleashed by the war against terror could render individual lives less significant than political causes or even information; and fear that information, aggressive in its own right, could convert difference into mere data and reduce traditional literary forms, such as the novel, to digital “messaging.” Nevertheless, Egan’s twitter novel is more renegade than it seems. Black Box is a covert action, in enemy territory, on the side of literary humanism. The subject of the story is the pathos of the protagonist’s partially observed destiny, or what I will call clandestiny: the secreting of something private in the midst of information flows. Clandestiny is not on the side of surveillance but a refuge from it. Under the guise of patriotism, embedded in data transfer, Egan’s novel strikes a blow for the individual by remediating the genre conventions that made individualism an effective propaganda tool during the Cold War.
Grotle Rasmussen, Kasper, University of Southern Denmark: “Groupfeel: Kennedy’s National Security Council Staff as Emotional Community”
In recent years, emotions are beginning to be seen as a valid and important category of historical analysis thanks to the works of Jan Plamper, Barbara Rosenwein, Peter Stearns, Frank Costigliola and others. These historians have successfully argued that the rational and the irrational are equally important and co-exist in the decision-making process. This paper seeks to examine the inner workings of President Kennedy’s National Security Council (NSC) staff in relation to US foreign policy towards the Soviet Union with specific reference to the emotive and irrational perspective. The NSC staff, headed by national security advisor McGeorge Bundy, served as the primary presidential foreign policy staff and was a major player in foreign policy-making. The inner workings of the staff and the dynamic between the staffers are thus important parts of the history of American foreign relations in the period. Specifically, this paper tries to apply Barbara Rosenwein’s term emotional community to the NSC staff to see if staffers did indeed share similar emotions regarding threats and required actions in the Cold War. The paper’s chief argument is that the majority of the staff did indeed share emotions, but those who did not, such as Walt Rostow and Marcus Raskin, had their membership of the community eliminated - Rostow left in the fall of 1961, Raskin left in 1962. To offer an explanation of this elimination process, I am suggesting the term groupfeel - a process by which a cohesive group cannot accept divergent feelings by members or applicants for membership. This term is a further development of Irving Janis concept of groupthink.
Grozev, Kostadin, University of Sofia, Bulgaria: “Walter Cronkite: Journalist, Anchor and Symbol of Middle America of the 1960s”
The proposed paper presents some reflections on the life and journalistic career of one of the most prominent U.S. journalists of the 20th century. The career and public impact of Walter Cronkite are an interesting focuspoint of the American narrative of the turbulent century with the 1960s presenting us a challenging case study of the tidal waves that reshaped American politics and society in the decades to come. Almost an age-mate of JFK, Cronkite’s lifestory is inseparable from the tragic news coming from Dallas on November 22nd 1963 when he was the one who confirmed to the nation on live-TV that repeat, President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. EST. With the spectacles in his hands and some heavy emotions in his eyes the anchorman’s words and gesture were just blinks in the professionalism of a dedicated man at the maturing age of television which through many similar moments (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3eFl9pcxsM) shaped the history of the world and the way ordinary people perceived it thus becoming the symbol of a period. The aim of this paper is to show when, how and why it did happen. The paper will be based on critical reading of biographies and textbooks of the period, on certain primary sources from the JFK and LBJ Presidential Libraries and on the analysis of few representative samples of his journalistic products on CBS easily available at our post-Cronkite digital age. The reflections will sum up his career trying to assess why nowadays, in our packaged, over-crowded, overbranded, Internet-based 24-hours news environment there are no figures of the caliber of Cronkite with such moral and professional prestige to be called Mr. Middle-America. Because he had the integrity allowing him to reformulate the famous Douglas MacArthur phrase into Old anchorman never fade away, they just come with more. The paper will give the authors perspective to that remarkable journalist.
Hamera, Pawel, Pedagogical University of Krakow, Poland: “The American Liberator on the Irish ‘Liberator’: Daniel O’Connell and William Lloyd Garrison’s Abolitionist Newspaper”
Daniel O’Connell (1775-1847) was the best known and most revered Irishman of the first half of the nineteenth century. Not only did he campaign for Catholic Emancipation and the repeal of the Act of Union, but also he had played a significant role in the anti-slavery movement since the 1820s. O’Connell decried both slavery in the British Empire and in the United States. The fact that slavery was present in American society was viewed by O’Connell as something that was incongruous with the principles and values of such a democratic country. O’Connell made the headlines when he condemned Andrew Stephenson, the American Ambassador in London, as a slaveowner and refused to recognize him. As a result, O’Connell was pilloried by the pro-slavery American press and politicians. At the same time O’Connell became a hero for American slaves. He made an impression on Frederick Douglass who in 1845 visited Ireland and met the Irish ‘Liberator’ himself. Due to Douglass’s oratorial skills, Douglass was even called ‘The Black O’Connell’. Moreover, O’Connell had the same nom de guerre as the title of William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper. Garrison met O’Connell in London in 1833 and included many of O’Connell speeches in his paper. The aim of this paper is to discuss the relationship between O’Connell and Garrison’s Liberator.
Harrington, Clodagh, De Montfort University, UK: “The Power of Lunch: Healthy Kids, Vested Interests and the Nanny State”
In 2010, President Obama signed the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act into law, continuing an initiative begun by Lyndon Johnson almost half a century earlier. Childhood nutrition was recognised early on by the Obama administration as a pressing issue, both in terms of managing the increasing levels of child obesity and the wider issue of poor diet among children at the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum. Five years after the statute with its $4.5 billion price tag became law, the issue of school lunches has become a highly politicised issue. What the administration envisaged and what children needed have lined up. However, what vested interests and children wanted was quite another matter. The path to implementation has been far from smooth and offers an insightful portrayal of how a liberal president can face staggering political opposition to policies that are deemed by some to smack of interventionism. Childhood obesity has been described by the World Health Organisation as ‘one of the most serious public health challenges of the 21st century’ and the debate around responsibility for the problem rages on. The school lunch saga offers a convenient microcosm of a wider ongoing debate relating to income inequality, food poverty and the extent to which, if any, to which government should tell its citizens what to do.
Hartmann, Johanna, University of Augsburg, Germany: “Dimensions of Intermediality in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape”
In the first decades of the 20th century the Little Theatre Movement became a source for dramatic creativity throughout the remaining century. It is the aim of this paper to shed light on the interrelation between dramatic texts that were written within the context of this movement and various forms of media that emerged in the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century. This paper starts from the assumption that American drama did not stand in an antagonistic and competitive relationship to other forms of artistic production – e.g. the visual arts, cinema, photography, opera, or radio – but in a network of mutual interdependency, interrelationship, and creative synergies. It will be argued that the specific character of the dramatic text lends itself to various forms of intermediality. Wolf e.g. argues that [a]s for drama, a play is not just a bookish or written medium, but a multimedial performance, involving words, sounds, music (notably in musical drama such as opera and the musical), as well as visual media (Wolf 2011, 3). Eugene O’Neill’s early play The Hairy Ape will be analyzed based on this claiming that the various aesthetic dimensions of these plays – as text, instruction for staging, and basis for aesthetic experience – appropriate and rely on techniques of German expressionistic movies and photography (e.g. space, sound, light and shadow) and require more refined categories for the analysis of intermediality in dramatic texts and theatrical practices.
Hartwig, Marcel, Siegen University, Germany: “Keeping ‘the Wheel of Prayer in Continual Motion’: Fasting in Puritan Communities”
As many as nine so-called “days of humiliation” a year were held in New England’s Puritan communities until the end of the 17th century. Unauthorized by the English crown, these days were marked by fasts and hours of prayer to pacify an angry God and avoid starvation, droughts, or any other hardships. Most often these days were concluded with a simple meal, but also feasts were added to the communal ritual. The controlled nonconsumption of food, however, was also a means to a dietary regimen against such threats as gluttony or inebriety and therefore a most welcome practice to maintain the community’s physical and moral existence. In 1616, John Winthrop in his private diary, for example, praises “prayer and fasting” as a way to “recover […] life and comfort” and renders his appetite as “a bear at the stake”. In the gustatory senses and eating thus lay sources of a spiritual danger that not only would harm the individual body but also the close-knit ties of the Puritan community. Days of fast in colonial New England’s Puritan communities thus can be regarded as both a potent strategy to their social organization and as a way of reinforcing their separate identity. Through close readings of diary entries, sermons, and edicts this paper will address how the Puritan enthusiasm for fasting as a deliberate strategy of disobedience make visible the dynamics between politics, food, and cultural identity.
Heffron, Mary Claire, UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital, Oakland, USA: “The Great Society and Child Welfare”
Head Start, which provides “comprehensive early childhood education, health, nutrition, and parent involvement services to low-income children and their families” has generated controversy since it began in 1965. Liberals like Joseph Califano Jr. praise it for having served some 30 million poor children. It is, he has insisted, “as American as motherhood and apple pie.” Conservative critics such as Congressman Paul Ryan have questioned its very existence, arguing that it has failed in its primary goal of preparing its graduates for success in school and has been vulnerable to fraud. Critics from the Left have also noted the program’s limited success but attribute it to Congress’s miserly funding since the Sixties. What neither critics nor defenders of Head Start have acknowledged is the degree to which the program’s actual day-to-day work with preschoolers and their families was influenced by English and European child development principles and practice. This paper addresses that lacuna in the literature of the Great Society by describing the ways that Head Start programs incorporated the theories of English psychologist John Bowlby and the practical experience of two Hungarians – pediatrician Emmi Pikler and early childhood development specialist Magda Gerber. The author, who trained with Gerber and Pikler at Stanford and in Budapest, draws on her forty-plus years working with Head Start programs in numerous communities – from California, to Arizona and New Mexico, to Rhode Island– to demonstrate the ways that these transnational connections have contributed to Head Start’s promotion of child welfare in the United States.
Herzogenrath, Bernd, Goethe-University, Frankfurt, Germany: “Decasia - The Matter Image”
This talk will focus on the nexus of film, time, and materiality. I will begin by introducing film’s constitutive| constituting move as the attempt to represent time in film which was already being discussed at the birth of the medium. Taking my cue from Bazin’s influential article on the “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” I will shift my focus to the materiality of film: time leaves much more direct traces on film than any representation of time in film could ever achieve. Taking Bill Morrison’s film Decasia (2002) as example, I will direct a more ‘materialist’ approach to the filmic material. Material Culture is based on the premise that the materiality of objects are an integrative part and parcel of culture, that the material dimension is as fundamentally important in the understanding of a culture as language or social relations – but Material Culture mainly focuses on the materiality of everyday objects and their representation in the media [literature, film, arts, etc.]. Thus, a further and important step would be to redirect such an analysis to the materiality of the media itself, to put the probing finger not only at the thing in representation, but the thing of representation. The medium film seems to me most fitting to test such an interface of Material Culture and Media Studies, since film has entertained a most complex relation to time from its early beginnings onward: film promised to [re]present temporal dynamics – and the temporality of things – directly, unmediated, a paradox that gives rise to the different; strategies; of what Deleuze calls the movement-image and the time-image respectively. Such a representation, however, is not only an effect of a perceptive illusion, but also of the repression of the very materiality of film itself. If such an interest in the possibilities of the celluloid had already driven much of the 60s avant-garde [Brakhage, Jacobs, etc.], Decasia in addition does not only focus on film’s ‘thingness,’ but also its own, particular ‘temporality.’ Put together from found footage and archive material in various states of ‘dying,’ this film reveals the ‘collaboration’ of time and matter as in itself ‘creative,’ and ultimately produces a category that that I will call the matter-image and that, I argue, neither Deleuze’s movement-image, nor his time-image completely grasp: here, time and matter produce their own filmic image.
Hinrichsen, Malte, University of Hamburg, Germany: “‘Studies of That Kind’: European Roots of Jefferson’s Racial Thought”

Panel speaker: Thomas Jefferson and Europe: A Complex Legacy
Hirschfelder, Nicole, Eberhard Karls University, Tübingen, Germany: “‘No Justice, No Peace’: On New Forms and Challenges of (Understanding) Black Protest”
Challenging white supremacy by deliberately targeting segregated spaces, such as buses or lunch counters marked one of the central pillars of civil rights activism in the 1950s and 60s. These forms of non-violent direct action sought to bring about fundamental changes in order to overthrow Jim Crow laws and customs. While this kind of formal segregation has officially ceased to exist, several cases of police brutality against unarmed black citizens in public areas have recently prompted activists to again target so-called white spaces. In January 2015, for example, BlackBrunch demonstrators specifically protested in selected diners and restaurants to shed light on the fact that privileged whites can afford to brunch in safe, predominantly white spaces and ‘take a break from’ pressing political issues, whereas this luxury does not exist for the majority of blacks. While handsupunited.org or BlackLivesMatter have lately found mentioning in a number of scholarly books, for example, by Naomi Zack, Sandhya Rani Jha and Kenneth Fasching-Varner, more in-depth, analytical accounts that relate these protests to those from the 60s still remain scarce, however. This presentation will argue that recurring controversies, such as substituting BlackLivesMatter with AllLivesMatter not only result from the lack of a deeper comprehension of the historical dimension of these demonstrations, but also disclose profound misunderstandings regarding the campaign’s purpose and relevance today. Adopting an Eliasian perspective by drawing from his study, The Established and the Outsiders, this presentation will offer an attempt to view the 1960s protests in relation to today’s activism. A closer look at the historical background, the legal situation, and the respective social figurations will, in a last step, both focus on the problematic aspects of overestimating the role of social media and complicate the concept of today’s ‘non-violent’ protest.
Hoelbling, Walter H., Retired Professor Karl Franzens University of Graz, Austria

Roundtable speaker: Women ‘Against the Grain’ in U.S. Film, 1945-2015
Hoffman, Katherine, St. Anselm College, USA

Roundtable speaker: Women ‘Against the Grain’ in U.S. Film, 1945-2015
Hofer, Roberta, University of Innsbruck, Austria: “The Emancipation of the Puppet: Self-Determination and Human Marionettes in US Film”
This paper explores the phenomenon of “human marionettes” and its implications of dependency and freedom in contemporary US film, pinpointing the theme as a deeply American motif. “Human puppeteering” paradoxically merges two ontologically different beings: the human, based in the real world, independent and defined by free will – and the marionette, artificial inhabitant of fantastical worlds, caught on strings and controlled by its master. In recent years, several US films have confronted viewers with a number of characters who find themselves manipulated like puppets on a string. Examples include The Truman Show (1998), Being John Malkovich (1999), Stranger than Fiction (2006), Ruby Sparks (2012), and Camera Shy (2012). The dependency between the puppets and their masters puts a strong focus on dominance and control. This is inherently a very American theme, considering the implied aspects of freedom and self-determination (or the lack thereof) in puppeteering, as well as in US politics and the nation’s consciousness. In all of the case studies the dependency provides the basis for a shift of auctorial power, a munity, where the masters have to forfeit their dominance, thus passing the reigns to the once-enslaved, rebellious puppets. The puppeteers are caught in their own plotlines, and the once submissive marionettes emancipate themselves into confident narrators. While both, the puppet and the puppeteer, work on the fulfilment of their personal American Dream, only one succeeds. This paper discusses the filmic case studies of “human puppetry” through the lens of various theoretical approaches of film narratology, puppetry and theater studies. By placing the selected examples in a wider political and sociological context, it becomes apparent that the phenomenon is not only deeply rooted in the architecture of narration itself, but also tackles the cornerstones of the US constitution and American psyche.