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

Manea, Dragoș, University of Bucharest, Romania: “Leonardo’s Straightwashing; Da Vinci’s Demons (Starz, 2013--) and the Struggle for a Queer Cultural Memory”
The American television series Da Vinci’s Demons premiered in 2013 to accusations of straightwashing and general skepticism with regard to its portrayal of Leonardo Da Vinci, the Italian Renaissance polymath who is generally considered to have been homosexual. The show’s creator, David S. Goyer gave an interview to wellknown gay entertainment website afterelton.com (now thebacklot.com) shortly before the premiere, arguing that the show will not shy away from depicting Leonardo’s historically documented sexual orientation. However, it was not until the fifth episode, “The Tower,” – which depicts Leonardo’s trial for sodomy – that the show tackled the theme of Leonardo’s homosexuality. Before it, the main character had only been shown in romantic dalliances with beautiful young women. In conversation with queer theorists like Charles E. Morris III and José Esteban Muñoz, as well as cultural memory scholars such as Alison Landsberg and Astrid Erll, this paper examines the narrative strategies employed by Da Vinci’s Demons both in depicting the title character’s homosexual encounters and in normalizing him through the emphasis placed on his largely heterosexual lifestyle. While I agree that the accusations are entirely warranted and discuss them in detail, I go beyond a rigid focus on the series’ reception in the gay community, and attempt to understand the larger approach to the adaptation of historical narratives that informs the series’ production, as well as its relation to queer cultural memory. I thus attempt to elucidate Leonardo’s paradoxical queerness by exploring three fundamental questions: how do traditional historical adaptations serve to reconcile viewers to normative, contemporary ways of being, while at the same time suppressing both authentically historical and alternative, contemporary values and social practices? How does queer cultural memory resist acts of mnemonic erasure? And what exactly is the underlying cultural logic that governs the practice of straightwashing?
Manolachi, Monica, University of Bucharest, Romania: “‘Our Chef is Delicious’: Persona Poetry in Contemporary American Literature”
This paper will explore the contemporary American poetry production, namely the poetry of Ravi Shankar, Edward Smallfield and Valerie Coulton, in order to present the different style and poetic origin of the three poets, which vary from abstract to prose poetry. Their poetic voice includes a large number of references to the American poetic tradition and incorporates different techniques and ways of writing, achieving at the same time to create a style of their own. The second purpose of this paper is to present the aforementioned poets through the prism of translation and show the ways their poetry finds its expression into another language and a totally different target audience. Translation difficulties will be presented and an analysis will follow showing the methods a translator of poetry uses to render meaning as well as form in the target language. More specifically, based on Andre Lefevere’s seven strategies for the translation of poetry, the analysis will focus on those instances the translator has to make a conscious choice and adjust and/or adapt the original poem to the target poem which might be slightly different, given the restrictions the target language and syntax impose. Finally, the whole discussion will focus on how the three poets can have the same impact on another audience and a different culture, with the translator as their mediator.
Mantzaris, Thomas, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece: “Hybrid Textualities – Heteroglossic Narratives”
Eighty years ago, Mikhail Bakhtin introduced the terms “heteroglossia” and “hybrid texts” in an attempt to theorize the complexities of the inherent multiplicity of languages within the world of the novel. In the era dominated by the forces of images, information, and the Internet, the 21st century experience is conceptualized and captured as a heteroglossic narrative by a range of literary authors and visual artists. A range of current publications aim at exploring the potential of the print book as a space and a carrier of heteroglossia. The diversity of narratives and codes in the particular literary works suggests that the novel as a medium not only constitutes an essential space for the realization of heteroglossia, but also enables and extends this notion to encompass new perspectives and envision new directions for literature. Drawing on the example of J.J. Abrams’s and Doug Dorst’s S. as well as other contemporary literary works, I will argue that the creative experimentation and the foregrounding of visuality through photography and innovative layout in these cultural artefacts, marks a new dynamic for the future of heteroglossia in literature as well as suggests an emerging prospect for American Studies.
Manousakis, Vasilis, Hellenic American College, Athens, Greece: “Contemporary American Poets in Translation”
This paper will explore the contemporary American poetry production, namely the poetry of Ravi Shankar, Edward Smallfield and Valerie Coulton, in order to present the different style and poetic origin of the three poets, which vary from abstract to prose poetry. Their poetic voice includes a large number of references to the American poetic tradition and incorporates different techniques and ways of writing, achieving at the same time to create a style of their own. The second purpose of this paper is to present the aforementioned poets through the prism of translation and show the ways their poetry finds its expression into another language and a totally different target audience. Translation difficulties will be presented and an analysis will follow showing the methods a translator of poetry uses to render meaning as well as form in the target language. More specifically, based on Andre Lefevere’s seven strategies for the translation of poetry, the analysis will focus on those instances the translator has to make a conscious choice and adjust and/or adapt the original poem to the target poem which might be slightly different, given the restrictions the target language and syntax impose. Finally, the whole discussion will focus on how the three poets can have the same impact on another audience and a different culture, with the translator as their mediator.
Manzanas-Calvo, Ana Maria, University of Salamanca, Spain: “From Guests to Hostages in Junot Díaz’s ‘Invierno’”
The paper examines the hostility that awaits a Dominican family newly arrived to the United States. The father takes them to the new family home, which is next to a landfill. But hostility is firmly established within the apartment as well, where Ramón, the father and despot, lays down the laws of hospitality as well as the violence of the power of hospitality. The guests, transformed into hostages, are immobilized under the law of the father and under the law of the land. What is specific about “Invierno” is that immobilization is both spatial and linguistic. Significantly, language has been a crucial aspect of hospitality. In fact, Derrida has written that “language is hospitality” (DH 117, 119). In “Invierno,” however, language is equated with hostility. It is not the hostility of the native host versus the alien guest, the native speaker of English versus the migrant, but between the assimilated Dominican and the newly arrived. As a bilingual host, Ramón is the master that casts Spanish as a migrant language relegated to the sphere of the domestic, the sphere of the unnamed mother, while English becomes the master language that secures social and spatial mobility. Thus, Díaz’s story is that of interaction between hosts and guest, but also of host and guest languages. Drawing from Paul Ricoeur’s terms “narrative hospitality” and “linguistic hospitality” the chapter suggests that linguistic hospitality can address the incorporation of the other and his or her language into a host country or language.
Mariani, Andrea, University of Chieti and Pescara, Italy: “Synesthetic Strategies and the Ecology of Sounds”
The paper studies at first the dynamic interplay of sounds, voices, words and images, during the transition from oral to written language, analyzing the role of synesthesia as a sophisticated linguistic strategy, and showing its crucial function in the context of literary discourses. Offering various examples, in particular from the territory of Angloamerican poetry, it concludes that synesthesia is productive and operative not only in the literary field, but also in the history of the development of human communication, when the latter is – as it should be – not exclusively rational, but emotional and affective as well. In so doing, synesthesia plays an essential role also in the field of sound ecology. The paper would fit in the context of a workshop/panel devoted to the theme of ecocriticism, since contemporary scholars of American literature pay a growing attention to the branch of those studies that takes into account the delicate balance between natural and artificial sounds, and the necessity to find a harmonic co-existence of noises, sounds, voices, oral utterances, and their functions and meaning.
Marino, Elisabetta, University of Rome-Tor Vergata, Italy: “Italian Women’s Archives: Their Origin, Development, and American Connections”
Stemming from the widespread turmoil of the late 1960s, neo-feminist movements in Italy had a rather heterogeneous character. Moreover, they privileged small-group activities, and were bound to specific geographical areas, mainly large cities. For instance, groundbreaking associations such as DeMau (Demistification of Authority), and Rivolta Femminile (female revolt) were born in Milan and in Rome, respectively. It is not surprising, therefore, that women’s archives, in their capacity as repositories of individual and collective memories, and as powerful tools to rewrite history by uncovering herstory, were established in those very cities, between the 1970s and 1990s. The “Archivio delle donne” (Naples), la “Biblioteca italiana delle donne” (created in Bologna at the end of the 70s, thanks to the efforts of Associazione Orlando, an independent feminist group), “Archivio per la memoria e la scrittura delle donne” (Florence), and “Osservatorio sulla storia e scrittura delle donne” (Rome) were among such archives. Women’s archives in Italy are still being established and expanded. Following a brief outline of their origin and developments, this paper will explore the how these archives have been influenced by US women’s archives and American intellectuals. In 1983, the “Archivio delle donne” in Naples, for example, invited Mariam Chamberlain (President of the National Council for Research on Women) to give a lecture on women’s studies which proved seminal. This paper will also, like the other two on the panel, assess the state of feminist research as a discipline, especially within the Italian context, stimulating discussion on the current state, and future direction, of Women’s Studies within American Studies in Italy.
Marszalski, Mariusz, Wroclaw University, Poland: “Quod Vadis Homo Futuris? – Dan Simmons’ Trans/Post-Humanist Fiction on the Evolutionary Future of the Human Species”
Is humanity still evolving? Opinions vary. As paleontologists assume, the common ancestor of the large apes and humans lived some 8-6 million years ago. Bipedalism, one of the earliest defining human traits, evolved over 4 million years ago. Brain size increased gradually from 6-2 million years ago. Other important human features such as the ability to use tools and the development of language occurred, according to some estimations, around 2.6 and 1.75 million years ago, respectively. More advanced traits, including art, complex symbolic expression and cultural variety, emerged during the past 100,000 years. The beginnings of agriculture and the rise of the first civilizations happened within the past 12,000 years. Ever since, as many scientists believe, essential physical and behavioral characteristics of the human race have hardly changed and even if some changes are happening they are imperceptible for evolution is a lengthy process that can be observed only within a longer time perspective. Sound as such views are, there are voices to the contrary that claim that humanity is standing at the threshold of a huge evolutionary revolution. Futurists like F. M. Esfandiary, Raymond Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom, David Pearce, Anders Sandberg or Hans Moravec predict that human enhancement technologies and the inevitable emergence of independent artificial intelligences create a new reality that launches mankind into a trans/post-human era. The paper that I would like to propose is a discussion of Dan Simmons’ speculative trans/post-humanist fiction The Hyperion Cantos and the Ilium/Olympus duologue with respect to the author’s evolutionary vision of the humanity of the future.
Martanovschi, Ludmila, Ovidius University, Constanţa, Romania: “American Sites: Experiencing Spaces and Bodies in Three Plays by John Guare”

Using insights from geocriticism and urban studies, the current analysis focuses on three plays that established John Guare’s reputation as American playwright in the twentieth century: “Landscape of the Body” (1977), “Lydie Breeze” (1982) and “Six Degrees of Separation” (1990). The paper will demonstrate that space shapes identities and relationships, by discussing the main characters’ experience of New York City in two of the plays, “Landscape of the Body” and “Six Degrees of Separation”, as well as of Nantucket Island in the third. The characters’ encounters with specific sites of the quintessentially American metropolis, such as Greenwich Village and Central Park, have significance for their trajectories, determining fundamental aspects of their lives, among which class mobility and sexuality, and sometimes even their deaths. The dynamics of Bert’s adventure in Lower Manhattan (“Landscape of the Body”) will be mapped in parallel to Paul’s intrusion in the Kittredges’ Fifth Avenue home (“Six Degrees of Separation”). In “Lydie Breeze”, nineteenth century Nantucket is the space that hosts and influences the Utopian project of a small group of dreamers, the fact that the location is an island having important consequences for the evolution of the events. Relying on Guare’s statement in one of the plays, according to which “the only landscape worth looking at is the landscape of the human body”, the study will also investigate the idea that bodies themselves can be experienced as spaces to be discovered, visited, explored, mapped, conquered, appreciated, contaminated and (re)imagined, and the implications of this on stage.

Martin, Nicola, University of Stirling, UK: “Army, Assimilation and Empire: the ’45 and British Imperialism in North America"
Two hundred and seventy years have passed since the Jacobite threat was crushed by the British army on the battlefield at Culloden Moor in the Scottish Highlands. In the aftermath of the battle the British army embarked on a violent pacification of the Highlands in an attempt to impose order on its ‘barbaric’ and ‘savage’ population. As the immediate fears over British safety lessened the pacification became more concerned with the long-term ‘civilising’ of the area and centred around legislative and economic changes that would assimilate the Highlanders more closely with the rest of Britain. Within a decade the army was involved in the imperial struggle against France in North America and officers were encountering various peoples who were, like the Scottish Highlanders, seen as others, including Native Americans and French Canadians. These peoples represented a potential threat to British imperialism both during and after the French and Indian War and the army employed various methods to attempt to pacify them, both violent and nonviolent. This paper will consider the parallels evident in the treatment of peoples considered to be others in these two peripheries of empire, considering the attitudes of British army officers towards those they encountered. Specifically, it will consider the importance of trade as a tool for assimilation and will illuminate some of the cultural attitudes driving imperialism in the eighteenth-century.
Martínez Serrano, Leonor María, University of Cordoba, Spain: “The Audible Light of Words: Mark Strand on Poetry and the Self”
That poetry is as old as humanity and the beating heart of literature sounds like a truism, and yet, from time to time, we need to be reminded that this is the case. Like philosophy or science or love, poetry is a way of getting to know reality, or so says French philosopher Alain Badiou in his Manifeste pour la philosophie. Poetry is the purest form of knowledge. As heirs to the century-old Western literary tradition, contemporary poets still feel there is something mysterious at the core of poems as inexhaustible artifacts, something that is hard to decipher or decode for good. This may account for poets’ concern with exploring the nature of poetry, both in their own poems (meta-literary compositions) and in pieces of literary criticism which are usually elegantly written. American poet Mark Strand, like the High Modernists Eliot, Pound or Stevens before him, is a paradigmatic example of a poet immersed in deep thinking and writing about the nature and role of poetry in the world. Born in Canada and educated in the USA, Strand is one of the most outstanding voices of contemporary American poetry. He is the author of a vast corpus of works encompassing poetry, prose, translations, art books, children books and anthologies. Among his poetry books are Sleeping with One Eye Open (1964), Reasons for Moving (1968), Darker (1970), The Story of Our Lives (1973), The Sargentville Notebook (1973), The Late Hour (1978), Selected Poems (1980), The Continuous Life (1990), Dark Harbor (1993), Blizzard of One (1998), Chicken, Shadow, Moon and More (2000), Man and Camel (2006) and New Selected Poems (2009). From the outset of his literary career, Rimbaud’s intimation that je est un autre (the self is someone else) has prompted Strand to explore in his poems and prose works the geographies of the self, the world as a prolongation of the voracious consciousness and limitless body of the poet, as well as the nature of poetry and translation. Strand writes naturally, without seeming effort or artifice, though his gift for the musical phrase and verbal nakedness are the result of genuine, conscientious craftsmanship. His oeuvre is a great human achievement. The aim of this paper is to look at Strand’s thinking about what poetry is all about, as expressed in his poetry collections and prose works, especially in The Monument (1978), a book of “notes, observations, rants, and revelations” about literary immortality, but also a meditation on “the translation of a self, and the text as self, the self as book”; in The Continuous Life (1990), a collection of luminous pieces on various aspects of the literary enterprise; and in “Notes on the Craft of Poetry”, an insightful essay included in The Weather of Words. Poetic Invention (2000), where the poet discusses the essentials of poetry as something made by the human imagination, the meaning or content of a poem, and the creative process with the guidance of such preeminent minds as those of Carl Jung, Paul Valéry and Wallace Stevens. Whether a form of communication or inexhaustible artefacts, poems happen to be made out of words that capture being, and yet Strand feels that poems must exist not only in language but beyond it if they are to speak to posterity. Poetry might possibly be an attribute of reality, it might be in the very texture of the mesh of things, or at least this seems to be the intimation of Strand and other contemporary poets whose true vocation is to make poems with their hands and their breathing, and still find time to think deeply about their quasi-mystical calling. The audible light in their words testify to the inexhaustible splendour and beauty of the world implicit in the thinking and the singing of poems. After all, this is what poetry is: a form of paying attention to what is.
Martynuska, Małgorzata, University of Rzeszów, Poland: “Cultural Hybridity in the USA Exemplified by Tex-Mex Cuisine”
Transnational mobility is the process which has a big impact not only on the lives of migrants who travel to another culture but also on the host culture itself. Because of the increasingly globalized nature of the world, cultural differences are no longer as clearly defined as they were in the past. The direct result of migration is the concept of cultural hybridity which combines diverse cultural fusions such as Tex-Mex. The presentation concerns the hybrid phenomenon of Tex-Mex cuisine that evolved in the U.S.-Mexico borderland. The history of the U.S.-Mexican border area makes it one of the world’s great culinary regions where different migrations have created an area of rich cultural exchange between Native Americans and Spanish, and then Mexicans and Anglos. The term ‘Tex-Mex’ was previously used to describe anything that was half-Texan and half-Mexican and implied a long-term family presence within the current boundaries of Texas. Nowadays, the term designates the Texan variety of something Mexican; it can apply to music, fashion, language or cuisine. Tex-Mex foods are Americanised versions of Mexican cuisine describing a spicy combination of Spanish, Mexican and Native American cuisines that are mixed together and adapted to American tastes, creating popular dishes such as tacos, burritos, enchiladas. Tex-Mex cuisine is an example of Mexicanidad that entered American culture and still keeps evolving.
Mazur, Krystyna, University of Warsaw, Poland: “Queer Anarchy: Resistance to the Normativization of Genders, Sexual Identities and the Neoliberal Economy in Silas Howard’s and Harry Dodge’s By Hook or by Crook”
Made in 2001 by a group of queer artists, performers and filmmakers—Silas Howard, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn—By Hook or by Crook is an independent feature produced with a tiny budget and a mini digital video camera. Reminiscent of the theater of the absurd, the film’s narrative is barely sketched out and events are difficult to account for as the characters are prompted by unorthodox motivations and the logic of their actions is elusive. Although the reality they inhabit is a recognizable contemporary urban environment, they seem to exist in a world of their own governed by a child-like, innocent, improvisational logic. With undefined genders (one of the characters claims to be both a boy and a girl; another is a bearded daughter in search of her mother), those “queer bandits,” as Judith Halberstam calls them, engage in scams and robberies involving plastic water guns and vending machines. Everything they do is defined by a certain lack of seriousness and yet they manage to sustain themselves and seem to be accepted by the world around them. The only threat to their freedom is constituted by institutions, represented by the police and the psychiatric establishment. I examine the film as a representation of a new radical queer politics which rejects the assimilative strain in U.S. LGBT activism and culture. The film’s celebration of the refusal to assimilate and to be productive members of the society situates it clearly within the politicized strain of contemporary queerness, which radically opposes tendencies toward normativization (be it in terms of the normative family or the capitalist economy). At the same time, the politics of this film is expressed indirectly, or, as Dodge puts it, “obliquely” in a manner which is non-didactic and interested “in gray areas or in-betweenness.” It is performed, rather, by a togetherness which, to use Jose Munoz’s formulation is a “movement beyond the singular individualized subjectivity” and toward a “critical utopia.”