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

Austenfeld, Thomas, University of Fribourg, Switzerland (chair)

Bak, Hans, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands (chair)

Panel: Writing Lives: American (Auto)Biography in Transition, Part I: The Challenges of Biography
‘The recounting of a life is a cheat, of course; I admit the truth of this; even our own stories are obscenely distorted,’ reflects Daisy Goodwill, the protagonist of The Stone Diaries, Carol Shield’s 1993 interrogation into the relative claims to truth of fiction and (auto)biography; ‘Biography, even autobiography, is full of systemic error, of holes that connect like a tangle of underground streams.’ This workshop aims to offer a platform, for both practicing biographers and scholars of (auto)biography, to examine the new challenges in the theory and practice of “writing the self” that have come with the transition from an “American Century” of print culture to the digital age. The writing of lives – of the self or of others, in fact or in fiction, in print, visual media or online modes of writing – has become a hybrid, porous and multiform genre. Traditional dividing lines (biography, autobiography, fiction) have become blurred and untenable, yielding a rich diversity of intersectional modes and manifestations in the field of life-writing. The self, however mediated, adopts a kaleidoscopic multiplicity of (dis)guises and strategies of self-representation and self-fashioning. More than half a century after Leon Edel’s Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (1959), practical biographers continue to struggle with the ever-fascinating problems of sources and archives, relatives, interviewees and executors. Some undertake the vexatious search for unity and coherence – what Henry James long ago called “the figure in the carpet” – in their subjects’ lives, others seek to incorporate a postmodern understanding of the self as necessarily discontinuous, conflicted and fragmentary. Still others seek to fathom the wily (and often barely self-conscious) strategies of subterfuge and duplicity in the selfrepresentation of their subjects, in fiction, letters, diaries, autobiographies, or other and more recent forms of ego-documents. Dilemmas of identity-formation loom with particular urgency when lives are shaped by the urgencies of class, race, gender, sexual orientation, or religious conviction. In the wake of confessional poetry and identitarian writing, the boundaries of privacy have been pushed back to permit discussions of sexuality and illness that seemed anathema for long, while radio, television, film and the new digital media have opened up avenues to new modes of “mediating” lives. “Writing the self” manifests itself as easily in popular forms of crime fiction or travel writing; in visual or cinematic representation (narrative photography, biopics); in new modes of online representation (authors’ websites, blogs, biography.com, the Biography Channel); as in more traditional modes of literary life-writing. Archival materials formerly restricted to an elitist body of certified researchers are made available on publicly (democratically?) accessible websites – e.g. The Walt Whitman Archive, The Mark Twain Project Online – offering both new challenges and opportunities for new intermedial modes of life-writing, and raising new questions about the uses and abuses of archives and the responsibility (and authority) of the (auto)biographer – and the reader. In this workshop, then, we hope to bring together an international group of scholars and practitioners of modes of life-writing, old and new, to discuss the trials and tribulations, the profits and pleasures, the challenges and dilemmas of “writing lives” as an interdisciplinary art and practice, as a quintessential mode of doing American Studies, as we transition into the post-print age. The workshop, we hope, will provide the opportunity to present poignant case studies as well as to address issues of theoretical, historical and comparative inquiry.
Panel speakers:

Marian Janssen, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands: “The Writer behind the Writer: The Making of an American Biography”
John F. Moe, Ohio State University, USA: “The Haunting Melody of Time Past: Oral Narrative, Literary Text, and Material Culture in African American Biography”
K. Kevyne Baar, Human Science Institute, USA: “The Personal was Always Political: The Letters of John and Sarah Cunningham Randolph, 1941-1945”
Ina Batzke, University of Münster, Germany: “Documenting the Undocumented: Online Life Stories of Undocumented Youth in the United States”

Bak, Hans, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands (chair)

Austenfeld, Thomas, University of Fribourg, Switzerland (chair)

Panel: Writing Lives: American (Auto)Biography in Transition, Part II: (Auto)biographical Ambivalences
Panel speakers:

Babs Boter and Lonneke Geerlings, VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands: “Writing a (Wo)Man’s Life, Or the Autobiographical Self in Female Portraits of Men”
Anne Ollivier-Mellios, University of Lyon 2, France: “Militants’ Autobiographies: Between Writing the Self and Writing History”
Lyuba Pervushina, Minsk State Linguistic University, Belarus: “Going Beyond the Boundaries: Erica Jong’s Autobiographical Writing”
Marta J. Lysik, University of Wroclaw, Poland: “The Power of Vulnerability: Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of Girl”
Austin, Patrycja, University of Rzeszów, Poland: “Claire of the Sea Light – a View from Another Shore in Edwidge Danticat’s Latest Novel”
Informed by her own immigrant experience, writing from her Miami home Danticat writes about Haiti in ways which focus on what is missing, her Haiti exceeds its geographic borders. Living away from her country of origin she is informed by the dislocations that open up the interstitial spaces in which the dichotomies of place, time, class, race or gender lose their meaning. In this paper I will focus on the presentation of the town, Ville Rose, and apply Deleuze an Guattari’s metaphor of the ‘rhizome’ to examine the nomadic perspective in the description of the life of its inhabitants. I will look at the possibilities that the in-between space of indeterminacy opens up for the author.
Baar, K. Kevyne, Human Science Institute, USA: “The Personal was Always Political: The Letters of John and Sarah Cunningham Randolph, 1941-1945”
In the summer of 1941, Mortimer Lippman (born Emmanuel Hirsch Cohen, soon renamed John Randolph), a charming young Jewish man from Bronx, New York, attended a celebration sponsored by the communist party of New York City. He brought with him the statuesque Sarah Cunningham of Greenville, South Carolina, a true rebellious Southern belle. They had been engaged in an affair that had started in an acting class, and was now facing the political litmus test. As Cunningham passed with flying colors, a letter commemorating the occasion quickly followed. It would be the first of many they exchanged over the next several years as Morty/John went into the service, came home, pursued his acting career and married Cunningham before the matinee of a show he was appearing in in Chicago. The back and forth of their letters, more often then not crossing in the mail, are a major part of the John Randolph Papers (WAG.255) at the Tamiment Library where I discovered them while processing the collection. The letters clearly demonstrate their passionate love for one another, and a deep sense of responsibility towards an activist life. In many ways politics was like their religion; the passion and devotion of their personal love was expressed in their united passion for, and commitment to, political involvement and social change. In my presentation I will discuss how working with the letters as a primary source is a valuable way to enlarge on and sometimes correct the veracity of memory.
Babic, Annessa Ann, New York Institute of Technology, USA: “Show Me your Archive and I Will Tell You Who Is in Power: The Development of Women’s Archives in the United States”
In the United States, women’s libraries and archives emerged out of the mid-twentieth century feminist movement that swept across the country and revolutionized knowledge and its patriarchal power structure. The original premise of these institutions (mostly housed in colleges and universities) was to celebrate and preserve women’s diverse contributions to society. With the women’s liberation movement (also known as the Second Wave of feminism) of the 1960s and 70s came the proliferation of women’s studies programs, which served as a catalyst in bringing women to the forefront of the social and cultural narrative. It also brought with it an urgency to document the radical changes that were occurring within the country, an increased recuperation of the past, and the preservation of women’s materials for the future. This paper will explore the origins of women’s archives in the United States, and will include an analysis of key institutions such as the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College; the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union Herstory Project; the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College (Harvard University); the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture (Duke University); the Lesbian Herstory Archives (Brooklyn, NY); the Five Colleges Women’s History Archive; and the Iowa Women’s Archives (University of Iowa). Digital archives, such as the Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000 Collection, and the North American Women’s Letters and Diaries Collection, both from Alexander Street Press, will also be discussed as a means of stimulating discussion on the current state, and future direction, of Women’s Studies research within American Studies. This paper will also delve into the politics of (women’s) archives and the struggle over whose voices are heard, and whose voices are not.
Bak, Hans, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands (chair)

Austenfeld, Thomas, University of Fribourg, Switzerland (chair)

Panel: Writing Lives: American (Auto)Biography in Transition, Part I: The Challenges of Biography
‘The recounting of a life is a cheat, of course; I admit the truth of this; even our own stories are obscenely distorted,’ reflects Daisy Goodwill, the protagonist of The Stone Diaries, Carol Shield’s 1993 interrogation into the relative claims to truth of fiction and (auto)biography; ‘Biography, even autobiography, is full of systemic error, of holes that connect like a tangle of underground streams.’ This workshop aims to offer a platform, for both practicing biographers and scholars of (auto)biography, to examine the new challenges in the theory and practice of “writing the self” that have come with the transition from an “American Century” of print culture to the digital age. The writing of lives – of the self or of others, in fact or in fiction, in print, visual media or online modes of writing – has become a hybrid, porous and multiform genre. Traditional dividing lines (biography, autobiography, fiction) have become blurred and untenable, yielding a rich diversity of intersectional modes and manifestations in the field of life-writing. The self, however mediated, adopts a kaleidoscopic multiplicity of (dis)guises and strategies of self-representation and self-fashioning. More than half a century after Leon Edel’s Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (1959), practical biographers continue to struggle with the ever-fascinating problems of sources and archives, relatives, interviewees and executors. Some undertake the vexatious search for unity and coherence – what Henry James long ago called “the figure in the carpet” – in their subjects’ lives, others seek to incorporate a postmodern understanding of the self as necessarily discontinuous, conflicted and fragmentary. Still others seek to fathom the wily (and often barely self-conscious) strategies of subterfuge and duplicity in the selfrepresentation of their subjects, in fiction, letters, diaries, autobiographies, or other and more recent forms of ego-documents. Dilemmas of identity-formation loom with particular urgency when lives are shaped by the urgencies of class, race, gender, sexual orientation, or religious conviction. In the wake of confessional poetry and identitarian writing, the boundaries of privacy have been pushed back to permit discussions of sexuality and illness that seemed anathema for long, while radio, television, film and the new digital media have opened up avenues to new modes of “mediating” lives. “Writing the self” manifests itself as easily in popular forms of crime fiction or travel writing; in visual or cinematic representation (narrative photography, biopics); in new modes of online representation (authors’ websites, blogs, biography.com, the Biography Channel); as in more traditional modes of literary life-writing. Archival materials formerly restricted to an elitist body of certified researchers are made available on publicly (democratically?) accessible websites – e.g. The Walt Whitman Archive, The Mark Twain Project Online – offering both new challenges and opportunities for new intermedial modes of life-writing, and raising new questions about the uses and abuses of archives and the responsibility (and authority) of the (auto)biographer – and the reader. In this workshop, then, we hope to bring together an international group of scholars and practitioners of modes of life-writing, old and new, to discuss the trials and tribulations, the profits and pleasures, the challenges and dilemmas of “writing lives” as an interdisciplinary art and practice, as a quintessential mode of doing American Studies, as we transition into the post-print age. The workshop, we hope, will provide the opportunity to present poignant case studies as well as to address issues of theoretical, historical and comparative inquiry.
Panel speakers:

Marian Janssen, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands: “The Writer behind the Writer: The Making of an American Biography”
John F. Moe, Ohio State University, USA: “The Haunting Melody of Time Past: Oral Narrative, Literary Text, and Material Culture in African American Biography”
K. Kevyne Baar, Human Science Institute, USA: “The Personal was Always Political: The Letters of John and Sarah Cunningham Randolph, 1941-1945”
Ina Batzke, University of Münster, Germany: “Documenting the Undocumented: Online Life Stories of Undocumented Youth in the United States”
Bak, Hans, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands (chair)

Austenfeld, Thomas, University of Fribourg, Switzerland (chair)

Panel: Writing Lives: American (Auto)Biography in Transition, Part II: (Auto)biographical Ambivalences
Panel speakers:

Babs Boter and Lonneke Geerlings, VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands: “Writing a (Wo)Man’s Life, Or the Autobiographical Self in Female Portraits of Men”
Anne Ollivier-Mellios, University of Lyon 2, France: “Militants’ Autobiographies: Between Writing the Self and Writing History”
Lyuba Pervushina, Minsk State Linguistic University, Belarus: “Going Beyond the Boundaries: Erica Jong’s Autobiographical Writing”
Marta J. Lysik, University of Wroclaw, Poland: “The Power of Vulnerability: Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of Girl”
Bakratcheva, Albena New Bulgarian University, Sofia, Bulgaria: “1836: Nature’s Reign Begins”
One hundred and eighty years ago Ralph Waldo Emerson’s NATURE was published to express what was already in the air – the need for a newly established correspondence between mind and nature, for “an original relation to the universe”. Emerson’s word was vision, a newly expanded vision for nature as always wearing “the colors of the spirit”. A few years later Emerson will describe his Poet as the Seer and Namer, in whose eyes America is a poem and “will not wait long for metres”. The visual arts were moving in the same direction, having already established the American landscape as an artistic object in its own right. In fact, Thomas Cole saw a close relation between poetry and painting, asserting that “to walk with nature as a poet is the necessary condition of a perfect artist”. Henry Thoreau preferred words to paints (never actually developing any taste for the visual arts), but he turned walking with nature into a mode of life – poetical, scientific, “simplified”, true. And this true living with nature led him to the wish to speak for nature, to become nature’s own voice against the human threats. Cole’s walks with nature did also lead him to the understanding that nature should not be devastatingly used only but defended and preserved. This paper will deal with nature-awareness as a distinctively American phenomenon: from NATURE in 1836 through the Hudson River school and Thoreau’s shift from homocentrism to ecocentrism, through John James Audobon’s paintings of American birds and John Muir’s travelogues to the emergence of nature writing and the creation of the US National Park Service in 1916 and of Baxter State Park in 1931, it will discuss the multi-dimensional and seemingly endless environmental discourse of American culture
Balestrini, Nassim, Karl Franzens University Graz, Austria: “Cli-Fi Drama and Performance”

Panel speaker: What’s in a Name?’: Debating Cli-Fi
Banica, Gabriela-Alexandra, University of Bucharest, Romania: “The Transformative Power of the Arts in Don DeLillo’s Terrorist Novels”
The paper is set to present the transformative power of the arts in Don DeLillo’s terrorist novels: Players (1977), Mao II (1991), and Falling Man (2007), by analyzing the passage from terrorist as social actor in the universe of the novel to terrorism as a main theme of a novel by Don DeLillo, and it argues that Don DeLillo makes use of the transformative power of the arts to create his counter-narrative. In Don DeLillo’s literary work the notion of terrorist as societal actor first appears in his 1977 novel Players, the notion is later given in-depth treatment in his 1991 novel Mao II. In his post- 9/11 novel Falling Man, terrorism itself is the main theme of the novel along trauma. This passage from terrorist as a character and theme of discussion in his novels to terrorism as a phenomenon, no longer focusing on the person but on his act, is marked by an increasing usage of art in his novels. If in Players the arts have a small dosage in the content of the novel, present only, through a cinematic passage, the no sound movie depicting some golfers killed by terrorists, in Mao II a prevalence of the arts is noted through direct reference to Andy Warhol’s works, and focus on photography. In his post- 9/11 novel Falling Man the prevalence of the arts increases: there is art, artists and art critics present in the novel.
Baniceru, Ana Cristina, West University of Timișoara, Romania: “Writing the Story of Madness”
The present paper analyses the connection between storytelling and madness in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat”. Therefore, I argue that the language of madness stretches the limits of narrative and storytelling to almost complete collapse. This happens because the narrators reject the metaphors and myths of healing, and refuse to write themselves free of madness. By telling the story of their madness, instead of identifying with their symptoms and accepting them as part of their identity, Gilman’s and Poe’s narrators project their symptoms outside. This alienation of the symptoms is realized through a subtle literalisation of metaphors. Both the black cat and the yellow wallpaper become symbolic projections of the narrators’ fears and feelings of entrapment in a domestic life, leading to a final

catastrophic fragmentation of the self.

Bartczak, Kacper, University of Lodz, Poland: “Evolution, Aesthetics, and Irony in Rae Armantrout’s Poetry”
John Dewey argued that it is in the very capacities and faculties by which an organism engages with its environment that the aesthetic element has its origin. Rae Armantout’s poetry investigates the present ramifications of this pragmatist claim. Her poems trace the way in which human desire and obsessions penetrate, control, and suffuse external materiality with their own contents. In her poems, the external materiality of environments – domestic, urban, linguistic, other – is only a transient product of the complex life of organisms, as they strive for survival by reshaping their surroundings. However, in contrast to Dewey’s philosophy, Armantrout’s poems display an ironic consciousness that remains outside of this struggle. The poems reflect and meditate on the aesthetic element inherent in the evolutionary processes. Camouflage, mimicry, all kinds of deceit – belong to the life of both, poems and organisms. But the poem is more than a wholesale endorsement of this naturalist assumption: it intercepts the evolutionary aesthetic, engages it, uses it for its own purposes, and then projects its own ironic distance to it. While Dewey’s aesthetic is used by some modernists, such as Williams, to carve habitable spaces amidst the aesthetically enhanced ordinariness, no such comfort is found in Armantrout’s poetics. Here, ultimately, the ironic aesthetics of the poems overrides Dewey’s experiential aesthetics of organic life and refuses to appease or tame the mundane and the transient. Instead, it shows the ordinary as a place of continuous struggle and subterfuge.
Baruah, Debarchana, University of Heidelberg, Germany: “The 1960s of Mad Men”
Representing the past in films and television has become a standard practice in contemporary America. This phenomena poses questions regarding our sustained interest in the past, the appeal of the past for contemporary audiences, and the extent of mediations within these representations as they bring the past back into life. My paper will examine the relationship of the contemporary AMC television series Mad Men to the American 1960s, where it is set. A few instances from the series are analyzed to understand the problems of periodization within a retro representation, and the variety of ways that characters in within the narrative revisit their past. One significant way of revisiting the past is enabled by nostalgia. I will discuss the treatment of nostalgia within Mad Men, and around the series as a result of its long run and serial format. I contend what we see in some of these retro representations involves something complex and layered. I explore Mad Men as a case study to understand how the past is negotiated in the series through the lens of nostalgia, critical distance and commercial viability. I also plan to follow this with a brief discussion on the evolution of the discourse on nostalgia, its contradictory dimensions, and the concomitant results of its over circulation. I would locate my paper within the broader context of David Lowenthal’s framework of the past as a foreign country, and the potential of a retro cultural text to imagine these not-so-distant pasts without divesting them of their historic significance.
Basiuk, Tomasz, University of Warsaw, Poland: “Edmund White’s Life Writing and the Mode of Reprise”
Edmund White, an American writer who spent many years in Paris and who is best known for his early autobiographical fiction addressing his experience as a gay man, has repeatedly written about the same events in his life in both fictionalized and openly autobiographical modes. These reiterations across the genres of life writing provide a unique occasion for considering memory as constructed, especially that White’s novelistic rendition typically precedes the straightforward memoir. A close reading of the instances in which White returns to certain details and to episodes he had described some years before reveals that his prose, often eloquent to the point of verbosity, is a sensitive instrument reflecting the contemporary discourses about national character, class, sexuality, and AIDS, among other subjects. As a writer, White is interested in the ways that shifting categories of discourse, be they stereotypes or self-consciously theoretical concepts, shape what may be said about certain kinds of experience, which persist in memory but which morph to the mold of the time of their telling. White deploys an aesthetic of reprise to carry out his artistic investigation, as he connects his personal past, already recounted in parts, to the time present.