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

Borcan, Dimitrie Andrei, Ovidius University, Constanţa, Romania: “Colour Symbolism as Reversed Racism and Quest for the Self in Moby Dick and Heart of Darkness”

The present paper proposes a comparison between the symbolic uses of blackness and whiteness in two existential quests: Ahab’s monomanic chasing for the White Whale extinction in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Kurtz’s going native in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, as well as their antiracial/ reversed racial implications. In Melville’s romance, white is blankness/albino, the symbolic leviathan’s colour/colourlessness of the whites imposed Christianism and slavery. In Conrad’s novella, white is the symbol of pharisaism, inefficient imperialism, civilisation’s ethical failure. Black is to Melville the symbol of demonism, madness wisdom, multiracial crew equalitarianism, cannibalism governing the ocean’s depth and human subconscious. To Conrad, black is the symbol of savagery, unbridled id, regress, death/mourning/inferno, nature’s invincibility, natives victimizing. While romantic Ishmael uses a variety of styles to convey his information, Marlow’s first person unique narrative thread is impressionistic and symbolist, remaining dually antiracist - an overt codemnation of colonialism and self-identification with the blacks unconscious. Kurtz’s uncensored freedom mirrors Ahab’s pains but the former adds horror. Both journeys, into the ocean and up the river searching for the id/shadow, are concluded in moral indeterminacy and relativism of opposing pairs: communality versus isolation, civilisation/ progress versus savagery/regress, nature versus culture.

Bosshart, Rebecca, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA; Ovidius University, Constanţa, Romania: “Laughing through the Social Criticism: The Dark Humor of Lorrie Moore”
The contemporary writer Lorrie Moore provides a place in the American literary canon for pain to be relieved through linguistic gusto. Fear is expressed in self-deprecation, and systems that promote emotional detachment are subverted by dark humor. Her short story “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk” provides a balm for an acute pain that has no reason: the suffering of the innocent. Moore’s short story is just as much about the language of writing tragedy as it is about the tragedy, the Mother coping with her baby’s cancer diagnosis and treatment. Moore writes in a high literary style using profane and charged narration. Her linguistic tricks evaluate the American medical system, delivering a payoff in every short scene (before each commercial break), proving that the fictional short story (quicker to research, write, and publish) is an ideal form for disseminating social commentary. Short literature with genre elements is more easily consumed in one sitting by a mass audience, which is why contemporary writers use this form to introduce literary editors, publishers, and other writers to their novels, the work that wins awards and attention, the literature that sells to a mass audience. Moore’s own representation of the world may resemble a Hieronymus Bosch painting, an image she invokes in her story, but her readers will find something to laugh about in the gruesome picture described.

References

Bausch, Richard. “Writing about Fiction.” The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, seventh edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. xxii-xxvi. Print.

Chodat, Robert. “Jokes, Fiction, and Lorrie Moore.” Twentieth Century Literature 52:1 (2006): 42-60. JSTOR. Web. 26 Jan. 2012.

Moore, Lorrie. Birds of America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. Print.

Botelho, Teresa, NOVA University, Lisbon, Portugal: “‘It’s not a Neutral World Out There’: Writing the Post 9/11 America in John Updike’s Terrorist and Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced”
A few weeks after 9/11, an essay by Don DeLillo for Harper’s Magazine with the title “In The Ruins of the Future” reflected on the paradoxes of the responsibility of the writer to create a counter-narrative to the narrative that ended in the rubble, questioning the protocols of representation not only of grief, but of the unaccountable, of an otherness so alien that it appeared reduced to an idea. How, he asks, does a writer imagine the “apartness”, the “righteous fever in the brain” that wrought the killers, and how does one respond to “the sense of disarticulation” carried by the term “Us and Them” that “had never been so striking, at either end?”(2001) Fifteen years later, it is possible to map out how American literature has been articulating and gradually scrutinizing that sense of apartness and has gradually attended to the task of redressing the cognitive and imaginative gap identified by DeLillo. This paper considers two texts, John Updike’s novel Terrorist (2006) and Ayad Akhtar’s play Disgraced (2013) and discuses how they move away from what Hartnell has described as “the redemptive work in the name of national polity”(2011) that characterized much of the early post 9/11 trauma narratives, either by directly attempting to scrutinize, unveil and represent the opaqueness of that antagonistic Other or by foregrounding the traumas of those silenced American voices that found themselves cast into the domain of irreducible Othersness.
Boter, Babs and Lonneke Geerlings, VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands: “Writing a (Wo)Man’s Life, Or the Autobiographical Self in Female Portraits of Men”
Writing the narrative of the other, many biographers seem to consistently write themselves into that narrative. For our paper, the title of which is borrowed from Heilbrun’s seminal Writing a Woman’s Life (1988) we will focus on a particular form of this self-inscription. The scholar and social activist Rosey E. Pool (1905–1971) and the travel journalist Mary Pos (1904–1987) each presented the lives of historically and culturally important male figures (either dead or alive), and their life-writing demonstrates how the boundaries between the authorial (female) self and (male) other at times seem to have dissolved and disappeared. In the early 1950s Pool wrote a biography of George Gershwin, brought out by a Catholic publisher that aimed ‘to bring the music of famous composers in the reach of young music lovers via life stories.’ Presenter Geerlings will show the ways in which Gershwin’s biography incorporates Pool’s own life story. Presenter Boter will focus on two “American narratives” (Franklin Delano Roosevelt; Henry Ford) in which the main figures have likewise been put on a pedestal, but also need to share the biographical space with Pos herself. The paper will investigate these questions: 1. How exactly do the two women, via their biographical work, construct and perform their own public personae (Bosch 2012)? 2. How is our knowledge of the written lives (of men) “infected” by the biographers’ (gendered, class and race-informed) discourse, cultural background and historical context?
Botshon, Lisa, University of Maine at Augusta, USA: “Interdisciplinarity in Ozekiland”
At the center of the concept of interdisciplinarity is the idea of thinking and writing between and among disciplines. Allen Repko asserts that interdisciplinarity allows for multiple perspectives and new syntheses in order to provide a deeper understanding of complex issues; this definition, of course, also gets at the core of American Studies, itself a set of interdisciplinary endeavors (4). This paper examines the interdisciplinarity of Ruth Ozeki’s fiction, focusing on the novels My Year of Meats and A Tale for the Time Being, and exploring Ozeki’s pedagogical value in particular. Ozeki’s fiction synthesizes so many relevant and contemporary issues that it is not unusual to find it described through laundry lists of topics regularly headlined in our news sources: climate change, war, economics, and intersectional identities, to name only a few of her subjects. Challenging what and how we know what we know, Ozeki helps her readers interrogate the realities of the contemporary world and creatively imagine how to resist and reimagine it as a better, more humane place in which to live. Her multivalent navigation of our increasingly complex society can be employed as an integral teaching tool in classrooms throughout the university, including literature, gender studies, history, sociology, and science, among others. Ultimately, this essay asserts, using a set of interdisciplinary lenses, Ozeki effectively demonstrates how to dissect and analyze everyday life and concomitantly discover the magic in the mud.
Boulot, Elisabeth, University Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, France: “Fighting for Gender Equality in the 21st Century and Passing the Torch to the Younger Generation”
Fighting for Gender Equality in the 21st Century and Passing the Torch to the Younger Generation As the midterm elections were in full swing, the White House convened for the first time ever a summit on working families in June 2014.It highlighted the obstacles women still face in the workplace as well as the strong opposition from the conservative majority in Congress and state legislatures against enacting laws that would foster better equity and improve families’ lives. Meanwhile, Democrats’ protests against Republicans’ efforts to reassert traditional control on women’s reproductive rights, triggered off a debate on the meaning of feminism and the relevance of feminists’ struggles for the younger generation of American women as well as on their ability to mobilize to defend the goal of gender equality. This paper first aims at studying the Obama administration’s proposals to help Americans reconcile family and work and to point out the detrimental effects that failing to pass legislation providing for parental leave and adequate childcare as well as address the wage gap, has had on American families and the economy. Conservatives and liberals are both eager to promote their views on women’s rights and vie for young women’s support and attention. This paper will thus examine whether doubts expressed in the media about succeeding in fostering an intergenerational conversation with millenniums on this issue to secure their commitment and criticism voiced about the role played by the Internet in millenniums’ and teens’ debate about feminism are founded. Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the presidency and the celebration of NOW’s 50th birthday in 2016 will certainly give renewed salience to the debate about the significance of the gains of feminist movements for gender equality in the 21st century.
Bryzgalova, Valeriya, Saint Petersburg State University, Russia: “African-American Links with the Soviet Union as a Component of the Harlem Renaissance”

Panel speaker: African American History: Aspects of Racism and Violence, Part II
Buday, Maroš, University of Prešov, Slovakia: “Reflection of Lacanian Psychoanalytic Discourse in Paul Auster’s and Stephen King’s Depiction of the Phenomenon of Writer’s Block”
This article deals with the employment of several of the most prominent notions of post-structuralist psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan onto postmodernist literary discourse. For the purposes of this paper, two authors who explore the phenomenon of writer’s block in their works have been chosen, namely Paul Auster and Stephen King. Auster’s and King’s literary corpora both embody a metafictional element where the protagonist of a story is a writer who experiences the same kind of anxiety exhibited by many authors when engaging in the act of writing. This paper argues that both of the aforementioned authors seem to be remarkably synchronized with the theoretical perspectives proposed by Jacques Lacan. The root of their characters’ inability to write is not tied to external factors; on the contrary, this problem is being continuously linked with the medium of written discourse itself. The obstacles which the protagonists of their stories face are put within the confines of their psyche, and in addition, are chiefly presented as formal linguistic problems. According to Lacan, the human unconscious premeditatedly contains the whole structure of language; however, he also stresses that reality is unattainable, thus people have to resort to symbols which are only a substitute for the real. The perpetual tension encompassed within the human zeal to achieve pure reality is nothing but a futile attempt of the conscious mind to grasp the impossible and this tension leads to the selfsplitting and subsequent fragmentation of the human consciousness. This article proposes that this predicament is much more noticeable in writers because their primary conduit for describing the exterior (extralinguistic reality) and interior (conscious and unconscious mind) worlds is discourse in its written form. Auster as well as King exceptionally mirror Lacan’s view of the writer’s psyche and vividly explore the foundation of the phenomenon of writer’s block with respect to the symbolic realm of human experience.
Buelens, Gert, Ghent University, Belgium (chair)

Davies, Jude, University of Winchester, UK (chair)

Panel: Money, Wealth and Excess in American Literary Realism and Naturalism
This panel, organized by Gert Buelens (Ghent University) and Jude Davies (University of Winchester), will examine literary representations of the rise of finance capitalism in and around the period 1875-1917, with a particular focus on distinctions between “old money” and “new money” and the reverberations of new forms of economic power in American and transatlantic sociocultural contexts. At the start of this period, London was the heart of the financial world; towards the end, New York could be regarded as having replaced London in this position. Connections between America and Britain were strong in the world of speculation, where wealth was being created less by means of profit derived from production or landed property and more thanks to the ascribed value of financial stock. Literary realism and naturalism are in part responses to these shifting and intensifying relations between old and new, real and virtual, material and ideal, natural and social, especially when charting transatlantic flows of capital, commodities, and people. The panel will consider the varying “customs” that regulate wealth in the US and Europe; the “color of money” in Philadelphia and North Carolina; the figuration of excessive wealth as a Gothic subversion of limits; and the project of charting the growth in scale of financial systems from the city to the nation to the transatlantic.
Panel speakers:

Gert Buelens, Ghent University, Belgium: “Wealth in Trollope, Wharton, and Dreiser”
Leland S. Person, University of Cincinnati, USA: “The Color of Money: Racial Violence and Economic Power in The Garies and Their Friends and The Marrow of Tradition”
Myrto Drizou, Valdosta State University, USA: “Phantasms of Excess: The Transatlantic Gothic of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country”
Jude Davies, University of Winchester, United Kingdom: “From Civic to National to Transatlantic: Scaling Finance in Theodore Dreiser’s Trilogy of Desire”
Bulz, Adriana Carolina Military Technical Academy, Romania: “Hero-displacement in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis and White Noise”
In my paper, I will look at two of deLillo’s novels that focus on the white American male as hero, a category that has frequently been displaced in contemporary cultural and literary texts towards the margin of experience. In the former novel, the hero turns from a demi-god of finance into a scapegoat whose sacrifice is meant to cleanse the evils of consumerist society, while in the latter, the family man or self-assured fatherfigure is confronted with the ultimate fact that American hyperreality and consumerist society is constantly trying to ward off by various means: Death itself. In order to meaningfully enact their marginal but salutary experiences, the heroes of deLillo’s novels situate themselves in a series of contexts and go through hypostases that are desperate, comical, absurd or a combination of the above, while continuing to tread along the path prescribed by the author, with unwavering resilience. The question I will try to answer is whether their stance is anti-heroic but equally carries a numinous significance and how these postmodernist novels may accommodate a mythic-archetypal reading of their characters and narrative trajectories.
Byers, Thomas, University of Louisville, USA

Roundtable speaker: The Space of Communities - Representing U.S. Communities in Cinematic and TV Spaces
Cârstea, Daniela, University of Bucharest, Romania: “Literary Testimonials to Banal Evil. Desubjectivisation in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (Agamben, Arendt and Poe)”
The proposed paper is subsumable to the interpretative protocols of a rapidly expanding theoretical grid within American Studies, namely trauma studies. A reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” can show its author to have been “the prophet of the time of dehumanisation”, the prophet of Auschwitz. I’ll be firstly outlining the problematics of testimony and the adjacent one, that of (banal) evil, as put forth by Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub and Giorgio Agamben, on account of the fact that a succinct characterisation of Poe’s tales reveals them as unwittingly set on unfolding or bringing to light obscured horrors, which evokes similarities with the objectives set by testimonials to psychic trauma. The conclusion will aim to show that, for Poe, the act of giving voice to his experiences of encounters with threatening phenomena serves simultaneously to mitigate their threat and to intensify its power, and thus his work can be seen as archiving the “deep memory” of a traumatic experience, similar, by all hermeneutical accounts, to that of the Holocaust.
Carter, Derrais, Portland State University, USA; Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic: “Dark Suspicions: The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Policing of Black Women in Washington D.C.”
This paper analyses a 1919 obscenity case in Washington, D.C. Herman Moens, a Dutch ethnologist, photographed the daughters of the city’s black elite with the endorsement of W.E.B. Du Bois and other black intellectuals. The problem? The underage girls were in the nude. Carter’s paper analyzes Bureau of Investigation field reports along with newspaper accounts of the resulting scandal to reveal how the outrage fueled public anxieties about New Negro womanhood in urban areas. The paper begins by explaining how the D.C. Bureau of Investigation (BI) bribed a 20-year-old black woman named Helen Saunders into having sex with Moens in exchange for a government job. The BI’s goal was to catch Moens and Saunders “in the act” so that they could blackmail Moens into leaving the country. When that operation failed, the agents used Moens’ photographs of underage black girls to expose him as a moral degenerate. The paper then addresses how the BI’s case against Moens led the Washington Bee – D.C.’s premier black newspaper - to police black womanhood. The BI made black women’s sexuality central to the Moens scandal narrative. As a result, public commentary on the case focused heavily on containing the threat – young black women. The Washington Bee offered months of extended commentary, condemning young black women for participation in Moens’ research. Dark Suspicions raises larger issues about the two competing notions of black female sexuality, respectability and primitivism, before the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance. Moreover, the paper demonstrates how policing black women’s sexuality became a key function of racial uplift politics in the nation’s capital.
Cenamor, Rubén, University of Barcelona, Spain: “Moving Ahead: Alternative Masculinities in Tea and Sympathy (1953)”
Recent studies on gender relationships in 1950s US society have rightly pointed out that the prevailing hegemonic masculinity brought about a return to traditional, heteropatriarchal roles (Filene 1974; Meyerowick 2002; May 1998). The dissatisfaction and anxiety it caused on men has also been focus of recent studies (Baker 2006; Cohan 1997; Cuenca 2012; Ehrenreich 1987; Gilbert 2005; Kimmel 2006). However, little attention has been given to the fictional representation of counter-hegemonic or “alternative” masculinities –that is, models of masculinity which advocate for gender equality, embrace sensitivity and reject any type of traditional hypermasculine behavior. As James D. Riemer argues, in order to change men’s lives one needs more than recognition of the negative effects of our present ideals of manhood; “there also must be a recognition and reinforcement of positive alternatives to traditional masculine ideals and behaviors.” (1987). In this line, studies of cultural representations of masculinity are particularly relevant to the analysis of the social construction and de-construction of masculinity (Carabí & Armengol 2015). Hence, my aim in this presentation is to explore the critique of the 1950s hegemonic masculinity and the models of alternative masculinity in Robert Anderson’s play Tea and Sympathy’s (1953). I will argue that the play presents the hypermasculine, rough type of manhood enforced by society as a detrimental model which shows the flaws rather than the strengths of masculinity since it become too phallocentic and somatic. It also oversimplifies and animalizes manhood by neglecting and stigmatizing intellectualism and sensitiveness. Thus, I will contend that the play advocates for a model of alternative masculinity which embraces empathy, sensitivity, and intellectualism as represented by its protagonist, Tom Lee. To do so, I will divide my presentation into two parts. First, I will problematize the hegemonic masculinity of the time, focusing on the model of manhood encouraged to young adults. In doing so, I will examine the Lavender Scare and its repression of any trace of “undesirable masculinity” (i.e., any non-hegemonic trait of manhood), which determined the actions and attitude of adults and, especially young men. Indeed, I will argue that boys were expected to adopt hypermasculine models of masculinity lest be ostracized by their companions and society. As a result there was the creation of teenage idols who allegedly were rebels but in fact were just disguised models of heteropatriarchal, hyper-masculinity, as in the case of Jim Stark, the protagonist of Rebel Without a Cause. The second part of my presentation will be devoted to the analysis of Tom Lee’s masculinity and the ordeals he goes through to reaffirm it in the stifling gendered environment of the 1950s.
Chambers, Matthew, University of Lodz, Poland: “Cultural Receivership: International Institutions and Postwar America”
Building on Christopher Hitchens’ notion of “imperial receivership” that emphasizes the extent to which the US has inherited its Empire from the British, this paper will focus on what I term “cultural receivership” to describe the range of institutional apparatuses that were established in the late 1940s-early 1950s to produce, disseminate, and manage cultural production that retained European Enlightenment ideals about the archive and the museum, heritage and display, tradition and custom. Institutions like UNESCO, and particularly its NGO-affiliate PEN International, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the Marshall Plan, and even Yale University’s Bollingen Prize arise out of twin concerns of preservation and management. Largely international in scope, these institutions, to varying degrees and to varying ends, projected maintenance and domestication as core values to ensure peace and security in a rapidly globalizing world. This paper will briefly examine each of the abovementioned institutions in turn not so much to evaluate their historical cultural effects, but more to frame a way of thinking that was rooted in ideas about development and the archive as cornerstones for domestic security. I will use Amy Kaplan’s notion of “domesticity” in foreign policy to examine America’s role in structuring a postwar world where cultural traditions would provide a bulwark against any and all threats, real or imagined.