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

Hans Krabbendam, Roosevelt Study Center, Middelburg, the Netherlands: “Saving Europe: American Protestants’ Visions for a Postwar Transatlantic Relationship”
Jaap Verheul, Utrecht University, the Netherlands: “Literature, History and National Identity in Antebellum America: John Lothrop Motley as a Literary Writer”
Matthew Chambers, University of Lodz, Poland: “Cultural Receivership: International Institutions and Postwar America”
Damian S. Pyrkosz, University of Rzeszów, Poland: “Crisis of Economy or Values? The Ethical Roots of the America’s Economic Crisis”
Krabbendam, Hans, Roosevelt Study Center, Middelburg, the Netherlands: “Saving Europe: American Protestants’ Visions for a Postwar Transatlantic Relationship”
The paper by Hans Krabbendam deals with the transatlantic response to the perceived threat of secularization right after World War II. The paper explores the fact that in American Protestant eyes Europe was part of the problem and could only advance the solution if it became either evangelical or truly ecumenical. Neither solution worked. From the European side suspicions arose at to American domination, but also admiration for American success in mobilizing moral energy for effective world evangelism. International conferences had to sort out these issues, but instead exposed parallel universes.
Krevel, Mojca, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia: “Everything that is possible will happen or perhaps already has: Quantum Mechanics and Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being”
On the last pages of Ruth Ozeki’s 2013 novel A Tale for the Time Being, the principles of quantum mechanics, which Ozeki seamlessly connects to the philosophy of Zen Buddhism, are proposed as the key to understanding the interrelatedness of individual stories. My paper argues that the quantum mechanics manyworlds interpretation, as charted in the main text and the appendix, not only connects the seemingly disparate events of the novel into a coherent story, but is also implicit in the structuring of the literary personae, worldbuilding and reality creation, as well as in the overall organization of the novel’s internal and external forms. By establishing the connection between the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics as applied in the novel, and the hitherto observable governing mechanism of the postmodern epoch, I intend to show – relying primarily on Baudrillard’s concepts of hyperreality and fractal subject – that Ozeki’s work is arguably one of the first critically acclaimed so-called mainstream novels that thoroughly corresponds to the metaphysical framework of the nascent epoch. Moreover, I contend that her use of Zen Buddhism invites a consideration of its teachings for the development of an ethical system that is applicable to the principles of the postmodern paradigm.
Kriebernegg, Ulla, University of Graz, Austria: “When 100-Year Old People Climb Out the Window and Hit the Road: Reading Nursing Home Escape Stories as Road Narratives”
This paper is dedicated to nursing home escape stories, a genre that has gained increasing popularity and expanded the literary canon in recent years. Using the road narrative as a template, care home escape stories present the freedom of the open road as an alternative space that is contrasted to that of the limited world of the care home. The cross-country or cross-border journeys that elderly “escapees” undertake are dual journeys: journeys of the mind and of the body, physical and spiritual, which often lead them to a new acceptance of themselves and to a reevaluation of their individual identities that would not have been possible within the confining contexts of the home. The decline narrative of old age is counteracted in the texts discussed by the escape narrative, which constructs the spatiality of old age in a very different and highly ambivalent way, especially with regard to gender. By leaving the nursing home and hitting the road, female protagonists often meet obstacles (Fitzgerald, Cloudburst (2010); Hepburn, Flee, Fly, Flown (2013)), and are represented as being “out of place.” They find so much space “disconcerting” (Hepburn 172) and are reproached for their transgressions, whereas male protagonists who overstep boundaries and borders, as I show in my literary gerontological analysis of Oscar Casares’s Amigoland (2009), are in contrast generally able to negotiate their newly won place in a much more self-determined way.
Krsteva, Marija, Goce Delcev University, Štip, Macedonia: “Artists, Lovers, Wives: Postmodern Re-Writings of Henry James’s and Ernest Hemingway’s Lives”

Panel speakers: Liaisons, Families, Texts: Henry James and the Fictionalization of Lives
Kubyshkin, Alexander, Saint Petersburg State University, Russia: “African Americans and Higher Education in the United States”

The presentation focuses on the role of the African American Community in the formation of the higher education in the United States. The role of race in the educational system created obstacles to the students of the minorities. The enactment of relevant legislation allowed all the Americans to participate in the educational system of the country. However, the deep roots of racism within the American society promoted the collaboration among the minority groups as a means of overcoming the prejudice against them. Moreover, the paper will examine the role of diversity within the American universities and how it affected the quality of their service. In addition, the paper will focus on the status of the African Americans, their relationship with other the communities and their participation in the advancement of the American educational system.

Kudriavtseva, Irina, Minsk State Linguistic University, Belarus: “The Short Fiction of Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and Peter Taylor: From Anecdote to Epiphany”
In my paper I will examine the short fiction of Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor and Peter Taylor with an emphasis on three particular short story types – the growing up story, the retrospective story and the epiphanic story. My analysis will focus on their generic features and individual modifications in each author’s representative stories (e.g. “Kin” by Welty, “The Artificial Nigger” by O’Connor, “The Old Forest” by Taylor). I will argue through these narrative modes Welty, O’Connor and Taylor effectively expressed their essential moral, social and aesthetic concerns and represented a variety of southern cultural codes, including oral storytelling tradition with its reliance on the grotesque and the anecdotal.
Kuhl, Stephan, Goethe-University, Frankfurt, Germany: “‘Bigger Thomas was not black all the time; he was white, too’: References to Richard Wright in Contemporary American Literature”
Richard Wright’s novel Native Son (1940) is usually regarded as an example of literary naturalism, a genre that emphasizes hereditary and environmental determinism. Accordingly, its protagonist, Bigger Thomas, appears as the quintessential black character, racially defined by forces beyond his control, confined and fated by his blackness. Such a character appears dated in a time when American literature, under the monikers of “postblackness” or “post-soul,” opposes static notions of race and investigates or stages the fluidity of racial identities. It is reasonable, therefore, that contemporary American novels, including Percival Everett’s Erasure (2002) and Adam Mansbach’s Angry Black White Boy, or the Miscegenation of Macon Detournay (2005), explicitly reference Native Son and use Bigger’s quintessential blackness as an example for the static conceptions of race that they themselves satirize. Yet in his essay “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” (1940) Wright himself stated that “Bigger Thomas was not black all the time; he was white, too,” therewith countering the assumption that a static conception of blackness was necessary or even sufficient to explain his character’s destiny. This presentation will first investigate how contemporary American authors (mis)read Native Son and incorporate it into debates about race in “post-black” or “post-soul” America. Then it will show how Wright’s claim about Bigger’s whiteness anticipated not only these debates but also their limitations for an understanding and a realistic literary representation of race in American society.
Kupfer, Charles J. D., Penn State University, Harrisburg, PA, USA: “How to Conscript Intellectuals: Archibald McLeish Makes the Case for Cultural Defense before Pearl Harbor”
When news of German troops parading down the Champs Elysee reached Washington, D.C. in June 1940, colleagues found Archibald MacLeish in his office. His head was on his desk, tears streamed down his face, and he wished aloud that the United States would formally enter the Second World War. Such was the agony caused by the image of Nazi control over the city which epitomized the finest elements of western culture for many American intellectuals. MacLeish was shocked, but perhaps not surprised. For quite awhile, this extraordinary figure – acclaimed poet, dramatist, and political operative whom President Franklin D. Roosevelt named as Librarian of Congress -- had seen the war, not as example of Europe’s toils and caprice, but as a global fight between freedom and totalitarianism. This paper articulates and critiques the strategies and tactics used by MacLeish as he fought to enlist intellectuals in the cause of defending France, Britain, and democracy in general, many months before formal American entry into the war. Central to this project is an analysis of MacLeish’s controversial attack on intellectual support for Isolationism, laid out in his much read and debated Nation article, The Irreconcilables. In it, MacLeish attacked the idea that American culture was separate from Europe, charging that writers, artists, and academics who refused to rally to the defense of European freedom with cowardice or dereliction of intellectual duty. The paper, accompanied by a PowerPoint and based upon primary documents, dissects the case MacLeish made as well as the furious reaction to it in an effort to glean understanding of the rhetorical and thought patterns at work when American intellectuals wrestled with their proper role in an overseas war and the debt MacLeish insisted they owed to Europe as the citadel of free inquiry. It continues an examination developed during previous EAAS and other European ASA meetings I participated in: Copenhagen, the Hague, Oslo, and Alta. I would be pleased to continue this transAtlantic intellectual history inquiry with my colleagues, at Constanza.
Kušnír, Jaroslav, University of Prešov, Slovakia (chair)

Panel: (Post-)Postmodern Preoccupations in American Fiction, Part I
Panel speakers:

Mariusz Marszalski, Wroclaw University, Poland: “Quod Vadis Homo Futuris? – Dan Simmons’ Trans/Post-Humanist Fiction on the Evolutionary Future of the Human Species”
María Ferrández San Miguel, University of Zaragoza, Spain: “The Ethical Impulse in E.L. Doctorow’s Early Fiction”

Kvachakidze, Natia, Kutaisi Akaki Tsereteli State University, Georgia: “Symbolic Significance of Hemingway’s Titles (On the Material of the Nick Adams Stories)”
The aim of this work is to study and analyze the significance of Ernest Hemingway short story titles based on the stories which share one of the author’s distinguished protagonists, Nick Adams (sixteen main stories titled and published by Hemingway himself). The subject is especially interesting considering the fact that titles are crucially important for a short story (much more than for a novel). They act both as introductory steps and keys to understanding the whole piece of work. This is even more determining when we deal with an author like Ernest Hemingway and his minimalist fiction where every single word counts immensely. Even those titles which seem neutral at first sight, convey a lot in Hemingway’s fiction. Judging from the different angles of vision and critical perspectives Hemingway’s titles may be denotative, symbolic, ironic, allusive etc., and sometimes may even be combining more than one of these features. But they are never accidental or trivial. These titles act together with the text to create the effect Hemingway intended to. The choice of the Nick Adams stories as the material for this study is due to the important role of this protagonist in Hemingway’s work, as well as the controversy of opinions about the correctness of uniting all these stories in one collection, despite the fact that the author himself scattered them in three different story collections.
Ladyga, Zuzanna, University of Warsaw, Poland: “Experimental Cinema and Theatrical Politics: the Case of William Greaves’s Symbiopsychotaxiplasm (1968)”
The paper discusses William Greaves’s 1968 forgotten documentary film Symbiopsychotaxiplasm as an anticipation of Jacques Rancière’s 1998 concept of theatrical politics. Greaves’s experiment with the convention of cinema verité consists in a method of non-direction, where the director withdraws his control over the filming process in order to explore the political question of authority. The immediate result of the strategy is a revolt of Greaves’s film crew, who amidst frustration with what happens on the set actively engage with the questions of authority politics in Greaves’s production as well as with the issue of power in the broader context of the socio-political problems of the McCarthy era. Thus, the paper argues, what the aesthetic strategy of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm occasions is a situation of dissensus (Rancière), where all participants of the aesthetic venture claim equal positions, and where all dogmatic pedagogy of the documentary genre is replaced with the principle of democratic dialogicity. Violating the documentarian dictum that films are tools of consciousness-raising (John Grierson), as well as the dominant film theories of the 1960s: the auteur theory, the socially engaged theories of kino-pravda (Dziga Vertov) and cinema verité (R. Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker), Greaves takes on a counter-pedagogical approach of the ignorant schoolmaster (Rancière), and creates a transitional space (Winnicott) of social interactions, as a result of which he, his crew, and the spectator may partake of the experience of emancipation (Rancière, Barbara Johnson).
Lapugean, Mirela, West University of Timișoara, Romania: “The Silence of Trauma”
Trauma is an external event that breaks through and in a stable form of the psychic; it represents a disruption of time and history, a discontinuity of a well-established order. It is an incident that is exterior to the self and its consciousness. Nevertheless, through its unexpected and sudden impact it has the power to shatter and fragment the continuity and the well-established order of the being dividing its existence into two problematic hemispheres, the before and the after of trauma. Thus, it separates the individual’s chronology and history into a pre-traumatic and a post-traumatic reality. A return to a pre-traumatic existence is sought for, becoming more often than not a perfect getaway from the traumatized present. The after trauma of the individuals who fail to integrate the traumatic incident in their present reality and to work it through becomes a realm of sterile repetition, a wasteland in which some of the survivors lose themselves. The traumatized carry an impossible history within them, impossible to understand, impossible to forget and impossible to voice. Articulating trauma and gaining linguistic control over it becomes the struggle of the traumatized. The paper analyses the problematic relation between trauma and silence which burdens the lives of the ones that have to bear witness to the traumatic event in Jonathan Safran Foer’s book Everything Is Illuminated.
Laschinger, Verena, University of Erfurt, Germany: “Clairvoyance, Hunches, and the Lizard Brain: Intuition and the Criminal Case from The Dead Letter (1866) to Dexter (2006-13)”
This paper aims to investigate the specific ways, in which the nineteenth-century scientific discourse bears heavily on the mutually dependent conceptualizations of the material and the spiritual realms in the so called “domestic detective fiction“ (Nickerson xiii) by Metta Fuller Victor aka Seeley Regester. Often deeming the spiritual in photographic metaphors, the generically heterogeneous domestic detective novel The Dead Letter (1866) converges prevailing scientific, philosophical and literary discourses, hence shaping the themes, narrative techniques and tropes, which have become typical for the genre. Denying clear-cut separations e.g. between private and professional spaces and spheres, between the amateur investigator, the professional and the veiled lady who serves in the investigative process as a medium, hence allowing for both scientific and heterodox practices of investigation (such as mesmerism, phrenology), the domestic detective novel shines a light on the polarizing a/effects of the sentimental genre’s excessive emotionality and the logical operations and principles of narrative ratiocination, which are, however, mutually dependent on one another. Examining closely the first book-length detective text by an American woman writer, this paper would like to bring to our critical attention an outstanding, yet under-researched author, whose formally and stylistically innovative work was not only immensely popular in late nineteenth-century America, but also influential in shaping American detective fiction.
Łaszkiewicz, Weronika, University of Białystok, Poland: “Warriors of Our Imagination: the Portrayal of Native Americans in 20th-Century Polish Literature”
In the second half of the 20th century, the life of Native Americans constituted a major theme of Polish literature, particularly of adventure novels targeted at young adult readers. Polish writers such as Nora Szczepańska, Longin Jan Okoń, Sat-Okh (a.k.a. Stanisław Supłatowicz) and Yáckta-Oya (a.k.a. Sławomir Bral) invited their readers into American wilderness where they could accompany the Native American protagonists in their daily lives and struggles. Though the existence of this kind of literature was conditioned by the political reality of the People’s Republic of Poland (as the country was called until 1989) and state censorship, this paper will focus on the literary and cultural aspects of the chosen texts rather than on their political background. The aim of this paper is to examine how the selected Polish writers envisioned (for they seldom left Poland) and represented the life of Native Americans. The proposed analysis will focus on the issues of attitude, idealization and authenticity. What is the writer’s attitude to Native American communities and what emotional responses does s/he intend to evoke in the readers? Does the writer create a stereotypical and/or idealized image of Native Americans? How does the writer try to convince his/her readers of the authenticity of the novel? By exploring these and other issues, the following study will become part of the general discourse on how Native Americans are represented by non-Native American writers.
Lechenet, Annie, University of Lyon 1, France: “Old World New World: Jefferson’s Historical Thinking from His Residence in Paris”

Panel speaker: Thomas Jefferson and Europe: A Complex Legacy
Lee, Judith Yaross, Ohio University, USA; Leiden University, the Netherlands: “Mark Twain and American Exceptionalism from King Kamehameha to King Leopold”
Across much of Mark Twain’s career, comic antipathy toward monarchs and empires stood as a celebration of American exceptionalism. In particular, he exploited the vernacular tradition of colloquial narrators’ comic ironies, which valorized invidious contrasts between republican Americans and imperial others, and between U.S. democracy and monarchies elsewhere. Indeed, Twain’s contemporary William Dean Howells hailed A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889)--a tall tale that comically reversed history in recounting how a nineteenth-century American mechanic colonized and modernized sixth-century Britain in the American mold--as “an object lesson in democracy.” In this context, Twain’s late satires of imperialism seem to depart from his earlier rhetoric as tied mainly to his dismay over U.S. actions in the Spanish-American War and Belgian King Leopold II’s atrocities in the Congo Free State. Nonetheless, Twain began exploring the limits of American exceptionalism as a young man and became progressively more cynical about American virtue as time went on; my paper shows how his humor moved toward a vision of “two Americas: one that sets the captive free, and one that takes a once-captive’s new freedom away from him,” as he put it in “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901). As early as his comic lecture debut, “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands” (1866), whose sesquicentennial we observe in 2016, Twain criticized Americans and their government by joking that King Kamehameha’s indigenous Hawaiian subjects, who “do nearly everything wrong end first,” would “elect the most incorruptible men to Congress” after “we take those islands away from these people as we are pretty sure to do some day.” His humor turned darker, however, after 1886, during the composition of Connecticut Yankee, when his earlier acquaintance with African explorer Henry Morton Stanley--who found Dr. David Livingstone, secured land in the Congo for King Leopold, and represented the U.S. at the Berlin Conference that apportioned Africa among European empires--blossomed into a life-long friendship between them. In Connecticut Yankee, whose protagonist Hank Morgan has a name close to Stanley’s, Twain turned the exceptionalist investments of the vernacular monologue against themselves by framing an apocalypse as the fulfillment of Americanization. And Twain had still fewer illusions about American virtue by the time he published his satiric dramatic monologue King Leopold’s Soliloquy (1905), which presents its vernacular speaker as an imperialist villain and implicates the U.S. in his crimes.
Leikam, Susanne, University of Regensburg, Germany (chair)

Julia Leyda, Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, Potsdam, Germany (chair)

Panel: What’s in a Name?’: Debating Cli-Fi
As global awareness of climate change increases with the publication of popular works such as, for example, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012), films such as Snowpiercer (2013) and Interstellar (2014), or Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything (2014), North American cultural and literary productions offer insights into the structures of feeling around this topic. Various combinations of fear, anxiety, confusion, anger, and hope mark the reception of texts and other cultural phenomena dealing with climate change, while academics and intellectuals seek to understand, and contribute to, discussions around the framing of the issue in interdisciplinary field formations such as eco-criticism and environmental humanities. Following the EAAS’s call to explore current debates in American Studies, this proposed workshop intends to initiate a discussion of recent efforts to label the plethora of cultural and literary texts that address contemporary climate change. The terminological spectrum of the often hotly debated terms comprises substantially distinct approaches, extending from established literary, film, and cultural studies genre designations such as speculative and science fiction, disaster film, or nature photography to newly coined neologisms such as, for example, ‘cli-fi’ and topical identifiers such as “Theater of Species” or the risk novel. Contested concepts such as ahumanism, posthumanism, extinction, and the Anthropocene are also central to the contemporary conversations about climate change. The act of naming—a cultural practice very well known to American Studies scholars from North America’s colonial history to Janice Radway’s critical interrogation of our discipline’s very name in her 1998 ASA Presidential Address—is an act of cultural appropriation and scholarly categorization, subject to a variety of long-standing cultural traditions, ideological frameworks, socio-political and economic strategies, and affective motives. Besides, different approaches to naming also express varieties of the normative self-understanding of how literary and cultural production, nature, the environmental crises, and American Studies are entwined. In accordance with (New) American Studies’s programmatic emphasis on contexts, cultural functions, transnational flows, and interdisciplinary research agendas, our proposed workshop aims to investigate the dynamics, creative potentials, and limits of the current popular and scholarly practices of labeling climateconscious works from various interdisciplinary and intermedial perspectives. Each participant will present a brief statement limited to seven minutes, followed by a general discussion based on the presented talks as well as pre-circulated short papers. The goal of the session is thus to outline a range of positions and arguments around this topic and then to allow for further elaboration and debate. To this end, we will discourage detailed close readings of individual climate fiction texts and instead urge participants to work toward outlining broader questions and concerns about the use and usefulness of these concepts and terms.
Panel speakers: