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

Moroz, Nina, Moscow State University, Russia: “Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’: ‘Word of God’ vs. ‘dead text’”
My paper is dedicated to the post-apocalypse novel of Cormac McCarthy The Road (2006, 10th anniversary in 2016), which handles the problem of civilization in moral, almost Biblical terms. The problem of spiritual frontier, earlier studied by McCarthy in historical narratives, is now extended to its universal dimension. I am going to comment on the Biblical imagery of the novel, yet the main focus of my paper is the “sign problem” of good and evil in McCarthy’s Apocalypse. The principal manifestation of the fact that the world is abandoned by God is the disability of the surviving to express themselves in signs and symbols. Moreover, the world is abandoned both by God and His prophets, once able to read and record the divine text. The Father regards the dying world as a “dead text” never to be read and rewritten. The only possibility to restore the lost sense lies for the Father in the figure of the Son, the only “Word of God” surviving. Being very close to the existentialist “absurd” solution, the Father nevertheless relies upon the archaic and “old-fashioned” idea of God. He also discourses upon “old signs”, and the very way of “evoking” resembles the Biblical act of Creation. Another problem, which I am interested in, is the intertwining of the didacticism of the novel and the schemes of horror films that undoubtedly influenced the imagery and the plot of The Road.
Mudure, Michaela, Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania: “Cervicides: From Nicolae Labiş to Gloria Anzaldúa”
The paper relies on a comparative analysis of two texts: the poem “The Death of the Deer’ by the Romanian poet Nicolae Labiş and “Cervicide” by Gloria Anzaldua (a fragment from her postmodernist text Borderlands/La Frontera). Both texts rely on old traditions about the importance and the spiritual significance of the deer in Native Americans” traditions and Romanian oral traditions. With Labis, the cervicide is the result of hunger, a metaphorical representation of the changes that the Romanian society will have to endure afterWorld War II. With Anzaldua, the cervicide is the result of the clash of cultures within the (post-)colonial paradigm. In both cases the death of the animal is the symbol of human inability to live at peace with nature. Killing the animal is some kind of let-go, expiation of human social inequity and cultural oppression. The most innocent always pays the highest price. The interesting thing is that such similar lessons can be drawn from texts which were written at different times in diverse cultures and by writers so different politically and ideologically. This comparative exercise relies on the same mythologem found in two very remote oral cultures. This mythologem in-forms literature according to various literary recipes (modernist or postmodernist, in this case).
Musial, Aleksandra, University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland: “An American Tragedy: Victimization in the American Literature and Cinema of the Vietnam War”
In 1969, following revelations about the massacre of Vietnamese civilians by American soldiers at My Lai, Time referred to the event as an “American tragedy.” I wish to investigate the implications suggested by this designation, and to argue that such view has indeed been extended to the common understanding of the war in the U.S., as evidenced in American texts concerned with it. Narrative strategies and imageries employed by authors and directors to represent the suffering of the victims of the war—both American soldiers and the Vietnamese—will be discussed, in order to demonstrate that these depictions differ considerably and in various aspects, and that by tracing these differences it is also possible to gain insight into the various constructions of victimhood in Vietnam. Thus, victimization will be shown to be a powerful tool for establishing and projecting one’s identity in relation to a conflict and one’s own participation in it. Moreover, approaching victimization as a problem of narration will allow for a better appreciation of the ways in which Vietnam has been received and remembered in America; the discussion will then be extended to encompass issues of ideology and rhetoric, as well as of the real impact of mythology. Indeed, as I will argue, American myth in its many permutations is fundamental to the understanding not only of the country’s involvement and conduct in Indochina, but also its culture’s approach towards the problem of moral evaluation of the war. Finally, these considerations will be placed in the broader context of American military history and media representations of conflicts in the U.S.
Mutluay Cetintas, Bilge, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey: “Borders of the Mind, the Body, and the Frame: Isis Rodriguez and the Masked Woman Series”
The geographical border between the United States and Mexico is often viewed as a symbolical instrument in the formation of Chicana identity. The border represents a rupture in cultural continuity and the difficulty of establishing a sense of wholeness. Gloria Anzaldúa discusses several other intersecting borders such as race, ethnicity, gender and class in the formation of female identities. Anzaldúa maintains that Chicana identity occupies an uncertain space of transformation, which eliminates final closures. Chicana identity is thus always in the process of becoming—a process that, as she conveys, is empowering rather than weakening. Chicana writers and artists re-invent and re-claim their hybrid identities by deconstructing the female subject, mainly to present how multiple constrictive structures can be transcended. Isis Rodriguez’s work in progress, the Masked Woman Series, is an attempt to transgress patriarchal traditions while forming alliances with one’s community. The paintings consist of a realistically drawn masked woman in black lace underwear, sometimes wearing a military inspired jacket or a dark cloak. These paintings include a small-scale female cartoon figure, interacting with and functioning as the alter ego or the social persona of the masked women. According to Rodriguez, these paintings represent “a psychological place in the indigenous consciousness called ‘nepantla’ … an Aztec word meaning ‘torn between two ways’ used to describe thecultural polarization that took place during the colonization of Mexico.” The coexistence of a realistic threedimensional figure, and a two-dimensional cartoon, in the same frame is a reference to the “nepantla.” Both characters are the antithesis of popular stereotypical representations of women. The masked woman is drawn as a strong, able-bodied Chicana subject, with a proud stance or lost in her thoughts, in a meditative state, eyes often dreamily gazing beyond the borders of the frame. The cartoon figure, “Regalo,” as she is called by the artist, is a petite, longhaired blonde with feminine features, which are in marked contrast to the muscular body of the realistic figure. Yet, the two figures exist in tandem and in harmony, suggesting that Chicana identities are often formed by the confluence of multiple selves. This paper incorporates the idea that “existing in the borderlands” is a continuing and defining reality for Chicana Artists, as illustrated by the Masked Woman Series. In Anzaldúa’s terms, “the new mestiza consciousness” is a consciousness grounded in the borderland experience—one which has enabled Chicanas to cross or transcend constructed borders. The unconventional portrayal of women in the Masked Woman Series challenges borders through multiple layers of representation, all of which signify the same subject. This paper will rely on a power point presentation of the Masked Women Series to further this argument and create entry points for discussion.
Myk, Małgorzata, University of Lodz, Poland: “Word/Image and Hierarchy in Leslie Scalapino’s Avant-Garde Poetics”
In language-oriented experimental writing, visuality and textuality, images and words, inform each other in particular ways. As poet Bruce Andrews observed, for Language poets writing has always figured as “vividly materialized.” Book artist Johanna Drucker called these experiments “material word in avant-garde poetics.” As Drucker put it in her 1997 The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, writing’s visual forms possess an irresolvably dual identity in their material existence as images and their function as elements of language. This emphasis on the materiality of the word, the word/image hybridity of the text, is further complicated by the posited possibility of a non-hierarchical structure of writing; writing seen as a scrutiny of the transcendence/immanence dualism. Composing several of her texts of both “material words” and “discursive images,” as Drucker puts it, Scalapino, whose frequent collaborations with visual artists stand in an interesting relationship to Language poetry, was preoccupied with the phenomenological dimension of visuality and vision as related to both textuality and visible/perceived/constructed reality. My paper will offer a brief analysis of Scalapino’s image/word poetics in Crowd and Not Evening or Light, as well as in her collaborative work with artists Marina Adams (The Tango) and Kiki Smith (The Animal is in the World Like Water in Water).
Nae, Andrei, University of Bucharest, Romania: “The Cyborg as an Instance of (In)human Hybridity in Rolland Emmerich’s Universal Soldier (1992)”
Finding otherness in sameness is a cultural anxiety that became prominent especially with late Victorian novels such as Dracula, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Heart of Darkness. Without sharing Dracula’s popularity, Conrad’s novel has also been remediated (to use a new media term) or appropriated (to use a term coined in adaptation studies) into a series of new cultural products across different media. One such appropriation is the 1992 action movie, Universal Soldier. One salient trait of appropriations is the process of proximation, to use Julie Sanders’ term, which implies updating the narrative content of the original to a new spatial and temporal context, which in our case is present day USA. The implications of this recontextualization are conspicuous in the film’s attempt to translate otherness in politically correct terms. As a result, otherness is no longer represented in accordance with 19th century racialist views; instead the film signifies otherness through artificiality. Consequently, hybridity is no longer the state of being caught inbetween a Western modern and an African pre-modern culture, but rather the hybrid is a cyborg caught inbetween his humanity, marked by his free will, emotions and memories, and his artificial / robotic side, which compels the cyborg to obediently follow his instructions. The ambivalent condition of the cyborg’s identity is an unstable and conflicting one, with the two sides struggling for prominence. This identitary struggle yields different results: in the case of Luc Deveraux, becoming self-aware leads him towards ethical conduct, while in the case of Sgt. Andrew Scott, his Vietnam War trauma resurfaces, turning him into a paranoid killer. Therefore, the film’s conflict gains a technophobic connotation and highlights contemporary culture’s scepticism as well as fascination with respect to technological progress. Lastly, the film seems to confirm Linda Hutcheon’s claim that any new adaptation will bring along the entire history of previous adaptations. In the case of Universal Soldier, providing the Vietnam War as the cause for the evolution of the two main characters emphasizes an intertextual relation with Apocalypse Now and, as I hope to show, surprisingly adds another layer of cultural hybridity to Sgt. Andrew Scott by connecting him to Colonel Kurtz and, indirectly, to Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz.
Nagy, Judit, Karoli Gaspar University of the Reformed Church, Hungary: “Family Relationships as Cultural Bridges and Divides in Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker”

In his review of Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker published in the Fall 1997 issue of Korean Quarterly, Jerry Winzig points out how extensively family life and personal relationships are dealt with in the novel within the Korean-American cultural context. These issues will be at the very heart of the current paper, too. However, instead of offering the oft-employed analytical perspective centering on the Korean-American politician, John Kwang’s public and private life, or Park and his wife’s marital crisis and reconciliation, the paper aims at exploring how the interaction of Korean and American culture(s) is present in the life of Henry and Lelia’s parents though their children’s intercultural marriage. Culture, in the context of the present paper, will be understood in a broad sense, as a “learned set of interpretations about beliefs, values, and norms, which affect the behaviors of a relatively large number of people” (Lustig and Koester, 2010: 25), “a medium that touches and alters all aspects of human life” (Samovar and Porter, 1991: 12) including personality, self-expression, emotions, way of thinking, and attitude to solving problems and conflicts. The paper will make use of cultural and communication theory (Hofstede 1991, Lewis 2006, Berry 2005, Kim 2002, Shim et al. 2008) as well as socio-cultural information on the Korean American community (Jackson 2006, Kim et al. 2006, Zhao and Park 2013).

Lustig, Miron W., and Koester, Jolene. Intercultural Competence: Interpersonal Communication Across Cultures. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2010.

Samovar, Larry A., and Porter, Richard E. Communication between Cultures. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1991.

Nalerio, Juliana, University of Valladolid, Spain (chair)

Panel: (Re) Locating Violence in the American Imagination
One hundred and fifty years after the first full-length crime novel appeared in America, the persistence of violence into the 21st century in American art and literature continues to foster intense debate and speculation. In Richard Slotkin’s pivotal work Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier (1973) he establishes regenerative violence as the grand myth of the American imagination. In her recent The Prestige of Violence (2011), American literary critic Sally Bachner revisits the role of violence in Postwar US literature, questioning how violence came to be touted as the last route to the Real—‘beyond representation.’ From the colonial era to the present, cultural critics have interrogated the tenuous relationship of American culture to violence resulting in a category that is today as broad as it is ominous. The interpretive ambiguity of violence is related to its multiple and contested significances throughout the whole gamut of academic and artistic discourses, ranging from the political, historical, sociological, as well as in theory of affects and aesthetics. Continuing that dialogue, this panel seeks to explore the changing place of violence in North American cultural studies. How has violence been represented and how has that representation changed over time? Where does violence take place today? If not the frontier, to what sites and locations has violence been relocated? In an era of mass media, how might cultural products reinforce the image of a violent America? of violent groups within America? How might they reshape it? What is the relationship of American nationalism to violence? How might that relationship be contingent upon the representation and the reception of violence in America? This panel takes a markedly interdisciplinary approach and invites papers from across genres and formats. This panel includes four papers. The first of which is a theoretical approach to violence and sets up the conceptual-historical frame for the rest of the panel. The other three take various approaches to violence and its appearance in American cultural products and self-representations. This panel aims to contribute to the discussion on American culture and violence in a meaningful and productive way, resulting in a panel that offers an at once varied and in-depth perspective on the ‘violent heart’ at the center of American life.
Panel speakers:

Juliana Nalerio, University of Valladolid, Spain: “Bringing it Back Home: America and the (Re) Location of Violence”
Noelia Gregorio Fernández, University of Alcalá, Spain: “Robert Rodríguez’s Hyperreal Aesthetic of Violence: Exploitation and the U.S.-Mexican Border in Machete”
Eva Schörgenhuber, University of Vienna, Austria and Eugenie Theuer, University of Barcelona, Spain: “From Domestic Violence to Violent Dominatrices: Deconstructing the Dominatrix Figure in Female Artist’s Music Videos”
Nicla Pasquini, University of Valladolid, Spain: “Helena Maria Viramontes and the Encounter with the ‘Other’ in the Urban Barrio”
Nalerio, Juliana, University of Valladolid, Spain: “Bringing it Back Home: America and the (Re) Location of Violence”
Relegated to the frontier during the Colonial period and the Civil War, later brought into the heart of cities like New York dense with immigrant occupied tenement-buildings, violence has long been cornerstone to the American experience. Fueled by Manifest Destiny, violence was a prolific force giving birth to a young America: first as a frontier experience, then brought to the center and finally cast out to the margins. This paper attempts to unpack the history of violence as American pastime while offering an atypical second glance; informed by Slavoj Žižek’s tripartite notion of violence (Violence 2008) we argue that while what Žižek calls ‘subjective violence’ has swayed and supposedly changed agents in America, what he calls ‘objective’ and ‘systemic’ violence has stayed consistent (normalized as best practice). Up until the 1960s, violence was all but welcomed as central to American life. With the deaths of Martin Luther King and John F Kennedy, America’s relationship to violence shifted and the presupposed acceptability of violence was questioned. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon spearheaded the National Commission of the Causes and Prevention of Violence, instituting discourses that ring all too familiar: the mass media danger of over-representing violence; minority groups as agitators of group/individual violence. During this era, violence was evacuated and projected onto the Other, expelled from the national identity. This other was used to scapegoat and absorb the violence America was in the process of excreting and wiping away. Nevertheless, the US continued projects of forceful coercion globally, publicly circulating an anti-violence discourse that was smoke and mirrors, all spectacle. The relocated violence was nearly excluded from discussions on American national identity while issues like ‘gun laws’ occupied the limelight. A prime example: Nixon adhering to the Commission on Violence recommendation that mass media censor ‘titillating’ violence, while supporting the CIA’s involvement in the coup d’état that overturned Salvador Allende in Chile. How did “fires” in (Latin) America and the Middle East come to be considered foreign to the US although fueled by it?
Neagu, Adriana, Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania (chair)

Marek Paryz, Warsaw University, Poland (chair)

Panel: Utopia, Dystopia and Global Order of the Image
Taking utopia and dystopia to be the defining sensibilities of global times, in the proposed panel we seek to explore the structures of the global imagination from a perspective informed by comparative poetics and global theory. Typically, globalization is construed as the cultural logic of processes of standardisation, to many, synonymous with ’Americanisation’. In the present, we take issue with this thesis, in the attempt to make the case for a cognitive rather than culture-specific model of global theory, one that views knowledge structures as significantly more consequential and reflective of global anxieties than the cultural patterns to which they give rise. Working in the medium of culture history, fiction, film and television, we aim at identifying a set of dominants constitutive of the global ‘order of imagination’, wherein ‘order’ is understood in the Durandian acceptation of the term, i.e. as ’regime of the image’. While it is beyond the scope of our enquiry to embark upon in-depth analyses of the topoï and tropoï of the utopian/dystopian imaginary, we do hope to shed light on some of the dominant motifs resurfacing in global cultural production. One of the central tenets of this investigation is that dystopian projections, in general and apocalyptic trends, in particular, form an integral part of global sensibility, with catastrophe looming large on the horizon of expectation of globality. Panel activity is grouped around illustrations of 3 main categories: allegory, digital catastrophe and cinematic dystopia.
Panel speakers:

Adriana Neagu, Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania: “Post-Apocalypse Now: Globalism, Americanism and the Imagination of Disaster”
Marek Paryz, Warsaw University, Poland: “Utopian Underpinnings of Contemporary Transnational Film Westerns”
David Brian Howard, NSCAD University, Nova Scotia, Canada: “War Machines: Utopia and Allegorical Poetics in the 21st Century”
Andrew S. Gross, Georg-August University Göttingen, Germany: “Black Box: Covert Literary Humanism in the Age of Digital Surveillance”
Neagu, Adriana, Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania: “Post-Apocalypse Now: Globalism, Americanism and the Imagination of Disaster”
The paper examines post-apocalyptic representations in American film productions from a perspective informed by global and hypermodern cultural theory. It is an enquiry into aspects of dystopian sensibility in global cinema seen as manifest in several prominent genres of the post-apocalyptic strand. It is premised on the assumption that global society is endemically one marred by a catastrophic horizon of expectation, whose most congenial form of expression is dystopia, a genre on the rise worldwide, especially productive in Anglo-American cinematic practice. The chief scope of the investigation is to identify the articulations between ‘Americanism’ --construed as both ideology and sensibility-- and global anxieties as reflected in post- 9/11’ cinematic imaginary. Drawing on Paul Virilio’s hypermodern and Arjun Appadurai’s global cultural theories, I seek to bring these dominants to bear on what I construe as globality’s post-apocalyptic imagination.
Nelson, Barbara, University of Bucharest, Romania: “Furthering the D.W. Griffith Project: An Intervention into Romania”
In honor of the 150 anniversary of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, I would like to discuss this director’s presence in Romania. A film proposal on D.W. Griffith letterhead exists, virtually unknown, in the Royal Archives of HRH Prince Paul of Romania in Bucharest. This film proposal centers on the 1918 Odessa marriage and tragic aftermath of Crown Prince Carol II of Romania and Ioana Marie Valentino Lambrino. While the film was never made, the backstory of the contract is marked by the intersection of radical shifts in the film industry, due to transatlantic activity and industrialization, and of political dynastic instabilities in the face of post-war transformations and rising Republican sentiments. This story is a personal one of epic scope, the type that played into Griffith’s strengths. Perhaps he never abandoned his desire to do a History of the World for which he sought funding after Intolerance; however he seemed to be going at the project region by region. This contract proposal furthers The Griffith Project’s investigation into the European interests of the American director at a time when he was becoming out of step with the industry he helped to create. It reinforces the important role of film in the writing and rewriting of history, as it recuperates and also influences one of the buried stories of a king who gave up his rights to the throne for the woman he loved, a story not only of passion, but of casualties of war, dramatic intrigue and governmental coverups.
Nesmelova, Olga, Kazan Federal University, Russia (chair)

Olga Karasik, Associate Professor, Kazan Federal University, Russia (chair)

Panel: Fiction and Non-fiction in American Literature: Fictionalization of Facts
Panel speakers:

Olga Karasik, Kazan Federal University, Russia: “Anne Frank in Mass Culture: Fictionalization of the Image in Literature and Visual Arts”
Stanislav Kolář, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic: “Fictionalizing the Holocaust: The 2nd and 3rd Generation Responses to the Genocide”
Olga Antsyferova, Ivanovo State University, Russia: “Correlation of Fact and Fiction in Henry James’s Biographies: Moral and Aesthetic Vision”
Agnieszka Salska, Teacher’s Training College, Poland: “Galway Kinnell as a Public Poet: History, Tradition and the Individual Talent”
Neţ, Mariana, Iorgu Iordan - Al. Rosetti - Institute of Linguistics of the Romanian Academy, Bucharest, Romania: “Images of the Working Girl in The Dead Letter and The Figure Eight”

Panel speaker: EAAS’s European Study Group of Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Literature 10th Anniversary Panel
Newman, Mark, University of Edinburgh, UK: “Catholics and Race: The Southern Field Service, 1961-69”
In 1961 the National Catholic Conference on Interracial Justice (NCCIJ) established the Southern Field Service (SFS) to encourage and advise southern bishops to desegregate churches and schools under their jurisdiction; create interracial Catholic councils; and help and motivate Catholic lay people, African American and white, to pressure their bishops and Catholic institutions to end discrimination and inaugurate equal opportunities. Based in New Orleans, the SFS engaged in voluminous correspondence with bishops and lay people and regularly visited them. It also worked with civil rights groups in local and major campaigns, such as Selma in 1965 and the Meredith March in 1966. The paper examines the history of the SFS, analyses its approach, and assesses its impact, which provides an insight into race relations in different parts of the South, as well as the response of African American and white Catholics in the region to desegregation of Catholic and secular institutions. The SFS was not an official Catholic agency under the direct control of the bishops, which gave it considerable freedom. Some bishops refused and obstructed the SFS’s services in their dioceses. However, others were responsive to the organisation and the pressure it generated from progressive lay people. By 1966, every southern diocese had begun desegregation, but, struggling for funds, the NCCIJ closed the SFS in 1969. The paper draws on SFS papers, diocesan archives and interviews.
Ni, Pi-Hua, Department of Foreign Languages, National Chiayi University, Taiwan: “Julie Wu’s The Third Son as the Cornerstone of Taiwanese-American Literature”
This paper aims to illustrate that Julie Wu’s The Third Son, published in 2013, has laid the cornerstone for Taiwanese-American Literature and established a landmark in the landscape of American literature. The following issues shall be discussed so as to substantiate the foregoing contention. First, this paper shall demonstrate that the retrospective narrative on the protagonist’s (Tong Chia-lin’s) dramatic development respectively in Taiwan and America skillfully inscribes the complex Taiwanese history—particularly the coercively “erased” parts—and represents the diverse Taiwanese cultures and languages in American literature. Secondly, whereas the problematic of doubleness and the struggle of identification have delineated the center stage of ethnic American literature such as Afro-American literature, Chicano literature, Chinese- American literature and Jewish-American literature, Wu’s The Third Son demonstrates its uniqueness and originality with its focus on the protagonist’s initiation to American culture, his reflective examination, in terms of American culture, of Taiwanese cultures and values and his ultimate maturation in such male gender roles as son, husband and father. Given the cornerstone and landmark Julie Wu has laid with The Third Son, this paper shall assert in conclusion that Wu has created a new and brilliant piece in the patchwork of American literature—the brand new piece of Taiwanese-American literature.
Nichols, David, Indiana State University, USA: “Acceptable Indians: Exoticism at Plainfield Academy, 1848-52”
In 1817 Congregational missionaries established in Cornwall, Connecticut one of the most famous American schools for indigenous youth, the Foreign Mission School. The academy educated about thirty young Native American men, including several from the culturally “progressive” Cherokee Nation. In less than ten years, however, a scandal engendered by the marriage of two Cherokee students to local women forced the school to close. Twenty years later, another Connecticut school, Plainfield Academy, admitted a second cohort of southeastern Indian students: twenty members of the Chickasaw Nation. These pupils enjoyed a very different experience from their predecessors in Cornwall: fellow students and local residents studied them, asked them to share their ball games and their language, and considered their community enriched by its Indian guests. This paper, based on the records of Plainfield Academy and official correspondence of the Office of Indian Affairs, will examine the experiences both of the Chickasaw scholars at Plainfield and their white classmates and neighbors. It will ask why northeastern whites received these students so favorably when others had threatened the Cherokees with violence. Had Yankees sympathies for southeastern Indians grown during the national debate over Indian Removal in the 1830s? Or did the students own willingness to play up their exotic, Indian identity – even though they came from as “civilized” a nation as the Cherokees – reassure whites that they would not threaten Connecticut’s racial hierarchy, a hierarchy strained by the state’s earlier encounters with intermarriage?
Oliva, Juan Igniacio, University of La Laguna, Spain

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

Wayne E. Arnold, University of Kitakyushu, Japan: “Never to Return: Aller Retour New York and Henry Miller’s Shelved Epistle”

Anamaria Schwab, University of Bucharest, Romania: “Already Posthumanism? E. L. Doctorow’s Homer and Langley”

Susana Rocha Teixeira, Heidelberg University, Germany: “World War I and the American Makeover Fiction”
Oliveira Martins, Isabel, New University of Lisbon, Portugal: “Women’s Diasporic Trajectories in Katherine Vaz’s Collection of Portuguese American Stories”
By the end of the 20th century some Portuguese American writers achieved a place of some relevance, such as Katherine Vaz, a third-generation Portuguese American. Her last published work, Our Lady of the Artichokes and Other Portuguese-American Stories (2008), is a collection of stories that interweaves several geographical places and trajectories in and out of the US. While doing so, Vaz retrieves her Portuguese heritage including themes related to the role of women within the community and how they dealt with their situation as “forced” immigrants. Men had a prominent role those Portuguese American communities since they were the ones who most of the time took the initiative to emigrate, the ones who provided the basic material needs and who would later send for the women who in turn endured a forced displacement. Usually they were their promised fiancées who would become their wives, mothers of their children and thus would be confined to the home environment where their role could be both nurturing and central but also limited not only by the mainstream culture but by their own countrymen and their ingrained beliefs. Having in mind the importance of studies dealing with diasporic experiences and transnational women writers engaging with grief, loss and bereavement in North-American contemporary literature this paper aims to discuss the author’s representation of those situations and how the women, as diasporic subjects, face them.
Ollivier-Mellios, Anne, University of Lyon 2, France: “Militants’ Autobiographies: Between Writing the Self and Writing History”
This paper seeks to explore the complex relationship between militancy, the autobiography as a genre, and history, by examining the writing of Max Eastman (1883-1969), Sidney Hook (1902-1989) and Howard Zinn (1922-2010). Three key figures of the American intelligentsia, they allegedly illustrate John Patrick Diggins’s taxonomy: the Lyrical Left (in the 1910s and early 1920s), the Old Left (in the 1930s) and the New Left (in the 1960s). Their autobiographies – Love and Revolution (1964), Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century (1987), and You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train (2007) – mingle personal recollection and political memoir. Some events may be distorted as they were recorded decades after these authors had fought their major political battles – or simply because these intellectuals tried to rewrite (their) history and downplay their role in the Socialist or Communist party. I will consider these three figures as representatives of three intellectual generations shaped respectively by World War I, the 1930s and World War II, and the Vietnam War. Epistemologically speaking, their autobiographies pose the problem of the reliability of this specific kind of source for the historian. Indeed the status of autobiographies (and to a lesser extent of memoirs) has been at the heart of historiographical debates in the past thirty years. These three cases will serve as examples to discuss the status and interest of militants’ autobiographies for the historian.
Olsza, Malgorzata, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland: “Beyond the Written Word: Thirty Years of American Graphic Novels”
The year 2016 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Art Spiegelman’s first volume of Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. Maus was the first graphic novel to both engage with a grave subject matter, the Holocaust, and reach a wider audience, one extending beyond the circles of comics readers, which ultimately culminated in an unprecedented event: a graphic tale winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1992. The anniversary provides an opportunity to reflect on the development and status of the graphic novel in a wider context of the USA’s literary canon. “I obviously wanted company (…) Spiegelman remarked in one interview, “and many have followed since, and now [the graphic novel] seems like a relatively healthy medium.” Indeed, many authors have followed in Spiegelman’s footsteps, creating graphic novels which fiind universal recognition and which enter the ever-expanding canon. This paper will analyze the most interesting examples of graphic tales to emerge in the USA in the past thirty years, asking questions about the changes in techniques, narration, and visual aesthetics these works introduce. In keeping with the unique character of Maus, I will focus on non-fiction graphic novels, namely on Joe Sacco’s Palestine (1996) and Safe Area Gorazde (2000), Craig Thompson’s Blankets (2003), and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006). It will be demonstrated that the graphic novel is no longer a “foreign body” (because of its graphic character and affiliations with popular culture) but a notable contribution to the canon.
Oltean, Roxana, University of Bucharest, Romania: “Empowerment and Protest in Frederick Douglass’s Life Narratives”
This paper will explore the multi-faceted use of the discourse of empowerment in what may be termed Douglass’s life-narrations. In doing so, the paper will revisit a series of classical analyses of Douglass’s writings and most notably of his Narrative as texts bringing Americans together around common shared values, thus using Douglass to justify an American exceptionalism, and will also draw on recent investigations into transatlantic crossings which inscribe Douglass in a complex discourse of protest, thus contouring versions of diasporic and minority identities. More precisely, this paper will dwell on the extent to which Douglass’s vision of freedom and leadership is located in the interstices of power, on the manner in which Douglass’s life-narrations are comprehensive of a highly volatile geography going beyond binaries, and on the ways in which emancipation is predicated around complex constructions of selfhood as anchored in rhetoric and in work.
Opreanu, Lucia, Ovidius University, Constanţa, Romania: “Intertextuality, Identity and Reception in the Big Bang Theory”
Much of the appeal of The Big Bang Theory television series is due, at least as far as its more high-brow viewers are concerned, to the wealth of allusions to cultural products ranging from canonical literature to Star Trek and comprising a vast corpus of literary texts and cinematic productions. Since an attempt to exhaust the wide range of references the eight series so far released provide would be unrealistically ambitious, the paper aims to focus on a limited number of representative examples of intertextuality, from the often lengthy passages from science fiction series, comic books and action movie franchises the protagonists resort to in their conversations to the frequent instances of dressing-up and role-playing. Particular attention will be paid to the ways in which the characters’ personalities and behaviors are shaped by the popular culture they avidly consume in an attempt to establish whether there is more to their identities than a vast cornucopia of quotations. The analysis will also target the reader (and viewer) response mechanisms involved in the protagonists’ interactions with literature and film and the reception of key pulp fiction genres by different audiences. The ultimate aim is to go beyond the situation comedy and the show’s reliance on (and contributions to) the nerd stereotype and to explore the insights it provides into the deeply intertextual nature of contemporary identities and the reading practices and critical responses displayed by specific demographic groups.
Osipova, Elvira, Member of the Russian Association for American Studies, Russia: “American Studies in Russia: Significance, Challenges, Goals”
The importance of American studies as seen from a Russian perspective consists in entrenching in students’ minds fundamental values of liberty, equality in law, popular representation, human rights, in a word, values spelt large in the US Constitution. The teaching of American studies has a huge political significance now, as a way to combat xenophobia and, particularly, anti-Americanism. The current situation is not conductive, though, to developing the teaching of American studies, and we may envisage a possible shrinkage of its scope. It may be the case if the government continues to conduct its policy of self-isolation. Still, even in its present shape American studies in Russia is one of the few channels of educating people for democracy. A way to present the US to a Russian student may be by discussing the challenges the country has faced since its foundation, while showing what were the alternatives American people had, namely: plurality or unity; strong or weak government; “equality & poverty” vs “inequality & wealth” (the alternative formulated by W. Sumner, and challenged by L.Ward); “freedom and disorder”, or “order without freedom”. The latter choice is much discussed in Russian politics, which makes it so pertinent to address the American case.
Osman, Suleiman, George Washington University, USA: “The DIY City: Localism and Anti-Statism in Urban America”

Panel speaker: The Local and the National in Twentieth Century United States
Osoianu, Dragoș, Ovidius University, Constanţa, Romania: “The Ethics of the Machine: A Return to Nature in Isaac Asimov’s The Bicentennial Man”
This paper aims to inferentially establish an organic connection between the technological domain of the Machine and the ecological realm of Nature within the context of the fictional universe of The Bicentennial Man by Isaac Asimov. The main character, Andrew Martin, undergoes physical and psychological transformations in order to sublimate its existential status and to become his own master and, of course, a human being. The societal prejudices are overcome; the social-cultural hierarchies of power, which oppose the human master to the non-human servant, are deconstructed, the binary contradictions between the superior and the inferior having been abolished. Furthermore, extending the idea of human/humanity beyond its initial cultural construction leads to a reintegration into the primordial Nature. Existential issues, such as love, creativity, joy, and death, challenge the philosophical category of otherness and question the relationship between the organic consciousness and the inorganic subjectivity, inside and outside, subject and object, self and other. In this sense, a radical discourse of otherness is initiated, in which the human individuality can become an alien for oneself or a human can become other, within the same pattern of reality. Andrew sublimates the essentialist and speciesist concept of humanity, going through multiple changes and engaging his destiny into a complex process of becoming a posthuman being. The integration of the textual Machine within the larger context of Nature, apprehended as an universal cybernetic and rhizomatic system, and the homogeneity of the discursive materiality are connected to the idea that there is an ethical or agentive communication between the ontological realm and the epistemological one, between the observer and the observed, between the subject and the object, between the human and the non-human.
Pacea, Otilia, Ovidius University, Constanţa, Romania: “American Women in the Digital City: An Empirical Analysis”
The American Digital City is undergoing major shifts in demographics with more American women online than ever before. American women are more likely than men to have a blog or a Facebook profile. In this context, first-time filmmaker and husband of a popular “mommy blogger”, Christopher Wiegand promises to “change the way you see an entire industry” in his trailer for the documentary “American Blogger” that was first released on Vimeo in April 2014. Inspired by his wife’s blogging, Wiegand drove across the country to interview 51 American women bloggers whom he knew from his wife’s community of blog friends. What follows is an unexpectedly steady stream of Internet backlash that accuses Wiegand of the documentary’s apparently exclusive focus on overwhelmingly conventionally attractive, young, white women. The title of the film is indeed misleading in the sense that even if it does not refer to all American bloggers, the sample cannot yet be representative of the genre. But who are the most popular American female bloggers today and why do they blog? The premise is that computer-mediated communication shapes gender and vice versa. Blogs as the most representative American rooted Internet genre today have been viewed as gendered technology, between ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ digital écriture. What I intend to do is to collect language data from the most influential American female-authored blogs and compare the results to Wiegand’s American Bloggers. Using computer-aided text analysis methodology, linguistic dimensions of intrinsic motivation will be generated on the quantification of word category frequencies.
Pajor, Jan, University of Lodz, Poland: “The United States, the ‘Third Revolution’ in China and the Downfall of Yuan Shikai”
In December 1915 Chinese military and civil officials dissatisfied with President Yuan Shikai’s plan to reestablish monarchy and make himself emperor started the “Third Revolution” which soon engulfed the country. Yuan tried to quell it, but was unsuccessful. In the meantime, his health severely deteriorated and he died in June 1916, before he was overthrown. In my paper I will try to present how did Washington react to the “Third Revolution” in China (observed strict neutrality, tacitly or officially supported one of the belligerents, sent troops to protect Americans, etc.) and was there any difference between actions taken during this upheaval and the previous ones in 1911 and 1913? Did the United States cooperate with other powers or rather pursue independent policy? Were they surprised by the course of events, did they fear that the rebellion might become anti-foreign or that Japan might take advantage of it? Lastly, how did they perceive the outcome of the revolution and the demise of Yuan Shikai who they hitherto supported? My paper will be primarily based on archival records from the Library of Congress and the National Archives. Significant supplement will be printed materials and vast literature on the subject.
Palotás, Zsolt, University of Szeged, Hungary: “US Diplomatic and Consular Representatives in Ottoman Mahgreb, with special emphasis on the Agents in the Regency of Tunis, 1783-1865”
On September 3, 1783 the United States and Great Britain concluded the Treaty of Paris which meant the end of the American Revolution (1775–1783). The American politicians were already trying to establish relations with other countires during the war. On the one hand, the Diplomatic Service targeted major European powers to obtain diplomatic and military assistance. On the other hand, agents of the Consular Service were sent to other nations such as the Muslim States of North Africa. In fact, the Diplomatic and Consular Service were closely linked with each other in the Maghreb in order to protect American commercial interests. Relations between the United States and the Barbary States, namely Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli, may be divided into two periods between 1783 and 1865. The first period (1783–1815/6) was characterized by vivid relations among the nations. In contrast, the second period (1815/6–1865) had no decisive importance neither for the U.S. nor for the Maghreb States. From the very beginning the young Republic sent diplomatic and consular agents to the Maghreb, of whom the best known were Thomas Barclay, Joël Barlow and William Eaton. The U.S. representation in Tunisia was incidental to those of Morocco and Algiers which used to have consul generals, whereas the former had only consuls, vice-consuls and chargé d’affaires. This paper aims to present the activity of the agents of U.S. Diplomatic and Consular Service in the Maghreb, with special emphasis on the officials in the Regency of Tunis between 1783 and 1865.
Pantuchowicz, Agnieszka, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw, Poland: “Friendship and Attachment in Sylvia Plath’s and Halina Poświatowska’s Prosaic Works”
Sylvia Plath’s Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963 (published in 1975; years after the author’s death) and The Bell Jar (published only a month before Plath’s death in 1963 under a pseudonym; and in 1967 with her own name) have predominantly been read in an autobiographical mode. Halina Poświatowska’s Opowieść dla przyjaciela (A Tale for a Friend) was published in 1967 – nine years after heart surgery for which she went to the US and after the publication of her first volume of poetry; less than a year before her death in October of 1968 at the age of thirty two – and constitutes a poeticized account of the experiences the poet had in America and is frequently read literally as an autobiography (also due to its form of letters). The hybrid literary forms of Plath’s and Poświatowska’s prosaic works make room for various, though not mutually exclusive, readings: a meditation on love, closeness and friendship; a story of un/success; an account of (always already) failed translations of a life re-gained, though one where wild hunger for life all too frequently leads to linguistic, mental and culturally troublesome recognitions which are voiced in defense of instincts and ethics wilder than the one of self-preservation. The economy of life and the economy of friendship constitute the backdrop against which those stories are told to disturb the conventional conceptualizations of attachment in general.
Pantuchowicz, Agnieszka, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw, Poland (chair)

Panel: Polish-American Encounters: Social and Anthropological Insights
The panel offers four papers investigating the ideas of identity, ethnicity, modernization, history, religion, culture as well as social conditions and conventions of living in multicultural contexts. Each of them focuses on a different set of texts and employs different critical approaches. Together they seem to constitute a comprehensive introduction to an analysis of close relationships between geographically distant cultures and literatures. Comparative readings focusing on various aspects of a wide selection of texts of diverse American and Polish authors and film directors will discuss the proposed problematics in the context of social critique and anthropological reflection.
Panel speakers:

Piotr Skurowski, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw, Poland: “Poland’s Post- WWII Borderlands and the Aesthetics of the American Western in Polish Film: Prawo i pięść (The Law and the Fist, 1964), Wilcze echa (Wolves’ Echoes, 1968), Róża (Rose, 2011)
Paweł Pyrka, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw, Poland: “A Modernist’s (Mis)Adventure in Poe’s Maze: Patterns of Obsession and Investigation in the Weird Fictions of Stefan Grabiński and H. P. Lovecraft”
Aleksandra Hołubowicz, University of Gdańsk, Poland: “Complicated Religious Heritage: A Comparative Study of Selected U.S. Latina and Polish Young Female Writers”
Agnieszka Pantuchowicz, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw, Poland: “Friendship and Attachment in Sylvia Plath’s and Halina Poświatowska’s Prosaic Works”

Parks, Justin University of Turku, Finland: “American Stuff: Melvin B. Tolson, Carl Rakosi, and the Invention of Multiculturalism”
The notion of “Americana”—suggesting both material and immaterial forms of American folk culture—became increasingly politicized during the years of the Great Depression and the buildup to the Second World War. In this presentation, I will discuss works by two very different poets from the period—namely Carl Rakosi’s Americana (1940) and Melvin B. Tolson’s Woodcuts for Americana (1944)—in terms of the ways they utilize this concept to different yet complementary ends. I claim that Rakosi, an immigrant Jewish Midwesterner working within an explicitly avant-garde milieu, and Tolson, who hailed from a southern Black background and had ties to the Harlem Renaissance, both deploy the concept of “Americana” in constructing narratives of national history that are at once exceptionalist and inclusive. In keeping with the Popular Front intellectual agenda of the time when they were written, both poetic narratives represent what Michael Denning has called “ethnic Americanism,” a “Popular Front public culture [that] sought to forge ethnic and racial alliances, mediating between Anglo American culture, the culture of the ethnic workers, and African American culture, in part by reclaiming the figure of ‘America’ itself” (The Cultural Front, 9). Both Rakosi and Tolson, I argue, looked to the Popular Front period’s newly inclusive notion of the American cultural past as they assembled and inscribed miscellanies of cultural ephemera intended to complicate and critique received ideas concerning American cultural history—aims through which their work can be seen as anticipating the multiculturalism of the postwar period.
Pargas, Damian Alan, Leiden University, the Netherlands: “Seeking Freedom in the Midst of Slavery: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum South”
Slave flight in the antebellum South did not always coincide with the political geography of freedom. Indeed, spaces and places within the South attracted the largest number of fugitive slaves. Assuming false identities and attempting to pass themselves off as free blacks, innumerable slaves strove for freedom by fleeing to urban areas within the slaveholding states rather than risk long-distance flight attempts to formally free territories such as the northern US, Canada, and Mexico. This paper will briefly examine the experiences of fugitive slaves who remained in the South between 1800-1860. It will touch upon themes such as the causes for slave flight to urban areas, the slave and free black networks that facilitated their escapes, and, most importantly, the ways in which they concealed their identities and navigated urban spaces upon arrival.
Pargas, Damian Alan, Leiden University, the Netherlands (chair)

Panel: Slave Identities and Resistance in Antebellum America
In her groundbreaking work Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women & Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (2004), Stephanie Camp argued that a proper appreciation of the fluidity and multiplicity of slave identities is crucial to scholars’ understanding of slave resistance. As Camp put it, “enslaved people were many things at once, and they were many things at different moments and in various places.” Among other things, they were “agents and subjects, persons and property, and people who resisted and accommodated—sometimes in one and the same act.” Camp’s work focused on enslaved women’s illicit movements and construction of “rival geographies” in the antebellum South, but in the past decade relatively few other scholars have analyzed the relationship between slave identities and resistance (whether overt or covert). A closer inspection, however, reveals that for African- American slaves, identity construction was central to challenging slavery in a multitude of ways—not just in the case of enslaved women’s day-to-day resistance but also for methods as divergent as suing for freedom, running away, and inverting gender stereotypes. How did enslaved people’s identities inform the nature and extent of their resistance to slavery? Drawing from Camp’s argument as a point of departure, this panel will explore the relationship between slave identities and forms of resistance in antebellum America from different angles. Focusing on slave resistance in different settings and with different aims, it will reveal how slaves shifted their identities according to circumstance in order to challenge their enslavement and/or enslavers. The panel will highlight, for example: the ways in which fugitive slaves in southern cities employed a tactic of identity concealment to attempt to pass for free blacks; the importance of black identities to open legal challenges to slavery in 1850s California; and the ways in which enslaved men challenged notions of black manhood and negotiated an identity relative to their enslavers in order to survive slavery.
Panel speakers:

Damian Alan Pargas, Leiden University, the Netherlands: “Seeking Freedom in the Midst of Slavery: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum South”
David Doddington, University of Cardiff, Wales, UK: “‘The best amongst them was picked for that job’: Masculinity, Resistance, and Survival in Slavery”
Jean Pfaelzer, University of Delaware, USA: “California Bound: African American Slavery and the Struggle for Freedom in the American West”