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

Stéphanie Durrans, Michel de Montaigne University, Bordeaux 3, France: “Redefining the Home in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s Detective Fiction”
Aušra Paulauskiene, LCC International University in Klaipeda, Lithuania: “Queering of Femininity in American Fiction 19^th into 20^th Century”
Mariana Neţ, 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”
Popa, Anca, “Confronting mirrored selves in Philip Roth's Operation Shylock and The Plot Against America”
Philip Roth has provided an original perspective on Jewish identity, an intergenerational interpretation of the self. His major themes are located and delineated in terms of cultural dynamics, his character’s dilemmas converge in the endeavour to affirm the “raw I” regardless of social consequences or following the precepts that have been laid by Jewish customs. His protagonists are trying to understand their cultural and personal predicament as Jewish-Americans in their attempt to bridge the gap between assimilation and alienation. The present paper examines the Rothian crisis of identity from the narrative strategy of “the Doppelgänger” in Operation Shylock, a novel which presents a postmodernist reflection of the quintessential Roth (both character and author). This strategy is meant to offer mirror images, alter egos or constructions of alternative selves which are projected on secondary characters so that the protagonists might come to terms with their most elusive issue: Jewish identity.
Popescu, Veronica, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi, Romania: “The Dialectic of Diaspora and Return in Three of Cristina García’s Novels”
In The Vulnerable Observer. Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart (1996) Ruth Behar finds the terms immigrant and exile as inappropriate and limiting when referring to Cuban Americans born on either side of the Strait, claiming that “diaspora embraces all these possibilities and others including earlier periods of displacement in Cuban history” (145). One could argue that the former erases the exceptionalism of this community of Latinos, victims of a revolution that moved the Iron Curtain to only 90 miles from US territory, and the latter ignores those belonging to the 1.5 (Pérez Firmat, 1994) or the second-generation Cuban Americans, for whom “Cuba is an enduring, perhaps an endearing fiction ... as ethereal as the smoke and as persistent as the smell of their grandfather’s cigars” (5). Like Behar, Cristina García also engages with the question of identity for Cuban Americans belonging to different generations, but she is equally interested in the collective imagination of the Cubans living in the US, a community sharing similar or complementary ideas of a Cuba that has survived in their minds, souls, stories and dreams through nostalgic images, memories—true or imagined as a healing strategy—emotional residue and, more importantly, the dream of a future return to the fatherland on their own terms, after the death of Fidel Castro. Positioning herself outside and inside her own diasporic community, Cristina García has shifted her interest from exploring the personal and the subjective experience of the Cuban national trauma and of the exiles’ displacement (Dreaming in Cuban and The Agüero Sisters) to a purely fictional representation of a Fidel-free future, concocted by the feverish imagination of an old Cuban exile (King of Cuba). Written almost two decades apart and in slightly different contexts (King of Cuba being published after Fidel Castro stepped down and a more liberal-minded brother Raúl took his place), these three novels look at the Cuban American’s old dream of returning to the island from different angles. What is unchanged is the author’s concern for a nuanced representation of the two Cubas—one created and nurtured by the diasporic collective imagination and one experienced by the novelist as a visitor to the island—reflecting the novelist’s refusal to reject or ignore anything that might explain her own fascination with this wounded tropical paradise to which García keeps returning in search for answers.
Pospíšil, Tomáš, Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic: “Women in Crime, Politics, and the Law in HBO’s The Wire”
In “Women in Crime, Politics, and the Law in HBO’s The Wire” Tomáš Pospíšil (Brno) examines the varieties of the representation of African American women as presented in the HBO series The Wire. The visual and narrative construction of all three main black women characters suggests an unusually high degree of authenticity and resemblance to actual living persons. The fact that in the vast social canvas of this series the only empowered Black women happen to be cynical, calculating, and corrupt politicians or strong, streetwise, slang-speaking killers is regarded as an example of what Noel Carrol labels a distorting categorical framework. The presentation argues that, despite its hallmark narrative complexity, insightful take on the flawed functioning of American society and its institutions, and an otherwise impressive array of round (male) characters, The Wire fails to avoid the multiple trappings of dominant (read: white, patriarchal) ideology.
Precup, Amelia, Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania: “The Ethnic Implications of a Cybertopian Future in Karen Tei Yamashita’s ‘Anime Wong’”
This paper participates in the discussion about literary texts influenced by the development of technology and cybernetics. It looks at Karen Tei Yamashita’s “Anime Wong” through the theoretical lenses of scholars debating the identity configuration model of a posthuman culture. “Anime Wong” imagines a posthuman future inhabited by an exclusively Asian population of cyborgs, aliens, androids, and indefinable entities. The mythological foundation of this Asian posthuman civilization draws on the cultural pillars of Western culture. Subtitled “A CyberAsian Odyssey,” Yamashita’s “Anime Wong” borrows Homeric elements, filters them through the ‘mythology’ of Star Trek, and mixes them with political comments and references to Western philosophy and popular culture. It then impregnates the result with distinctively Asian (Japanese) elements and uses the mixture as a figuration of an ethnocentric cybertopia, thus commenting both on the cultural implications of cybernetic technologies and on the ethnic clichés and stereotyping predispositions at work within contemporary culture. My claim is that the use of the Asian ethos and Star Trek’s Borg analogy serves the re-conceptualization of the subjective self in terms of the collective, one of the core ideas in the discussions on posthumanism. However, given Yamashita’s ironical approach, “Anime Wong” is not a sign of attachment to the idea of ethnic preservation, nor an effort to extol the worth of ethnicity, but rather an attempt to subvert the cliché of the Asian as technologically enhanced, while simultaneously pointing out the persistence of ethnic stereotyping despite major cultural shifts.
Precup, Mihaela, University of Bucharest, Romania: “A Widow Shall: Joyce Carol Oates’s A Widow’s Story (2011) and the Public Performance of Mourning”
Joyce Carol Oates’s bestselling memoir A Widow’s Story (2011) can best be described as a confused and underedited manual of mourning where the writer put everything she could think of after her husband’s unexpected death, and instead of re-reading it in order to make some much-needed cutting and proofreading, she simply had it published as such. If only for this reason, the book is important to examine, since it speaks volumes about the publishing business which—one can only assume—was comfortable not to edit the manuscris because they were able to rely on Joyce Carol Oates’s being a household name and the fact that she produced a memoir about trauma. One of the most interesting issues of A Widow’s Story is that Oates means to use her own experience to write a how-to book; this does not, at first sight, appear to be the case, since diary excerpts form a large percentage of the book. However, there are passages, all of them written in italics and occurring quite suddenly in the narrative, where Oates abandons the first person point of view and refers to the experience of “the widow,” a person that turns out to be based entirely upon herself, much as “the husband” is not some abstracted faceless personage, but is closely based on Ray Smith, Oates’s first husband. I am interested in examining the public performance of mourning displayed by Oates from a critical background that includes recent trauma theory and death studies.
Préher, Gérald, Lille Catholic University, France (chair)

Arbeit, Marcel, Palacky University in Olomouc, Czech Republic (chair)

Panel: Southern Specificities of Literary Genres, Southern Studies Forum Panel, Part I
Panel speakers:

Valeria Gennaro Lerda, University of Genoa, Italy: “Rebecca Latimer Felton and Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin: Memoirs of Southern Ladies in the Transition from the Old South to the New”
Constante González Groba, University of Santiago, Santiago de Compostela, Spain: “‘When You Disappear in Mississippi, You’re Dead’: The Reverberations of the Emmett Till Case in Southern Autobiography”
Iulia Andreea Milica, University of Iaşi, Romania: “If a Good Man Is Hard to Find, What about a Good Woman? Gothic and Grotesque Representations of Women in Flannery O’Connor’s Short Stories”
Carmen Rueda, Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona, Spain: “Appalachian Women’s Autobiographies from the Margins: Crossing the Boundaries of the Genre”
Préher, Gérald, Lille Catholic University, France (chair)

Arbeit, Marcel, Palacky University in Olomouc, Czech Republic (chair)

Panel: Southern Specificities of Literary Genres, Southern Studies Forum Panel, Part II
Panel speakers:

Roman Trušník, Tomas Bata University in Zlín, Czech Republic: “Jim Grimsley at the Crossroads: From Literary Fiction through High Fantasy to Science Fantasy”
Candela Delgado Marín, University of Seville, Spain: “Southern Ecoliterature: A Silent Sensory Topography”
Irina Kudriavtseva, Minsk State Linguistic University, Belarus: “The Short Fiction of Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and Peter Taylor: From Anecdote to Epiphany”
Beata Zawadka, Szczecin University, Poland: “Swamp Is the Limit: The Southern as the (New) Western”
Prieto, Sara, San Antonio Catholic University of Murcia, Spain: “The White Flame of France: Maude Radford Warren’s Forgotten Voice on the Western Front”
In this paper I propose an examination of The White Flame of France, the war text produced by Maude Radford Warren (1875-1934) out of her experience in the French war zone during the First World War. Unlike many other women who enrolled on the war as nurses or ambulance drivers, Warren visited the Western Front as a civilian journalist. She wrote about her own impressions on the development of the conflict for the Saturday Evening Post and later on gathered these articles in The White Flame of France, published in 1918. Through the examination of Warren’s text, we will revisit the role that several women played in the promotion and reception of the First World War in the United States. At the same time, it will allow us to discuss how the author dealt with the implications of her unusual presence in the war zone and how her perspective compares to the combatants’ view of the war.
Prorokova, Tatiana, Philipps-University of Marburg, Germany: “Women, Power, and Insanity in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle”
This paper analyzes a novel by one of the most prominent female writers of the twentieth century – Shirley Jackson – We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Written in 1962 and strongly inspired by Jackson’s personal history with psychological illness, the work falls into the times of patriarchy that vehemently reigned in American society of those times. By means of literal and historical analysis, this paper aims at addressing such a pivotal issue as power, precisely female power, and the way it is reflected in the novel. Examining two main female characters – sisters Merricat and Constance – the paper seeks to showcase the differences in the nature of the two young women and investigate how these dissimilarities influence Merricat’s and Constance’s position in society, and, hence, how the notion of power can be applied or related to them. The paper also argues that the magic elements that are present in the novel figuratively stand for Merricat’s power that enables her to be superior compared to the other characters. The paper inevitably addresses the problem of complex relations between the sisters and contends that there are three possible ways of their interpretation: as full sisters, friends, and lovers. Additionally, I look at the issue of insanity that entwines Jackson’s work throughout and consider the relationship between female power and female insanity as they are represented in the novel.
Preumont, Yannick, University of Calabria, Italy: “Translating Cioran in America”
On the Heights of Despair, translated by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston and published by the University of Chicago Press in 1992, permits an understanding of one kind of translation experience. In this case the metaphorical concept of Pe culmile disperării, so important for the young Cioran (These lines written today, April 8, 1933, when I turn twenty-two. It is strange to think that I am already a specialist in the question of death, p. 15), may hide an interesting and new Belle Infidèle. Magda Jeanrenaud has studied the French translation in Textele timpurii ale lui Cioran în limba franceză. Cazul Pe culmile disperării. The American version of 1992 forces us to think, in a whole new way, about the language Cioran uses: this translation aims at capturing the lyrical, whimsical spirit of Cioran’s original Romanian, not a literal, word-for-word accuracy. Principally, this has meant a trimming of Cioran’s youthful prose, mainly those passages that sound florid or redundant in English (Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, Note on the Text). A revisited Cioran, but a Cioran that collaborated with the translator to cancel the image of 1934: All such cuts, changes, and revisions were either made by of approved by the author, who has also cut additional passages and sections that were conceptually repetitive. The French translation is always present, with the numerous cuts, changes, and revisions of 1990, but the American version will be examined as an excellent test case for cultural transfer. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston has succeded in capturing the lyrical, whimsical spirit of Cioran’s original Romanian.
Pyrka, Paweł, 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”
The proposed presentation is a comparative reading and analysis of selected works by two eminent authors of weird fiction, Stefan Grabiński and H. P. Lovecraft, the goal of which is to trace two (independent) patterns of development of ideas concerning "uncanny" or "weird" story writing (as established by E. A. Poe) in the cultural and historical context of modernism. The two authors discussed in the presentation appear to suffer from a combination of fatal and inherent inability to write "like Poe" with deep understanding and appreciation of the Poesque style and principles, and, in consequence invent different but equally fascinating strategies to cope with the resulting textual neuroses - a way out of Poe's Maze. The presentation will examine the character and functions of such "inquisitive obsessions", as well as specific means of translating the experience of modernism and its ideas of progress, change and mechanized, or mechanistic, existence into the dark matter of weird fiction.
Pyrkosz, Damian S., University of Rzeszów, Poland: “Crisis of Economy or Values? The Ethical Roots of the America’s Economic Crisis”
In the midst of debates on possible causes and solutions to the current unrest in international markets, political and economic decision makers tend to primarily focus on the role of economic and financial measures and oversee the fact that the economic instability is also the result of negative occurrences beyond the economic sphere, i.e. in the area of values and culture. In this way they fundamentally misinterpret the situation as markets are primarily reflections of people’s ethical decisions they we make every day. They are driven by our values and beliefs not only at the personal level but also at that of society. In this sense, the crisis that broke in years 2007-2008 should not only be treated as a economic phenomenon but primarily as the crisis of ethics. American society, built on a strong sense of values and beliefs that helped it survive the years of growth and contributed to its unprecedented economic success, and belied its own ethical code and moral norms. The paper will resort to statistical data and findings of the international reports in order to show the impact of the cultural sphere in the form of values, norms and beliefs followed by American society in the period prior to the crisis on the economic outcomes.

Rabitsch, Stefan, University of Klagenfurt, Austria: “‘Hornblower off the Starboard Bow’: 50 Years Star Trek”

To claim that the worldbuilding mechanics of the Star Trek continuum were purposefully modeled on a quintessentially British mythos—the Golden Age of Fighting and Exploring Sail—might seem preposterous at first. Informed by critically neglected primary production material and poised on the eve of its 50^th anniversary, this paper presents a condensed version of a recently completed, synoptic remapping of Star Trek’s contours that made visible how Rule Britannia, as an operational/functional theme, was intentionally and continuously used to govern the very ontology of Star Trek’s world for more than forty years. This theme manifests itself along five interrelated maritime dimensions; they range from 1) a naval corpus, and 2) the starship as a re-imagined sailing ship traversing the partially literalized; ocean of space; which is 3) captained by the transposed sentimental Royal Navy Enlightenment mariner as a fighting naturalist in space, to 4) the practice of archaic nautical traditions vis-à-vis the presence of naval intertexts and nautical paraphernalia. They are all set against the future backdrop of 5) a benignly imperial interstellar age of discovery and colonization which is governed by the laws, politics and exigencies of distance. Why else, for example, would Gene Roddenberry state that; everything we do is usually based on the English; in an off-hand remark about his reasons for giving the captain of ST. TNG a French name? (in Alexander, 1994: 518) Even though critics and fans alike have easily looked past Roddenberry’s ploy of pitching and selling a faux space western—; Wagon Train to the stars;—I argue that it has still colored, both implicitly and explicitly, many if not most scholarly approaches to Star Trek. His secondary pitch—Hornblower in space;—which pertains to much more than the character of the starship captain has gone almost completely unacknowledged: a mare incognitum. Ultimately, my paper takes the shape of a (con)textual manual for Star Trek’s transatlantic double consciousness in that it explains how and why Star Trek simply is Wagon Train to the stars; and ; Hornblower in space; in equal measure, making it rather unique if compared to all other major American science fiction universes. And, it also points to a whole generation of Americans, which includes among others John F. Kennedy, Gene Roddenberry and Russell Kirk, who shared a broader transatlantic awareness that was underwritten by a latent Anglophilia.

Rapatzikou, Tatiani, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece: “Digital Visuality – Poetic Transformations”
The digital visual-verbal poem Slippingglimpse (2007) constitutes a collaborative effort between a poet (Stephanie Strickland), videographer (Paul Ryan) and programmer (Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo). What is challenging about this particular endeavor relates to the way this poem enhances and diversifies poetic layout and lineation due to the intervention of various writing practices, imaging technologies and programming languages. One of the main images this poem makes use of is that of moving water that appears to be intertwined with a particular poetic text. But how does this affect the spatial and temporal dimension of the poetic experience? Also how does the particular moving image affect the way we relate to the poetic text as both viewers and readers? Finally, in what ways does the digitally generated sense of movement enhanced by certain kinetic and aural effects challenge the way poetry can be written, read or perceived? Through this presentation an effort will be made to comment on the multimodal character of such a work, to use N. Katherine Hayles’ term for Slippingglimpse, and at the multiple mechanisms at work for the creation not of a merely aesthetic effect but of a multi-dimensional and polyphonic experience. The effectiveness of the particular digital poem lies in the ongoing interaction between readers, machines and multiple language codes. This transforms Slippingglimpse into an ongoing feedback loop that engages readers, digitally generated images and spatial effects into a variable process of reading and perceiving texts while paving the path towards a creative but polyglot conversation between human and digital agents.
Rapatzikou, Tatiani, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece (chair)

Panel: Digitextualities – Spatialities, Fluidities, Hybridities
Through the exploration of various digitally produced texts (poetry and prose) this panel attempts to investigate the multidimensional, mallaeable and multimodal character of contemporary literary writing in addition to the alternative reading and writing strategies that emerge from the reader-machine interaction. The papers to be presented also attempt to trace the emergence of new trends both in writing as well as in publishing due to print and digital convergence. These trends also mark a gradual transition towards the advent of a digiprint literary consciousness and cognition.
Panel speakers:

Tatiani Rapatzikou, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece: “Digital Visuality – Poetic Transformations”
Philip Leonard, Nottingham Trent University, UK: “Writing the Ultramundane: Digital Poetry in Orbit”
Thomas Mantzaris, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece: “Hybrid Textualities – Heteroglossic Narratives”
Paweł Frelik, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin, Poland: “Southland’s Dark Rapture: California, Apocalypse, and Digital Technologies”
Reichel, A. Elisabeth, University of Basel, Switzerland: “The Word Unnerving the Us: Appolonian and Diyonisian Others in the Ethnography and Poetry of Ruth Benedict”
Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934), clearly one of the most influential studies by an American anthropologist, has long been acclaimed for its accessible introduction to the concept of cultural relativism, which Franz Boas taught at Columbia University in the early twentieth century. More recently, though, Benedict’s distinct style of writing has also attracted much critical attention. Starting from Clifford Geertz’s claim that “[t]he Not-us (or Not-U.S.) unnerves the Us” through the persistent “juxtaposition of the alltoo- familiar and the wildly exotic” (Works and Lives, 1988, 106) in Benedict’s writing, this paper first cautions that Patterns remains grounded in the predicament of cultural relativism and its assertion of essential differences between cultures of purportedly equal value. By borrowing Nietzsche’s (in)famous distinction in The Birth of Tragedy between Apollonian and Dionysian arts to describe two possible types of cultural configurations, Benedict exposes a contingent set of values that has informed both conceptions of art forms and of cultures. However, despite such avant-la-lettre gestures of deconstruction, Patterns, just as Birth of Tragedy construes cultural and aesthetic Others in its adherence to cultural relativism’s ‘separate but equal’ doctrine. While this paper thus qualifies Geertz’s appraisal of Benedict’s ethnography on the one hand, its second part argues that Benedict’s poetry—whose relevance Geertz notes but does not explore—is indeed able to move beyond the Boasian framework. By not merely juxtaposing myths from diverse cultural heritages but layering them in palimpsestlike constellations, the poem “In Parables” unsettles traditionally held distinctions, thus thoroughly unnerving the Us (or U.S.).