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

Resano, Dolores, University of Barcelona, Spain: “Can we laugh? Satire as a Literary Solvent for Post-9/11 America: Jess Walter’s The Zero (2006) and Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2012)”
In the first years after the September 11 terrorist attacks, American literary production was mostly centered on the inexpressible nature of what was deemed a collective trauma, as the nation was still trying to digest what 9/11 had meant and was desperately looking for a meaningful text. Pundits and cultural prognosticators (Carter, 2001; Coyne, 2001; Rosenblatt, 2001, among others) were quick to proclaim the “death of irony,” foreshadowing the demise of black comedy and cynicism in a post-9/11 climate “where a new form of PC (Patriotic Correctness) shaped most discussions of the US response to terrorism domestically and globally” (Duvall 280). However, critics like Michiko Kakutani reminded the public that, on the contrary, irony was not over, and that “disturbing historical events have tended to elicit not PG-rated displays of inspirational good taste but darker works of art resonating with a culture’s deepest fears and forebodings. Indeed, the thesis of the death of irony has been largely dismissed by the media, but it still “has a certain resiliency in academic criticism” (Duvall 279). This contribution follows John Duvall’s assertion that “to claim that irony died on 9/11 is to selectively read fiction published since 2002,” and it will offer an approximation to two post- 9/11 novels that feed into the uniquely American tradition of the satire: Jess Walter’s 2006 The Zero and Ben Fountain’s 2012 Billy Lynn’s Halftime Walk. Both novels engage with and satirize the heroic narrative that emerged after 9/11, especially as regards the hero-worship of police officers, firefighters and soldiers, and in doing so they question and subvert the official, closed narrative of 9/11 and the War on Terror.
Rieser, Klaus, University of Graz, Austria: “Contact Improvisation and Five Rhythms: On the Interconnection between Movement and Organization”
The genre, or art form, Graphic Novels is replete with life writing and even autobiographical narration. Some of the most famous graphic novels, from Art Spiegelman’s to Marjane Satrapi’s
and beyond have a strong autobiographical focus. In my paper I will look at these and lesser known examples (Talbot and Talbot’s , Howard Cruse’s , and others) under the aspect of focalization/point of view. I am here interested in the interplay of the visual and the verbal in the construction of a narrating position as well as the construction of a preferred reading position. I will look at visual and verbal techniques such as “close up”, “over-the-shoulder view”, etc. to determine how autobiography is rendered in these examples. I will look particularly at the construction of the child’s point of view in these works. Often in graphic novels with an autobiographical bend or element, we find representations of the narrator as a child. I will investigate in how far focalization via the narrator as child differs from the narration of events closer to the diegetic present. The representation of the child, its gaze, and its voice – or in the lack of such elements, their mediation through the adult - is interesting both regarding the representation of childhood and narratologically for the question of autobiography. Obviously, the talk will be illustrated with a number of verbal-visual examples.
Rocha Teixeira, Susana, Heidelberg University, Germany: “World War I and the American Makeover Fiction”
In 2016, it will be 100 years since World War I was in full force. Although many connections and effects between the US and the war have been analyzed and illuminated in American Studies, there are some aspects, which still remain in the dark. One of these aspects is that WWI contributed to the emergence of the American makeover culture and American makeover fiction. In a makeover culture individuals are (constantly) watching, displaying, commenting, desiring and modifying their own and other bodies (bodies of stars and celebrities). This holds particulary true for the twenty-first century, where YouTube, Facebook or Twitter play an important role in people’s lives. Makeover fiction is a term (genre) I created. It refers to works of fiction (mostly novels), which were typically written in the twentieth or twenty-first century, deal with makeover culture and which explore its consequences. In my presentation, I’m going to show how WWI triggered a paradigm shift with regard to makeover in the (puritan) United States (of all places) and thus makeover culture and makeover fiction. Furthermore, I’m going to analyze novels such as Gertrude Atherton’s Black Oxen (1923), or Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies (2005) in order to show what makeover fiction is, how it critically reflects on the American makeover culture and which narrative strategies it uses in order to do so. Furthermore, I would like to discuss with the participants the pecularity of the American makeover culture and the makeover fiction-concept.
Rogoveanu, Raluca, Ovidius University, Constanţa, Romania: “Expressive Enactments of Membership in Romanian Ethnic Associations from California”
This study is an analysis of the main types of Romanian ethnic associations and organizations from California and their strategies of shaping political subjectivity, by emphasizing linked fate through expressive enactments of ethnic membership. Building on the premise that political life goes beyond the realm of legislative assembly and electoral politics, this study explores the extent to which public gatherings, ethnic festivals and book clubs provide the Romanian -Americans with just as valid civic lessons. I shall focus on the heterogeneity of discourses professed by some of the most visible Romanian ethnic associations from California and their way of encapsulating essential Romanian ethnicity in ensembles of cultural practices and ways of showcasing ethnic culture through artifacts (icons, food) as signifiers of ethnicity. My study also aims to investigate the role of the leaders of such ethnic associations/organizations and their success in maintaining the community cohesion and active membership, by reinforcing the solidarity of the groups, increasing membership in organizations, promoting mobilization, and expanding the range and scope of those organizations. Centered on the missions and repertoires of the Romanian ethnic organizations in California, this project analyzes how salient is ethnicity for Romanian-Americans and the manner in which the they negotiate their ethnicity as individuals and as members of organized groups.
Roske, Octavian, University of Bucharest, Romania: “Debating the Causes of the Civil War”
The search for the causes of the Civil War is one of the “most absorbing historical problems,’’ if not “one of the most exasperating,’’ in Kenneth Stampp’s opinion. Many historians have argued that the southern states seceded mainly to preserve slavery. It is doubtful, Steven Yates notices in his study “When is Political Divorce Justified?,’’ that there was any intent on the part of the Confederacy to preserve slavery. First, and most obviously the institution affected only a small percentage of the white population: under ten percent owned slaves. It seems unlikely that thousands of Southerners would have chosen to go to their deaths against a militarily superior enemy just to help a few plantation owners to keep their slaves. Jefferson Davis wrote in his book The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government: “The truth remains intact and incontrovertible, that the existence of African servitude was in no wise the cause of the conflict, but only the incident.’’ The Confederate President observed that regardless of the outcome of the war, the slave property of southerners “will eventually be lost.” Charles Ramsdell showed that “by 1860 the institution of slavery had virtually reached its natural frontiers in the West. Beyond Texas and Missouri the way was closed. There were no reasonable ground for expectation that new lands could be acquired south of the United States into which slaves might be taken. There was, in brief, no further place for it to go. In the cold facts of the situation, there was no longer any basis for excited sectional controversy over slavery extension.’’Post-Civil War Southern historians were more inclined to find the causes of secession in a particular interpretation of the Constitution, in what Arthur M. Schlesinger called the state rights fetish. To show that slavery was not the essential issue in Georgia’s Declaration of Secession Michael P. Johnson writes in Toward a Patriarchal Republic: The Secession of Georgia: “When secessionists tied their hopes to the ideas of the Founding Fathers rather than to the proslavery argument, they implicitly acknowledged the limited hegemony of slaveholders. The ideology of 1776 did what proslavery ideology could not do... By using the rhetoric of a national independence movement and emphasizing that the rights of all Georgians were threatened by a Republican president, secessionists implicitly suggested that any consensus about the social necessity of slavery was not strong enough to rest their case on.’’
Roza, Mathilde, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands: “Educating the Nation: Dutch Artist Jo Spier and the Marshall Plan in the Netherlands”
In the visual history of the European Recovery Program, the image of a Dutchman climbing the Dollar sign to a more prosperous future has become one of the iconic images of the Marshall Plan. It was drawn by a then famous illustrator, Jo Spier, and first appeared on the cover of a booklet, Het Marshall Plan en U, ordered by the Dutch Ministry of Finance in 1949 to inform and convince the Dutch public of the Plan’s benefits: by 1950, it had reached an estimated 2,5 million people. Although intimately connected to the Netherlands and Dutch culture, the unusual strength of the booklet and its images was recognized in the United States as well; translated into English, it was distributed in the US also as reassuring proof that the American tax dollars were being well spent. The image of the Dutch farmer continues to appear in exhibitions – often accompanied by the heading “the Dutch view,” such as in the fiftieth anniversary exhibition of the Marshall Plan at the Library at Congress. Although the image itself is famous, not much work has yet been done on either the booklet as such, its images, or on Jo Spier’s role in the project of selling the Marshall plan by educating the Dutch people. In my talk, a visual analysis of Spier’s images will be made part of a broader investigation of the Dutch re-assertion and celebration, for better or worse, of a distinct national identity in the years after the war. Next to materials by Spier, this talk will make use of examples from Dutch music and documentary film.
Rueda, Carmen, Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona, Spain: “Appalachian Women’s Autobiographies from the Margins: Crossing the Boundaries of the Genre”
Appalachian autobiography by women writers, in which they reveal truths about themselves and their region, either to dismiss common stereotypes about mountaineers as “white trash” or more frequently to explore the conflation of identity, class, gender, and race, has only recently begun to receive the scholarly attention it deserves. The notion of autobiography, almost synonymous with life writing, has transcended the classical boundaries of the literary genre and now encompasses a broad range of cultural practices of writing the self. As recent research has shown, the field of life writing has become broader as authors have progressively tested the limits of their narratives of the self by experimenting with different forms of non-linearity, intermediality, and ethnography. My paper will focus on two contemporary Appalachian women who, from a marginal position within dominant discourses, have explored the blurring of boundaries between truth and fiction, reality and dreams in their autobiographical narratives: Dorothy Allison and her Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (1995), which began as a performance piece, and bell hooks’ Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood (1996). These autobiographies show the struggles of growing up surrounded with poverty, racism, and sexism in the mountain South. By combining text with images, using brief sketches instead of the chronological unfolding of a life, using first and third person to blur the lines between truth and fiction, and moving from a textual narrative form into different visual and performative cultural practices, these two authors have deconstructed and crossed the generic boundaries of autobiography, producing what Carol Kaplan calls “out-law genres” in autobiographical discourse.
Russo, Michele, University of Pescara, Italy: “Exploring the Native Americans’ Tales and Legends: a Cross-Border Analysis of Witchcraft and the Occult in John Lawson’s A New Voyage to Carolina”
Over the 17th-18th centuries, a remarkable number of European explorers set off on adventurous journeys into the New World in search of new lands and riches. The purpose of this work is to analyse Lawson’s anthropological details about the local tribes of North and South Carolina, in particular the Tuscarora, including stories and tales which go well beyond the limits of the supernatural. In spite of the numerous information about magic and superstition furnished by different adventurers at that time, what makes Lawson’s diary stand out is the detached and objective character of its descriptions, ranging from Shamans’ special powers to heal sick people to magic potions and animals possessing supernatural traits. Obviously starting from Propp’s theories and pursuing the most recent theoretical approaches by Calvino, Lévi-Strauss and Leach on fables and on the anthropological features of language, my paper means to analyse the occult aspects of Lawson’s report, such as the ones regarding the young’s initiation rites and the numerous voracious animals, such as snakes. In particular, I will apply the Russian scholar’s theories about mythological creatures as symbols of border defenders. The natural environment surrounding the Natives’ habitat, as well as the mysterious “code” of their language, represent a solid frontier, in Lotman’s terms, which only a special knowledge, requiring a difficult process of initiation, can overpass. Such knowledge is preserved within the boundaries marking the internal space of the Natives’ culture, which Lawson tried to cross. My essay will finally highlight the trans-cultural aspect of the British explorer’s work, which led him to set up a direct contact with the Natives’ superstitious world, thus causing his death under the Tuscarora’s “malediction”.
Sagredo, Antonia, National University of Distance Education, Spain: “American Women in Motion: from the Right to Vote to the National Organization for Women”
The culmination of the American women’s suffrage movement was to achieve the legal right to vote in 1920. It was a long way from its origins when in the 1840s it emerged the movement for women’s rights. In 1848, the Seneca Falls Convention, the first women’s rights convention, passed a resolution in favor of women’s suffrage despite opposition from some of its organizers, who believed the idea was too extreme. The first national suffrage organizations were established in 1869 led by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In 1890 was created the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and Anthony was its leader. In 1920 women achieved the right to vote but they needed to organize them as a stronger group. It took time, more than forty years before women founded an organization to promote themselves. This new platform was the National Organization for Women (NOW) created in 1966. There were 49 founders, women and men, but it is necessary to mention to two special women, Betty Friedan and Pauli Murray because they wrote the Organization’s Statements of Purpose in 1966, describing the purpose of NOW as To take action to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now, exercising all privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men. In 2016 the National Organization for Women will celebrate its 50th anniversary and this paper will pay tribute to these brave women and the organization they founded.
Šalamoun, Jiří, Masaryk University Brno, Czech Republic: “Not Profound, but Purposeful: On Ishmael Reed’s Voluntary Restriction by Race in Post-Black America”
Ever since the ascent of post-Black theory in the 1990s, African American artists such as Trey Ellis and Kara Walker have refused to be restricted by race as the main subject of their art. The pinnacle of such aesthetics can be seen in Kenneth Warren’s seminal monograph What Was African American Literature (2011) which suggests that African American literature ceased to exist along with the overt forms of racism. These approaches are united with the lack of perceived value in race as subject of African American art in the post- Black era. However, while there are valid grounds for such views, this talk examines the contrary perspective on the matter: the literature of Ishmael Reed who has never (voluntarily) ceased to be restricted by race. The talk juxtaposes Warren’s claim that revealing racism in contemporary America does not make a profound argument with examples of precisely such literary practice taken from Reed’s 2011 novel Juice! which reveals covert forms of racism in the U.S. media. The talk concludes by claiming that in post-Black America of Michael Brown and Eric Garner there is value even in such type of African American literature which is still restricted by race and hence might not be profound but it is purposeful.
Salska, Agnieszka, Teacher’s Training College, Poland: “Galway Kinnell as a Public Poet: History, Tradition and the Individual Talent”
Galway Kinnell, one of the best American poets of the second half of the twentieth century, died on October 28, 2014 at his home in Sheffield, Vermont. Born in 1927, Kinnell was one of the generation of talented and prolific poets born in the late 1920s who radically decentralized and reshaped American poetic scene. They also were the first generation of American poets who confidently and unselfconsciously assimilated foreign influences, canceling the traditional opposition between the cosmopolitan aesthetes like Longfellow or Eliot and native “barbarians” like Whitman or Williams. While Kinnell is often recognized as an accomplished lyricist, a poet of intimate verse on domestic life and a close observer of nature, like Whitman, he insistently intertwined in his poetry the personal and the public strain. Throughout his career the poet kept addressing important public issues starting with the Civil Rights Movement through Vietnam War and nuclear disarmaments negotiations of the 1980s to the tragedy of 9/11. In my presentation I would like to look at the way Kinnell invokes and involves in his public verse the work of diverse poets of the past as a method of lifting the specific event out of its immediate historical and geographical context so as to give it a universalized, a-temporal, even mythical dimension.
Sandeen, Eric, University of Wyoming, USA (chair)

Panel: Poetic Traditions
Panel speakers:

Guy Stevenson Stevenson, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK: “Sacrifice and Expenditure: The Mad Sexual Economics of Georges Bataille and Ezra Pound”
Siofra McSherry, Free University of Berlin, Germany: “‘To fulfil a private obligation’: Marianne Moore and her Patrons”
Ana González-Rivas Fernández, Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain: “Poetry, Myths and the Classics: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the American Literary Community”
Justin Parks, University of Turku, Finland: “American Stuff: Melvin B. Tolson, Carl Rakosi, and the Invention of Multiculturalism”
Saxon, Theresa, University of Central Lancashire, England and Lisa Merrill, Hofstra University New York, USA: “Transatlantic Theatre from 1776 to 1917: Responses to ‘English’ theatricals in America”
This paper explores that part of a book project, ‘Transatlantic Theatre from 1776 to 1917’ concentrating on the opportunity provided by an Eccles Centre Fellowship residency to explore the range of responses to ‘English’ theatricals in America. The paper will examine the elements of this project particularly underpinned by discoveries made in the British Library collections. During my Eccles fellowship, I focussed on specific research areas within the British Library: consultation with regional newspapers from colonial centres, from the revolutionary period 1700s to the establishment of independence, consultation with playscripts/theatre ephemera (including newspaper reviews from papers and press cuttings), from eighteenth and nineteenth-century theatres in England, to consider the reshaping of, and reaction to, American performances on English stages and consultation with rare books by and about theatre practitioners in the transatlantic context. Regional newspapers of the thirteen colonies are not readily accessible and the digitised holdings within the ‘Early American Newspapers’ collection at the British Library are extensive, more than 200 titles in total. Access to this resource has enabled me to explore publications relating to known theatrical centres – Charlestown, New York, Philadelphia and Williamsburg, as well as the less established locations of Albany, Baltimore, Fredericksburg, Newport and Norfolk, and, importantly, the colonised sites of the West Indies – from early colonial settlement to the revolutionary war. I was, also, able to access resources at the library that hold a variety of playscripts, texts and theatre ephemera, including the Lord Chamberlain’s collection, in which I have found a licence copy of Dion Boucicault’s infamous ‘race’ play, The Octoroon, which had been first performed in New York and was brought to England in 1861. The Lord Chamberlain’s collection has generally proved crucial to my research, as a repository of plays licenced and has helped me develop knowledge of the exercise of power and privilege in this transatlantic theatre history.
Saxon, Theresa, University of Central Lancashire, England (chair)

Panel: Transatlantic Explorations and Relations in Performance and Literary Culture
The panel provides a multi- and inter-disciplinary platform for the discussion of transatlantic transfers and influences in popular literary cultures. Kit Carson was still working as a scout with the US cavalry at a time when east coast publishers were producing early comics fictionalising his adventures, and only a few years later members of both the native and invading populations were enacting mythologised versions of their own lives as they moved from living on the frontier to performing as extras in theatre and film. The art and the artists involved in these forms were in their turn affected by the transatlantic reception of the works, and by their own exposure to transatlantic influences.

• Christine Bold (Guelph): “Did Indians Read Dime Novels? A Transatlantic Exploration”,

• Alessandra Magrin (Strathclyde): “The Enduring Legacy of Buffalo Bill in Italian Cinema: from Silver Screen to Spaghetti Western”,

• Theresa Saxon (Central Lancashire): “Transatlantic Theatre from 1776 to 1917: Responses to ‘English’ theatricals in America”,

• Pia Wiegmink (Mainz): “A View from Abroad: Slavery, Transatlantic Relations and European Revolutions in African American Women’s Writing”,

These papers provide a matrix for the exploration of these literary, theatrical, filmic forms within their historical context. The fact that they are all delivered by scholars who have been Fellows at the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library in London brings another transatlantic element to the scholarship. The panel brings together a transatlantic team – based in Canada, England, Scotland and Germany – and scholars ranging from advanced postgraduate students to internationally know scholars. This offers an opportunity for professional support and development that is central to the missions of the Eccles centre and of the EAAS.