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

Vlad, Eduard, Ovidius University, Constanţa, Romania: “Countercultural Coordinates of Discourse Change and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five”
In the introductory chapter of his Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut evokes the Old Testament tale of great destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The author claims not to deplore the loss of the sinners who had inhabited those cities. He, nevertheless, laments the predicament of Lot’s wife, who, told not to look back, did, and was turned into a pillar of salt. Vonnegut also looked back on his personal experience of the apocalypse, the fire-bombing of Dresden in February 1945. He had been there as an American POW, and, like Ishmael in Moby Dick, survived to tell the tale. How was he to deal with that? The answer is a very complex one, weaving together responses to pacifism and engagement at the time of the Vietnam War, at the height of the countercultural age of the late sixties. It was typical of Vonnegut to avoid straightforwardly conveying important messages and using dead serious language to tackle important issues having to do with politics, history, society. He would use indirect artistic means, eccentric characters like Kilgore Trout (who is also an ironic, parodic version of the author himself), strange situations, inviting readers to respond to the “terror of history” themselves, while playing hide and seek with such filmic representations of war as The Dirty Dozen (1967) and The Green Berets (1968). This paper assesses the relevance of Vonnegut’s novel in the power and authority configurations of the most dramatic of America’s postwar decades, a text fundamentally concerned with the construction of American history and ideology.
Vlad, Florian Andrei, Ovidius University, Constanţa, Romania: “Guillermo Del Toro, Gothic Re-Animator”
Between October 1921 and June 1922, HP Lovecraft serialized what would become, if far from the author’s favorites, one of his most influential short stories and a source of what would become some of the most widespread horror cliches: “Herbert West - Reanimator.” Herbert West, initially meant as a crude parody of Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein, is an amoral scientist who re-animates the dead not driven by some misguided higher purpose, but rather by hubris and narcissism, and is arguably the prototype of the ”mad scientist” stock character of horror fiction and film. If the fictional Herbert West resurrects corpses who develop, shall we say, lives of their own, the real-world director, writer and producer Guillermo del Toro has been noted for re-animating tropes, themes and motifs from Gothic literary traditions. I use the term re-animation because del Toro goes well beyond mere pastiche of Gothic conventions, and even further beyond the watered-down, defanged and decaffeinated Gothic-lite of, say, Twilight or The Vampire Diaries; his resurrected Gothic ghosts develop new meanings and new manifestations. This paper concentrates on del Toro’s English language, American-produced work, and the primary focus will be Crimson Peak, his most straightforward tribute to a number of Gothic traditions, ranging from the Gothic romance to Hammer horror, but I will also refer to other works as well, including The Strain and Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark.
Vlaicu, Cornelia, Member of the Romanian Association for American Studies, Romania: “Reinhabiting Indian Land and the World”
One of the important anniversaries of 2016 is the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s World Conservation Congress, which will take place in Hawaii, U.S. It is also known that the U.S. has not ratified the Kyoto Protocol. In connection with the environmental theme both pertain to, I would like to propose a reading of Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Almanac of the Dead. The book’s indictment of globalization as a means of perpetuating injustice towards nature, along with (formerly?, currently?) colonized peoples, both “naturalized,” is well known. The paper, titled “Reinhabiting Indian Land and the World”, will give a reading of the novel through overlapping lenses of Native American traditional environmental knowledge, as theorized by authors such as Gregory Cajete (“natural democracy”), Vine Deloria, Jr. (ongoing Creation), Taiaiake Alfred (the “Onkwehonwe resurgence”) and others, and notions of responsibility and fraternity (Lévinas), a modernity that requires “a new democracy” (Bruno Latour), coupled with concepts of hybrid geographies, in line with Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of becoming and networking and with Foucault’s politics of caring for the self as “the practice of liberty.” My reading will analyze instances of “banning nature” (Stacy Alaimo) and “making pet of nature” (David Lowenthal) as two facets of the same coin – the extractive character of colonialism, perpetuated through globalization – and the peaceful war Silko fictionalizes in Almanac of the Dead as a starting point for a new, ceremonial while democratic, ethics of inhabiting the world.
Vogel, Christiane, Martin Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany: “A New Eden Tried and Failed – The Utopian Commune Fruitlands (1843). ‘The hunger of an age is alike a presentiment and pledge of its own supply’”
Community building in the United States during the 1840s was a common practice. The transcendentalist center Fruitlands – “ten miles northwest of Concord in Harvard, Massachusetts” – is one example of an attempt of utopian living that included a destined lifestyle and diet. Fruitlands was not inspired by, “nor was [it] in any way pledged to, specific religious doctrines and dogmas.” The idea to establish a ‘consociate family’ in the middle of an agrarian commune under certain regulations like a special vegan/vegetarian nutritional regime was that of Amos Bronson Alcott (1799-1888) and his British supporter, Charles Lane (1800-1870). Both saw real perfection only in the obligations encompassed in the thoughts of transcendentalism – a reform movement typically for the mid-1800s – a time when this movement was known to be “the most energetic and extensive upsurge.” In order to live the ideals of the transcendentalist movement through utopia, the members of Fruitlands estranged themselves from outside conditions. Fruitlands failed due to communal perfections such as primitive farming, homeopathic remedy, appliance of cold water, a strict dress reform, and a special diet. As one of antebellum America’s utopian communities that was rooted in transcendentalist ideals, it “collapsed in January 1844, just seven months after it began in early June 1843.” By means of a close reading of the satirical self-experienced account “Transcendental Wild Oats” (1873) by Alcott’s daughter Louisa May (1832-1888), the Fruitland experiment will be further evaluated.
Vogelius, Christa, University of Copenhagen, Denmark: “Margaret Fuller and the Art of Revolution”
Margaret Fuller’s records of her travels through the Midwest in Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 are haunted from their inception with transatlantic desire. The travelogue is both a record of the journey that was undertaken and the one that was not: several years before the trip, in 1835, Fuller was forced to abandon a long-awaited trip to Europe after her father’s death, and financial demands at home continued to make a longer journey impossible into the early 1840s. Though Fuller never explicitly framed it as such, the 1843 trip through New York, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin was a practicable compensation for these more expansive travels. In this light, the European allusions that ghost the writing from its opening poems to its concluding verse are much more than a display of Fuller’s Classical education. These literary and artistic allusions allow Fuller to think through her own position as an American writer steeped in European cultural traditions at the same time as they present radically hybridized view of the United States. References to Norse mythology, Neoclassical sculpture, and Southern European protagonists are superimposed onto the landscape of the plains in a striking juxtaposition of new and old, actual and imaginary, American and European. This layering, alongside Fuller’s frequent references to immigration, heralds a vision of an America in which Europe is a component of not just its cultural heritage, but its unfolding present. By highlighting the American Midwestern landscape as a patchwork of European immigration and Native American settlement, Fuller questions any unmixed claims to the land by original inhabitants, early European settlers, and later immigrants alike. This dramatically unsettled approach to the American landscape clarifies the formal complexity and fragmentation of the travelogue as a whole, and also provides new insight into Fuller’s transatlantic perspective only shortly before she became European correspondent for The Tribune. In this paper, I will consider not only Fuller’s own transatlantic imagination, but her place in the larger American tradition of the hybridized travelogue. The paper forms a part of my first book project on the role of popular ekphrasis and the American travel narrative in shaping a transnational literary identity.
Vysotska, Natalia, Kyiv National Linguistic University, Ukraine: “American Literary Studies in Ukraine: Academic Discipline or a Mover towards Social Changes?”
As Dana Heller remarked in her introduction to a special 2003 edition of American Studies International featuring papers on post-Soviet American Studies, “as post-Soviet scholars, teachers, and intellectuals engage day-to-day with changing forms of local and regional life, American Studies may provide a border space for the representation of a people to itself by way of a detour through the “other”. It is obvious that studies in American literature across post-Soviet space have all evolved from common roots in the Soviet ground, have been all subject to ideological pressures and presently suffer from similar economic and institutional constraints. Nevertheless, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the once monolithic “tree trunk” has been split, and its “branches” have been growing each in its own direction determined by national traditions and general intellectual climate in their respective societies. It is my belief that for independent Ukraine American experience in building workable relationships between an individual and the state has been of special significance as a potential model for a budding nation. This fact determined the emphasis laid on American literature both in research and in teaching, as well as leading vectors along which its study has proceeded. Another distinguishing feature of American literary studies in Ukraine is its openness to novel Western methodologies predetermined by the country’s geographical position and its European orientation. Therefore, mutual “pollination” between different national versions of the same disciplinary field is productive both in terms of generating new knowledge about their object of research, and of finding common language of cultural diplomacy so much in demand in today’s gruesome political situation. It can be argued that Ukrainian, Russian, and Byelorussian scholars form a kind of “tripartite alliance” closely collaborating in their academic pursuits. In addition, in current Ukrainian context American literature provides a laboratory for trying out (albeit virtually) various societal, cultural and ethical configurations. Even though one cannot be so naïve as to expect literary discourse to have immediate social impact, its long-term consequences, though incalculable, still must not be disregarded.
Waddan, Alex, University of Leicester, UK: “The Great Society and American Social Policy”
Barely 16 years after President Johnson put the “war on poverty” at the center of the Great Society, President Reagan announced that poverty had in fact triumphed in that war. The national poverty rate had, in reality, halved over that period, but Reagan’s real target was what he termed the increase in “welfare dependency”: And the idea that the great unintended consequence of the Great Society had been to undermine work incentives and foster a culture of dependency became a signature issue for conservatives looking to attack the social policy legacies of the 1960s. That focus, however, ignored the manner in which the social policy agenda in the mid-1960s was a wide ranging one, which included the creation of programs that have endured and expanded and have an ongoing popularity. Most notably Medicare and Medicaid remain bulwarks of the American welfare state, resilient to efforts at retrenchment. This paper will examine how the Great Society has come to have such contradictory social policy legacies. In legislative terms conservative ideas were at their most influential with the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, enacted in August 1996, and signed into law by a Democratic president. On the other hand, conservative efforts to re-shape the Medicare program or turn Medicaid into a block grant program have made little progress. The paper will reflect on the politics and policy driving these developments as well as examining how other Great Society programs such as Food Stamps have evolved over time. These questions will primarily be examined through a study of institutional, partisan and ideological factors.
Wanger, Allison, University of Iowa, USA: The U.S. Postwar National Cemetery System and the Transnational Containment of Worl War II Memory
This paper offers a critical examination of the intersection of nationalism, foreign relations, and public memory within America’s Cold War national cemetery system (NCS). Between 1945 and 1959, the U.S. government established fourteen military cemeteries in nine countries to inter the nation’s WWII dead. Through an exploration of the NCS’ transnational memorialization efforts, this paper argues that global warfare and the advent of the atomic age engendered a sense of international insecurity that necessitated a reconfiguration of the processes through which the nation developed its public memory and established its parameters of national belonging. Scholarship on the Cold War era NCS focuses on the failure of the institution to develop a uniquely American postwar identity. Such a critique fails to recognize the significance of the transnational negotiations and international political climate that facilitated the development of monumental cemeteries abroad. Thus, the organizing question of this investigation is how, why, and to what effect did America construct a public memory of WWII as a means to develop a contemporary national identity. To this end, this paper historically situates and critically examines the evolution of the NCS through and against the emergent rhetoric of containment and from multiple comparative angles: legislative, geographic, and symbolic. I argue that the NCS internationally memorialized the WWII dead to articulate and apply its emergent Cold War ideologies and to construct a democratic vision of the nation that unsuccessfully attempted to conceal its own inequalities.
Warso, Anna, University of Social Sciences and Humanities (SWPS), Poland: “Palahniuk’s Nightmare Box – Haunted: A Novel of Stories”
Chuck Palahniuk’s 2005 Haunted is a novel made of stories but also a novel about stories, or the tradition of telling stories, particularly those meant to evoke terror and shock, as well as related pleasures. Twentythree tales by writers trapped within the “retreat”, a cavernous, decrepit theatre turned prison, flesh out the frame narrative whose key takes the form of the said “nightmare box”, mysterious device / artwork allowing a glimpse into the indescribable (or “the real reality”, 222). The readers, too, are allowed a look into the nightmare box that the setting of the novel turns into as its inhabitants, observed and filmed by a Mr Whittier, the owner of the original device and the mastermind behind the plot, turn to murder, cannibalism and selfmutilation for the purpose of enhancing the effect that the story of their survival will have upon its (and their) release. Highly self-reflexive and morbidly ironic, Haunted is, thus, both an addition to and a commentary on the canon of works that capitalize on haunted spaces and minds, fragmented bodies and the illusory nature of the lived reality.
Weik von Mossner, Alexa, University of Klagenfurt, Austria: “Troubling Futures: Cli-Fi and the Perception of Risk”
My contribution will examine Cli-Fi in American literature and film through the lens of risk theory (Beck) and through psychological approaches to the perception of risk (Slovic, Leiserowitz). It will also include non-fiction formats in its deliberations in order to explore the importance of fictionality in our engagement with climate change fiction. The cognitive film theorist Dirk Eitzen has argued that the most significant difference between fiction and nonfiction is the way we feel about it, and so an important question that comes up with regard to Cli-Fi is how indexing a narrative as fiction inflects our perceptions of climate risk.
Welizarowicz, Grzegorz, University of Gdańsk, Poland: “Camino Real Roadside Markers: Articulations of White Spatial Imaginary”
In the paper, I analyze the symbolic, epistemic and ethical implications of the “White Spatial Imaginary” (Lipsitz) encoded in the effects of the recent restoration programs of the California Camino Real roadside mission bell markers. Implemented by Caltrans through two federal Transportation Enhancement grants (2000, 2010) which accompanied the federal “California Mission Preservation Act” (2004), the two phases of the program (first between Los Angeles and San Francisco, the other between San Francisco and Sonoma), were completed in, respectively, 2005 and 2012 and resulted in the erection or renewal of almost 600 total number of new markers along the main state routes (freeways 101, 82, and local streets). The original route of 450 miles was extended to 700. Every one to two miles tall, metal, Franciscan staffs with replicas of mission bells and a plate reading “El Camino Real,” stand in a historio-graphic gesture representative of the rituals of public memory and the hegemonic epistemic imaginaries enacted in the United States public spaces. In order to read this “landscape of (White) memory” I bring a decolonial consciousness and, drawing from Roland Barthes, note the autho-ethnography of the encounter. Two recent developments provide the opening for this discussion. The first is Vatican’s announcement in early May 2015 of plans to canonize Junipero Serra during Pope Francis September visit to Washington D.C. The other is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s report released on June 02, 2015 which concludes that the country’s policy toward its Native populations amounted to “cultural genocide.” The Pope’s announcement has rekindled the old controversy over the legacy of the founder of the Spanish California Missions. For many, Serra’s sainthood means the crowning moment of a more-than-acentury long fight for the founding Padre Presidente’s recognition as a missionary who, in the words of the current Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez, “came to this New World with a burning love for the land and its people. [Who] ... should be remembered as one of the great pioneers of human rights in the Americas.” Plans to make Serra the first Hispanic U.S. saint are also seen as a gesture that is key to strengthening Catholic Church’s ties with U.S. Latinos. On the other hand, there are those who, relying on a great body of research spanning from the seminal studies of Sherburne F. Cook’s The Conflict between California Indian and White Civilization (1940) or Carey McWilliam’s North From Mexico (1949) to James A. Sandos’ Converting California (2007) and other more recent publications, point to the role of the missions as colonial institutions which were instrumental in the destruction of many California Indian communities and peoples. The imminent canonization constitutes for them yet another, and gruesome, instance of white over brown, a culmination of a sustained effort to whitewash the negative or uneasy truths about the missions and their legacy. In this context, the Canadian report on the country’s policy of forcibly placing indigenous children at residential Christian schools points to a continuous need to openly address the historical and present injustices committed against indigenous populations by exploring national guilt and bringing occluded histories to the foreground for the purpose of restoring the balance in the relationship between the aboriginal and nonaboriginal people. It stands as an important example of how to seek reconciliation and public ritual cleansing of collective memory in the Americas. However it also reflects back or, better, casts a shadow on Serra’s legacy whose practice of removing Native children to the missions is well documented. The last time the controversy over Serra erupted was in the lead-up to Pope John Paul II’s Serra’s beatification, the second of the three steps toward sainthood, at Mission Carmel in September 1988. The movement of opposition spawned many studies in the field including Rupert and Janette H. Costo’s Missions in California: A Legacy of Genocide (1987). Although it may seem that the case of Serra’s sainthood has lain dormant since then only to resurface in 2015 I argue that the legacy of Serra’s project as evidenced by the sprawl of the Camino Real marker has continued to exert a profound influence on the collective memory and self-image of California and the United States. Charles Fletcher Lummis famously proclaimed that along California’s climate the missions were the state’s greatest assets. I argue that the missions; reinvigorated intervention into the visual field primarily, but not exclusively, through the Mission Bell marker restoration addressed major American anxieties of the post-millennial era and provided what, with the benefit of hindsight, looks like a build-up for canonization. After introducing a short history of the marker (dating back to 1906), placing it in the context of the late nineteenth-century boosters capitalization on “everything mission” (mission novels, plays, architecture, paintings, furniture), arguing that today the materiality of the missions is inseparable from their imaginary double, what McWilliams terms the “fantasy heritage,” and placing it in the context of the post-modern California space (Anthony Giddens says: “The old city-countryside relation is replaced by a sprawling expansion of a manufactured or created environment”) I analyze the cognitive effect of the markers which, at freeway speed, become a continuous, if not subliminal, feature of one’s vision. The markers endow both wild and tamed spaces they “guard” or mediate to the motorist viewer through the frame of the windshield with a set of aesthetic or semiotic, historical, epistemic, spatial and temporal implications. What is occluded and what is made visible in the presence of the marker and their infinite repetition? Drawing from George Lipsitz I propose to read the Camino Real marker through and against the model of “White Spatial Imaginary.” I argue that these are highly charged sites and sights of expression and repression of white American pastoral dreams and deep-seated insecurities. Drawing from the discourse of landscape representation, cinematic, and syneasthetic imagination (hearing the inaudible bell), the study points to the continuity of the anxiety of difference and of the threat of the Other expressed in California public spaces. The restoration of the markers, paralleled by the increased efforts at border insularity and militarization, expresses and represses turn-of-the century Clinton- and Bush-sponsored renewal of American exceptionalism. I interpret the Camino Real restoration programs as an attempt to disavow the conflicts both in California history and in the world at large today by involving drivers in a visual practice of assimilating (by visual pollution) into their imaginaries the vivid evidence of territorial colonialism (after Donald Pease). W.J.T. Mitchell tells us that the nineteenth-century landscape painting sought harmony as compensation for Western imperial violence. We can interpret the markers as the real landscape picture frames screening off the actual violence perpetrated there. For a decolonial subject trained in deconstructing the voids and silences of the Western locus of enunciation the pastoral scenes the markers stand for mix cinematically with the images of surveillance state, of border security, and of U.S. foreign military interventions – the markers become the figuration of the border fence and of a film strip, of material reality of a scar of the border and of a Hollywood simulacrum fantasy. The markers become public space instruments of “social forgetting” (Irwin-Zarecka) but also sights which trigger oppositional consciousness. The study is situated within the fields of borderlands and border studies, public space studies, as well as, cognitive decoloniality.