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

Chatzipapatheodoridis, Constantine, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki: “‘Elvis is my Daddy, Marilyn’s my Mother’: Lana Del Rey’s Camp Melodrama and the Mythopoiea of Hollywood Sadcore”
Currently one of the powerhouse names in pop music industry, American performer Lana Del Rey has picked the critics’ interest due to her eccentric, highly dramatic style. Born as Elizabeth Grant, the singer created her stage persona drawing influence from film noir actress Lana Turner and “her affinity for Spanish-sounding seaside towns.” Del Rey’s artistry is characterized as a mixture of retro music elements and scenes, referencing jazz, baroque pop, and 1950s/1960s Americana. The singer’s overindulgence in American iconicity, however, is what blatantly illustrates her audiovisual background. Whether, among others, she impersonates a contemporary Marilyn Monroe, or whether she quotes lines from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, Del Rey’s performative agenda is evidently marked with an almost exclusive commitment to American mythopoeia and culture. Contrary to other pop performers’ celebratory approach of Americanness, hers rather clings to a melancholic, even bleak homage to the nation’s icons, myths, and symbols. Considering her worldwide success, my paper will investigate how and why Lana Del Rey’s excessive nostalgia appeals to a global audience by proposing a cross-reading of camp sensibility and melodrama politics in her work. I will also address emerging questions behind the generic formation of sadcore, the singer’s Hollywood-esque stylization of it, in tandem with the exportation of the American Iconic: the transference of famous figures from the familiar and public register of the image to the iconic/mythical realm.
Chernetsova, Ekaterina, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia: “Visualization of America in Norman Mailer’s Works”
Norman Mailer was one of those American writers who visualized themselves as well as their works, and on the contrary novelized their country and reality. He revealed his publicity being a novelist, essayist, journalist, playwright, screenwriter, actor and even a film director. His unique feature is a correlation between the art of writing and the media. America is Mailer’s beloved subject. More over his America is an Individual. It is a lifelike image created with all its complexities by means of speculating on real facts and people. In this sense there is another interesting trait of Mailer’s work: through the whole life he coped with both fiction and nonfiction. In doing so the writer dramatized the best and the worst of American life by connecting the life of his characters to the life of the nation. And his characters are preeminently illustrious Americans, the symbols of this country. John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Lee Harvey Oswald are some of the most prominent people that represent America of the XX-th century, mostly its visual image. More over there are other multiple examples of Mailer’s ability to the visualization. In the 1960s Mailer was listed among the New Journalists, who applied the techniques of the novel to depict real events and people. We try to study Mailer’s combination of fiction and non-fiction, fact and document, visualization and novelization by studying his books: novels, essays, interviews. In this concern we suppose that visual image of a writer and his heroes may better reveal his work.
Chin, Curtis, New York University, USA

Film Screening: Tested: Diversity, Public Schools and Testing
Churchwell, Sarah, The School of Advanced Study, University of London, England: “Reframing The Great Gatsby: F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Newspaper Culture of 1922-1924”
This essay reframes The Great Gatsby within the context of cultural debate in the New York newspapers of 1922-1924, the papers that Scott Fitzgerald was reading, clipping, and saving in his scrapbooks. It will focus especially on the traces of an exchange between Fitzgerald and Burton Rascoe, literary editor of the New York Tribune, that reveals much about Fitzgerald’s ambitions for and anxieties about The Great Gatsby as he conceived, composed and published it.
Cid, Teresa, University of Lisbon, Portugal: “Brian Sousa’s Almost Gone and the Lingering Presence of Loss and Pain”
Brian Sousa’s first book, Almost Gone (2013), is advertised as “a novel in stories”. As with Faulkner’s Go Down Moses, for example, the book is made out of several independent, yet linked, stories of loss, grief and something more, spanning four generations of a Portuguese American immigrant family history where tragedy is never far off. It is the purpose of this paper to discuss this innovative sort of family saga and the author’s choice of a summative fragmentary narrative as a way of engaging the often disrupting condition of the immigrant in the USA, the many losses and hardships it entails, and the changes in culture and family it demands.
Ciobotaru, Alina, University of Bucharest, Romania: “Sex, Magic and Crime in Lyn Di Iorio’s Novel Outside the Bones (2011)”
In recent years, a number of books that deal with Afro-Carribean culture have been published and one of the latest is Lyn Di Iorio’s novel Outside the Bones. It features Fina, a Hispanic girl living in New York, who practices Palo Monte, an Afro-Caribbean religious system whose central ritual object is a cauldron containing the bones and spirit of a deceased person. The book is an amalgamation of supernatural events, sexually explicit scenes and a mysterious crime that had taken place in her homeland of Puerto Rico many years before. In this paper I set out to analyze the various ways in which Di Iorio’s novel deals with issues of displacement and erasure through the use of “moments of magical realism”, murder, violence, and depictions of various sexual acts. Although at the beginning of the novel Fina is a solitary woman who is obsessed with starting a romantic relationship with a Puerto Rican musician living in the same building, towards the end of the novel she finds herself empathizing with a community of women, exemplifying what Megan Musgrave called “magical activism”, a new mode for discussing class and gender issues.
Ciugureanu, Adina, Ovidius University, Constanţa, Romania: “‘The Picture out of Frame’: Henry James’s Use of ‘Realism’ in Fiction”

Panel speaker: Liaisons, Families, Texts: Henry James and the Fictionalization of Lives
Clark, Jennifer S., Fordham University, USA: “‘Mary Tyler Moore Can Sell Pantyhose, but How Can Mary Hartman Sell Anything?’: Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman as a Quality Soap Opera”
The question in this presentation’s title is one Barbara Ehrenreich posed in a 1976 issue of Socialist Revolution. While Ehrenreich’s high regard for the anti-capitalist ethos of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (syndicated, 1976-1977) is obvious, her comparison between Mary Tyler Moore and Mary Hartman gestures to a more-subtle complex of associations with genre, style, politics, and cultural valuation. The distinctions made between the keywords “quality” and “relevance” have long defined the critical conversation about 1970s American television and the production companies MTM and Tandem. In the foundational MTM: Quality Television, Jane Feuer identifies how MTM’s “quality” defined itself “against” Tandem’s “explicitly political themes.” More recently, Kirsten Marthe Lentz links “quality” and “relevance” to distinctive discourses about feminism and race, respectively. My presentation counters prevailing notions about politicized programming and quality television by placing Tandem’s Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman squarely within a tradition of quality. I consider the program, with a female protagonist and feminist principles at the center of its story world, a precursor to the current boom in quality television dramas about women. To do so, I explore cultural assumptions about the soap opera—the generic legacy Mary Hartman calls upon and satirizes—and its omission from considerations of quality. I also examine Mary Hartman’s production history and the feminist principles of writers and producers who worked on the show, their conceptions of the show as quality, their reclamation of soap operas from patriarchal dismissals, and the talent and labor it took to work successfully within the genre.

Ehrenreich, Barbara. “Mary Hartman: A World Out of Control.” Socialist Revolution (Oct.-Dec. 1976): 133-37. Print.

Feuer, Jane, “MTM Enterprises: An Overview.” MTM: Quality Television. Ed. Jane Feuer, Paul Kerr, and Tise Vahimagi. London: BFI, 1984. Print.

Lentz, Kirsten Marthe. “Quality versus Relevance: Feminism, Race, and the Politics of the Sign in 1970s Television.” Camera Obscura 15.1 (2000): 45-93. Print.

Clark, Thomas, University of Tübingen, Germany: “O Say, Can You Smell! - American Studies as Olfactory Studies”
The smoke of my own breath,

Echoes, ripples, and buzzed whispers.... loveroot, silkthread,

crotch and vine,

My respiration and inspiration.... the beating of my heart....

the passing of blood and air through my lungs,

The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore

and darkcolored sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn, [...]

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand.... nor

look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres

in books [...]

-Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
According to Freud, the primacy of sight over smell as humans began to stand erect marked the beginning of culture and repression, and smell in Western civilization no less than in academe has remained the marginalized sense associated with the rejected (yet desired) other, as well as with the incomprehensible yet palpable divine. Scent’s liminality between the material and the ephemeral/invisible, between culture and nature, between the sacred and animalic sexuality, offers multiple avenues for intellectual and sensory inquiry, as does its long history as an instrument of classification and ascription in discourses of race, gender, and migration, from odor di femina to Plessy vs. Ferguson. Topographies of smell represent socioeconomic and cultural practices as well as generating distinctions and identities, whether in the cooking and desodoration practices of migrant laborers in the neoliberal metropolis, or in its commodified olfactory regimes of ambient-scented malls suffused with aroma-molecules produced by a twenty-five billion dollar fragrance and flavor oligopoly spanning the globe. Smell, as practice and agency, smell, the non-cortical sense linked to emotions and memory, finally poses a challenge, as Walt Whitman already realized, to academic practice as purely cerebral act. If history smells, so must historians. In making the case for American Studies as olfactory studies, this lecture therefore cannot stop at discursivizing scent, but will introduce smell as object and activity into its performance, not just to illustrate arguments but to suggest an expanded practice of knowing which literally incorporates, i.e. embodies knowledge by virtue of sensory activity.
Clericuzio, Alessandro, University of Perugia, Italy: “From Pulp to Cult. A Case Study of Two Western Melodramas from the Page to the Screen”

Nicholas Ray’s most controversial western movie, Johnny Guitar is an adaptation of forgotten pulp writer Roy Chanslor’s 1954 eponymous novel. Most studies, though, only address the film as a text, neglecting the literary source. This paper aims at comparing the two texts, evidencing the transformation process - i.e. the screenwriting and the directing technique - that led to the highly visual version of this Western story, making such issues as gender and space absolutely prominent. These features allow a number of multiple readings including but not limited to: utopianism, gender-bending camp aesthetics, Freudian melodrama, and sagebrush Götterdämmerung.

Cobo Piñero, María Rocío, University of Cádiz, Spain: “Virtual Americas: Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s Transnational Americanah and the New Diasporas”
This paper takes Paul Giles’s concept of “virtual Americas” as a means to examine how Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s last novel Americanah (2013) constructs her notions of the United States through processes of dislocation and alterity, in continuous transition between prior categories and the experiences of the observer. Thus, the main character of the novel, a Nigerian woman who leaves her country in the 1990s in search for a university education in the US, had already imagined her utopian live in “Americah,” prompted by a mythic fiction projected in the cultural products she had consumed. Once in the US, Ifemelu perceives an unstable reality that she confronts with her former ideas and with the position of both American blacks and non- American blacks, like herself, in the virtual image of freedom and inclusion. Virtual practices are also apparent in the Internet blog Ifemelu writes, “Understanding America for the non-American black,” on her experiences as a racialized and gendered subject in the US. This blog discloses that the possibility of building a virtual community is highly limited by cultural restrictions. In a post/neo-colonial world, Adichie destabilizes fixed notions of race and gender, while highlighting the aftermaths of cultural and geographical borders in migrant subjectivities of the new transatlantic diasporas. In addition, the US-based writer imagines a transnational “Americanah,” an identity shaped by globalization and neoliberal consumer practices.
Cobain, Eve, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland: “Berryman’s Blues”
When asked about “the influence of blues and minstrel shows on The Dream Songs”, in an interview for the Harvard Advocate, the poet John Berryman responded: “Heavy. I have been interested in the language of the blues and Negro dialects all my life, always been” (1969, Plotz, 8). Taking its cue from Berryman, this paper explores the poet’s allusion to various blues artists, as well as blues notes from his archive, in order to express the full significance of this American tradition to his poetic project. With recourse to blues writers such as Ralph Ellison and Amiri Baraka I aim to show the ways in which the poet adopts the language of the blues – both thematically and formally – and his attempts to inhabit a blues subject position. Like most blues artists, I argue, Berryman exploits the tradition to express feelings of loneliness and oppression as well as concerns over money and alcoholism; it becomes a useful mode of expression for the poet, who wished to “keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in [his] aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it” (Ellison, Shadow and Act, 79). Yet if Berryman’s engagement with the blues was of a deeply personal nature, it was equally imbued with political intent. Finally, then, in considering the racial dimension of the blues work, I hope to demonstrate how its language allowed Berryman to inhabit what he regarded as a position of powerful alterity.
Colăcel, Onoriu, University of Suceava, Romania: “Romanians and Romania in the Memoirs of W.W. I American Diplomats and Servicemen”
In the aftermath of the Great War, the American take on Romania poses a challenge never actually faced by the Romanians themselves. Harry Hill Bandholtz (1919) and Stephen Bonsal (1920) spelled out their comprehension of the Romanian kingdom and the mainstream Romanian self-identification still struggles with similar concerns even today. When it comes to literary and media representation of Romania in the US, the Romanians read their ethnotype in a way that, essentially, meets American expectations. They belong to what originally was a borderland, post-secession East-European country, oriental and somewhat exotic, and, as of late, to a post-communist society and to a staunch pro-American NATO nation. At the time of World War I, the memoirs of American diplomats and servicemen feature the victorious Romanians – whose country was soon to be conquered by Soviet Russia at the end of the next world war – as yet another new European nation, Balkanized and antagonistic to its neighbours. Although Romanian identity is otherized in unflattering terms, I find that the outlook of the American elite on the country, and particularly on its citizens, has had lasting effects on the Romanian self-identification patterns ever since.
Cologne-Brookes, Gavin, Bath Spa University, UK: “After Springsteen: A Meditation on Pragmatism and the Uses of Art”
Drawing on the pragmatist ideas of William James and Richard Rorty, and David Joselit’s arguments in After Art, this paper considers the twenty-first century impact of Bruce Springsteen. Shifting emphasis from interpretation to availability, I explore the effect of the music as experienced in different times and places. Walter Benjamin in the 1930s thought that the aura of live experience was the only authentic experience, but as Joselit notes Benjamin’s argument can’t “account for the revolutions in image production and circulation initiated by media like television, the Internet, and mobile phones.” Rather, nowadays, we can talk of the buzz that the proliferation of ideas, images and music can produce. Given contemporary speed of access, Springsteen’s music can reach us almost anywhere, any time. “Small acts” when “taken individually” “may have no intention,” writes Joselit, but buzz indicates “a threshold at which coherence emerges.” Joselit’s ideas echo James’s sense that pragmatism is “anti-foundational.” Rather than there being an authentic, authoritative starting point (Rorty writes of “the contingency of starting points”), Springsteen’s music reaches us in myriad ways. Music has always been able to galvanize, aid reflection, or shift mood, but has become an ever-more important, ever-available currency. The exchange values Springsteen offers include such pragmatist tendencies as idealism, meliorism and social commitment. Therefore, his belief in the power and use of art to enhance lives, and the presence and profile of his music in the midst of society, makes him heir to the American pragmatists of earlier eras.
Coroban, Costel, Valahia University of Târgovişte; Ovidius University, Constanţa, Romania: “The Emergence of Nordic Studies in the USA in the 19th Century and Early 20th Century”
Nordic studies consist of the study of the languages, history and culture of Nordic, or Scandinavian, Europe. This includes Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and, by extension, Iceland and Finland. Par excellence, the study of Old Norse is, of course, included, sometimes as part of English departments given the importance of this ancient language for the evolution of the language. At the beginning of the nineteenth century little of the Nordic languages were taught in the U.S. universities. The aim of this paper is to trace the development of Scandinavian studies in the universities across the U.S.A. during the nineteenth century and early twentieth century using qualitative and quantitative methods, with focus on Norwegian and Old Norse language and culture courses. The activity of pioneers such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) – who underwent a study sojourn to Scandinavia on behalf of Harvard University Library to collect Nordic literature and various Nordic texts – or of institutions such as the University of Wisconsin, the first to offer such courses (where Rasmus B. Anderson taught Scandinavian languages from 1869 to 1884), will be taken into account in order to provide a complete image of the evolution of this field of study in institutions of higher education in the U.S.
Cox, Linda R., Executive Director, Bronx River Alliance and Bronx River Administrator, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation: “Reclaiming the Bronx River: A Story of Community and Collaboration”
Key-note address 3
The Bronx, a borough of New York City, is legendary as an icon of urban devastation and neglect. Yet a movement to reclaim the Bronx River (the borough's namesake), seeded in the 1970's and re-ignited at the turn of the 21st century, has succeeded in recapturing the river as a community asset, a green haven of nature, and a stimulus for environmental justice and innovation. We will trace the effort to reclaim the river from 1999 to the present by an alliance of non-governmental organizations, government, businesses and other institutions. Each sector brings something to the table. Community-based organizations root the work in local concerns and hands-on persistence. Government brings resources and capacity for implementation. Businesses bring resources too, as well as the prospect of long-term economic benefit. Other institutions bring visibility, technical expertise and opportunities to build knowledge. Success has come from an insistence on remaining intensely local in focus, and yet tapping into examples, expertise and resources from outside the community. 
Cruz Alves Junior, Alexandre Guilherme, Federal University of Amapá, Brazil: “America’s Freedom on Trial”
This work aims to discuss the judicial debate between the pastor Jerry Falwell and the ponographic editor Larry Flynt about the First Amendment limits. The case, in the 1980s, suggests that the concept of free speech in the United States moved different conceptions of freedom over time, making it an interesting object of study to understand the foundations of its democracy, as well as the Supreme COurt function in mediating these conflicts.
Čupić, Simona, University of Belgrade, Serbia: “Kerouac, Mona Lisa & Camelot: Jacqueline Kennedy as the New Image of Politics 1960-1963”
In “Kerouac, Mona Lisa & Camelot: Jacqueline Kennedy as the New Image of Politics 1960-1963” Simona Čupić (Belgrade) examines Jacques Lowe’s photographs of Jacqueline Kennedy wearing her ‘good luck coat’ by Hubert De Givenchy and sitting in the private airplane as she reads The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac while herself “on the road” during the 1960 presidential election campaign. She will point out Jackie Kennedy’s role in cultural politics—from the very beginning to the creation of the Camelot myth—and why that photograph is emblematic for the differences, debates, questionings, ideals, changes, and dualities which would come to mark the 1960s in American art and society.
Currell, Sue, University of Sussex, UK: “‘Capitalism Sterilizes’: Communism and Eugenics in America in the 1930s”
What was the attitude towards eugenic sterilization in America from the communist left and the cpusa at the height of mass sterilizations? How did slum clearance and eugenics intersect? The paper will offer some answers to these questions through the examination of a wide variety of cultural forms such as newspapers, magazines, stories and plays to map a left-wing response to eugenics in America during the Great Depression: in particular it will examine the writing of left-wing writers sympathetic to the CPUSA at the time. The paper will look at the shifting engagement with eugenics within the left and how it was (or was not) possible to be both a communist/socialist and a eugenicist in America in the 1930s.
Cvek, Sven, University of Zagreb, Croatia: “Americanism, Fordism, Socialism: a View from the Periphery”
This talk is about the arrival of Fordism, as a peculiarly American socio-economic model, to Europe. As Antonio Gramsci’s classic Americanism and Fordism (1934) shows, this arrival was viewed by European socialists with an ambivalence that ascribed to Americanism a socially progressive potential. In order to reflect on the appropriation of Fordism for socialism, I will focus on the history of the Bata shoe factory near Vukovar, Croatia, to this day the most complete instance of Fordist planning in former Yugoslavia. My aim will be to delineate continuities between the corporate capitalist model that brought, along with Tomaš Bata’s “brutal business style of the modern American kind,” as a commentator put it, the shock of modernization to Yugoslavia in the early 1930s, and the patterns of socialist modernization that followed after the revolution of 1945. Pivotal among these continuities is the central place of labor within these social formations (albeit central in different ways). My focus will be cultural, meaning that my account of Fordism will privilege its social or cultural aspects, and view it as a mode of “societalization.” Taking into account the current transnational turn in American Studies, and relying on the recent work of Stipe Grgas as well as original archival research, I will situate the social and historical developments on the European periphery within the context of the global reach of US economic models and priorities.