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

De Lucia, Francesca, Zhejiang Normal University, Jinhua, China: “‘Let the fires rage’: Filming post-September 11th New York in Spike Lee’s The Twenty-Fifth Hour”
As pointed out by Marc Redfield, the attacks on the Twin Towers of September 11 2001, mainly experienced through the filter of media representations, constitute “a spectacle, a famously, infuriating, cinematic spectacle” (2). New York is one of the most lavishly filmed cities, in ways that include idyllic representations visible in Woody Allen’s work as well as darker one like the teeming and violent immigrant world of The Godfather part II. Director Spike Lee is also known for his iconic portrayals of the city, in particular for his (still heartbreakingly actual) evocation of Brooklyn as a world charged with racial tensions, yet vibrant with life, in Do the Right Thing. His 2002 film The Twenty-Fifth Hour faces the difficult task of expressing the legacy of September 11th in cinematic terms, moving away from the “cinematic spectacle” of the actual attacks on the towers. The Twenty-Fifth Hour follows a convicted drug dealer, Monty Brogan, during his last day of freedom before serving a seven-year prison sentence against the background the scarred landscape of post-September 11th New York. Lee exploits much of the conventional filmic imagery of the city’s skyline, however emphasizing the empty space left by the towers, in particular in scenes set at night. Thus the collective sense of disarray caused by the attacks becomes a way to mirror the personal disruption in the characters’ lives. One of the film’s most vivid scenes shows Monty pronouncing an elaborate, almost dantean series of curses against New Yorkers of different social, ethnic and racial origins, which ends in the auspice that various natural cataclysms may hit the city, before turning to a self-malediction. Both Monty and New York itself become immersed in a climate of deep melancholy that forms the dominant mood of The Twenty-Fifth Hour.

Dean, John, University of Versailles, France: "Digital Preservation. The Present Erased: The Dangers of US Culture and Technology Values Embedded in Our Digitalized World”

The Internet is a global body with an American soul. Essential to its disposition and engineering – the abstraction and reality of this digital telecommunications medium -- is a perilously fragile force. Through this medium runs a fault line that potentially and adversely effects the future of all. Which may result in our current era understood as another Dark Ages in the future. This is due to an optimistic sense of the future, a faith in culture and technology, altogether characteristic of US civilization. As argued by Stewart and Bennett in American Cultural Patterns (1972; 1991), progress in its US sense is most frequently associated with technological control of the environment. The final arbiter of the good and desirable, the greatest good for the greatest number, lies in the potent blend of technological achievement and economic profit. Nowhere in the contemporary world is this common good more visible than in the digital economy, the culture and technology visions and realities of Silicon Valley. Yet what lurks here? The civilized world is focused today on ISIS’ destruction of the three thousand year old cultural patrimony of Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. Statues, cultural artifacts, and stone tablets which have provided memory and identity to hundreds of generations in the Mesopotamian region. A less recognized, but moresignificant, form of unintended iconoclasm sits under our own Western noses and threatens to erase our own cultural record, making it unrecoverable for future generations. By 2016 -- the 200th anniversary of the composition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein -- US-driven values have perpetuated the near universal practice of storing all records as digital data. By succumbing to the efficiency and convenience of electronic information storage we have virtually guaranteed that vast portions of our history will go blank. Our common, recorded memory of events and dreams, facts and fiction, shall evanesce. For example, if no hard copy of the King James edition of the Bible existed, we would not now have the Bible. Just try and recover your own digitally stored information of fifteen years ago; storage and retrieval devices have changed, subsequent generations of operating systems are incompatible. The information is to all intent and purpose -- GONE. The purpose of this parallel lecture is to explore this issue in American Studies and Transnational American Studies, to analyze the readings of the problem past and present as exhibited in a variety of artistic forms and scientific responses. Among outstanding works here are Kate Wilhelm, Where Late The Sweet Bird Sings (1974); Lois Lowry, The Giver (1993), Russell Banks, Lost Memory of Skin (2010); Robert Harris, The Fear Index (2011); a panoply of US dystopian literature; current film (notably The Social Network [2010] and Interstellar [2014]); music and graphic novels -- along with the complementary writings of US scientists, secular humanists and businessmen Bill Gates, the late Steve Jobs, Jaron Lanier (You are Not a Gadget [2010]), and pertinent critical articles from Scientific American.
Delgado Marín, Candela, University of Seville, Spain: “Southern Ecoliterature: A Silent Sensory Topography”
The devastating effects of the Civil War on the southern landscape, agrarian exploitation, the poverty caused by industrialization, and the drainage of natural resources (such as mountaintop removal mining or fracking) provide historical and social explanations for the scarce ecocritical approach to southern literature. The flora and fauna of the South have long been mythified and idealized, but nature has not only been a means to express nostalgia and romance; it has equally been an epistemological and political concern. In my paper I will argue that southern ecoliterary texts present three distinctive characteristics: firstly, that natural beauty encompasses the grotesque; secondly, that the partly tamed landscape of farms and gardens can suffice as a setting for the contemplation of wilderness; and thirdly, that a sense of communion with nature can overcome writers and their characters in stillness. I will present close readings of four southern writers for whom quietness is a way to navigate physical and emotional topographies: two Mississippi writers, William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, and two contemporary Kentucky writers, Wendell Berry and Bobbie Ann Mason.
Delikonstantinidou, Aikaterini, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece: “Caridad Svich’s Raving Iphigenia: A Mythical Celebrity”
The convoluted myth of the House of Atreus has been broadly employed and modified by both ancient and contemporary dramatists who expand on the myth’s family tensions in ways that often reveal larger political and social issues. One of the most famous Greek legends structuring and surrounding the myth of the royal House of Atreus involves Iphigenia’s sacrifice by her father Agamemnon. Caridad Svich’s plunging into the world of Iphigenia’s myth with her multimedia play Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (A Rave Fable) (2004) is consistent with the playwright’s persistence in engaging with the past and its ancient forms and traditions in order to learn from them and (re)discover new ways of seeing a mestizo/a world through them. Drawing mainly from Euripides’ Iphigeneia in Aulis, Svich attempts to reclaim the myth of the House of Atreus for her own generation and sociocultural frame, while also giving the story a decidedly feminist sensibility. In Iphigenia Crash, Svich reshapes the well-known Iphigenia myth—recasting Iphigenia herself as a mythical celebrity—aνδ recontextualizes it in a cracked-lens world of surveillant dreams, sacrificial bodies, and societies adrift in a global(ised) spectacle marketplace where everything, including murder, is for sale; a world, moreover, of cultural mestizaje that resonantly alludes to the borderland between the United States and Mexico. Svich has explained that the play evolved out of her attempt to dramatize the feminicides that have taken place in the Mexican border city of Juárez as well as counter their romanticization and spectacularization in the American media culture. In effect, Iphigenia Crash dramatically revises the mythical story of Iphigenia to shed light to and fight against widespread violence directed towards disadvantaged social groups, stigmatized and marginalized due to their gender, sexual orientation, and class position in ethnically marked contexts. Through Iphigenia’s recovery the playwright wishes to not only pay homage to the tragic myth’s never ending “presentness,” but also to recover Iphigenia, as a thinking, feeling, speaking subject and in so doing to “grant her rest.” Most importantly, though, she wishes to grant rest to all these ghost-girls whose death have not been claimed and who haunt twenty-first-century Latin American border landscapes.
Delliou, Elena, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece: “America in a Bed of Ancient Ruins: Charles Mee’s Iphigenia 2.0”
Constantly inspired by ancient myths and the works of the Greek tragic poets, which he considers “historical documents of who we are” that enable a critical connection between past and present, American playwright Charles Mee wrote Iphigenia 2.0 in 2007; the play that completed Imperial Dreams, his trilogy on the Trojan war and the plight of the Atreides. This presentation aims to analyze the mode and reason a modern American playwright chose to base his play on a woman’s mythic sacrifice and (re)make one of Euripides’ most famous plays, in order to speak for contemporary concerns. Famous for his collage aesthetic, Mee draws heavily on Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis, but borrows handily and openly from a variety of contemporary writers and sources. The ancient myth is interspersed with humorous textual references, Greek songs and traditional dances, and sensual, choreographic and contextual elements, with the playwright revising and reconstructing Euripides’ play to give it new relevance and enable it to reflect modern social, political, and aesthetic parameters. Mee’s soldiers—in present-day American military gear—transfer the carnage from Troy to Iraq or Afghanistan, and the fall of the House of Atreus is used by the American as a springboard to articulate his outrage at his country’s imperial designs. Moreover, leaning on one of the most famous mythic female figures, Iphigenia, the modern creator rages against war by presenting it as a manic obsession, making explicit the horrors, the madness and vanity of military conflict, and the sacrifices it demands, and openly criticizing military leaders. Stripping the story of any interference by the gods, the mythical tale also becomes one of human choices; Iphigenia embraces her martyrdom and Mee even gives her a feminist voice when she declares that the sacrifice was what she was born to do. However, the final scene of rape and hedonism between soldiers and bridesmaids—whether war or orgy—questions the validity of such a sacrifice.
Deutsch, James, Smithsonian Institution, USA: “Learning from Ploieşti: The Cultural Significance of Operation Tidal Wave’s Failure in World War II”
Most Americans today have little familiarity with Romanian history during World War II. Because no major land battles involving U.S. military personnel were fought there, Romania’s significance is often overlooked. However, this paper maintains that Romania’s role in World War II deserves much greater recognition in the United States due to Operation Tidal Wave, a costly failure engineered by the U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF) on 1 August 1943. One of the most ambitious aerial raids in U.S. history, Operation Tidal Wave dispatched 178 B-24 Liberators, with 1,750 crew members, to attack the oil refineries of Ploieşti roughly 60 kilometers north of Bucharest. The objective was to disable the massive oil production facilities that provided fuel for the Nazi Luftwaffe. On this one day of operation, however, the USAAF lost 54 aircraft, with 310 fatalities, 300 wounded, and more than 100 POWs. Only two refineries were destroyed, and (according to one estimate) the Ploieşti refineries were producing more oil just a few weeks after 1 August 1943 than they had been producing earlier. In lieu of describing the military history of Operation Tidal Wave, this paper will investigate the mission’s cultural significance through previously recorded interviews with U.S. veterans who participated in the operation. These interviews are part of the Veterans History Project collection at the Library of Congress and offer candid assessments of the mistakes made by USAAF commanders and some reasons why the mission’s failure was not shared widely with the U.S. public.
Dickerson, Nikolas, University of Lincoln, USA: “Ricky and Stick Icky: Marijuana, Sport, and the Queering of Black Masculinity”
In the 2014 Super Bowl the Denver Broncos took on the Seattle Seahawks. One of the more interesting side stories of this game was the fact that both of these teams hailed from states (Colorado & Washington) where marijuana is legal for adults 21 and older. Since this Super Bowl, Alaska, Oregon, and Washington DC have also legalized the recreational use of marijuana. Despite the legality of the recreational use of marijuana in states such as Colorado, Washington, and the District of Columbia where the National Football League (NFL) has pro franchises, the NFL still characterizes the plant as an illegal substance. Additionally despite the recent shifts in marijuana policy in the United States at both the medicinal and recreational level the plant still remains illegal at the federal level. Given the complex status of the marijuana plant in American culture this paper examines mediated narratives of one of the most famous NFL players to use marijuana, Ricky Williams, in order to gain a larger understanding of cultural narratives of marijuana use. In this paper I use newspaper coverage, a documentary, and a television interview to examine the cultural narratives constructed about Ricky Williams marijuana use. I draw on Mark Anthony Neal’s concept of “illegible black masculinity” to argue that a critical examination of these texts can work to challenge dominant conceptions of marijuana use, black masculinity, and understandings of mental health at a time where the United States is taking steps to reform marijuana policy.
Doncu, Roxana Elena, University of Medicine and Pharmacy “Carol Davila” Bucharest, Romania: “The Return of Form: Dana Gioia’s New Formalist Poetry”
Reacting against what he called “the bankrupt theory of perpetual avant-garde” the poet and critic Dana Gioia both advocated and wrote poetry which combined traditional forms and genres to generate a new aesthetic, based on a “generational change in poetic sensibility” (Matthew Brennan). What were the aims of this new formalism in American poetry and what are the uses of form in Dana Gioia’s poetry? The new objectivity that arose from this formalist approach to poetry, initially a reaction to what poets of Gioia’s generation perceived to be the excessive lyricism of the first person verse, served to make poetry more attractive for the readers, and thus give it wider scope. Unlike prose, poetry has few readers, and the excessive concentration on either stylistic innovation or first person lyricism does not help in creating an audience. Gioia’s new formalism, which managed to combine both elitist and democratic subjects, worked to enhance the appeal of poetry for a larger audience The revival of form in American literature becomes thus, in Gioia’s poetry, linked to the Homeric tradition of form as a structure that facilitates remembrance, yet less in the manner of the European elitist tradition, and more in the way of the all-embracing democracy of a poet like Walt Whitman.
Donn, Katharina, Augsburg University, Germany: “Trauma Literature Re-visited: Practices of Knowledge in Pynchon’s The Bleeding Edge”
The 9/11 attacks brought large-scale violence into the 21st century with force, and have come to epitomize the entanglement of terror and the media, pain and spectacle that is typical of the globalized present. In my paper, I will read trauma as an epistemological crisis, and propose that the relationship of trauma to the digitalization and virtuality of contemporary experiences of the real has developed into a driving imaginative force behind recent 9/11 fiction. Authors have departed from the haunting memory traces and melancholic Betroffenheit of the aftermath, and are taking the fiction of trauma in this wholly new, non-Freudian direction. In Thomas Pynchon’s 2013 novel The Bleeding Edge, the planes have turned sonic. Trauma here resists the wide-spread academic focus on memory, and manifests a pathology of knowledge itself. Set in the rhizomatic underbelly of virtual and urban space, Pynchon’s (anti-) detective protagonist develops innovative epistemological practices in order to navigate her warped reality. I suggest that paradoxically, it is the precariousness of human life that emerges through layers of code and networks of digital surveillance, as possibilities of recognition are engendered by affect and corporeality. In effect, Pynchon therefore experiments with a post-traumatic practice of knowledge as intuition. Not anti-, but post-rational, this also introduces a subtle, intersubjective ethics of empathy into this multi-dimensional reality.
Draga Alexandru, Maria-Sabina, University of Bucharest, Romania: “Post-Traumatic Friendship: Transnational Female Bonding in Domnica Rădulescu’s Novel Country of Red Azaleas”
This paper sets off from two observations. One is the that recent academic work has increasingly favored comparisons between American Studies as an interdisciplinary framework of thinking about our contemporary global transnational world and the still emerging field of postsocialist or postcommunist studies (see Rodica Mihăilă). The second observation, supported by feminist literature, is that female friendships, motherdaughter relationships and generally female bonding, as they reflect on the transmitted affective history of the group (be it ethnic, religious or otherwise) on the personal level epitomize inter-human bonding on a wider scale (see classics of feminism and trauma studies such as Elizabeth Abel 1981, Marianne Hirsch 1981 or Cathy Caruth 1996, but also Lauren Berlant 2008, Silvia Schultermandl 2009 and Ioana Luca 2011). When women share similar traumatic backgrounds, their capacity for empathy when it comes to the personal level of emotional experience is increased, making the processing and reparation of group trauma possible. I will argue that in Romanian American author Domnica Radulescu’s 2015 novel Country of Red Azaleas – about two women’s different stories of relocation to the USA at the time of and following the Yugoslav war – female bonding can be a redemptive version of critically damaged inter-ethnic relations. The author pleads for overcoming personal and collective trauma through friendship of a depth that transcends all boundaries, inhabiting a transnational world which could only have America as a model and location, but could only exist in the global environment of the new millennium.
Drobot, Irina-Ana, Technical University of Civil Engineering Bucharest, Romania: “Methods in American Studies to Investigate the American Dream in Literature”
The purpose of this paper is to study how the American Dream has changed over the years in literature. From the Great Gastby by Scott Fitzgerald to Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, we notice different ways of treating the theme of success the American Dream deals with. For the Great Gatsby, it was about wealth but also about personal fulfillment. The same is true about the heroes of the novels by Adichie and Diaz. However, the experience of acculturation plays a significant part in the latter two novels. Migration gains the foreground and influences how the American Dream is perceived. Sometimes it is perceived as light-heartedly, sometimes as more tragic in the difficulty to attain it. The dreaming part is the focus of the latter two novels, while the action part is the focus in The Great Gatsby. For Adichie and Diaz, the characters are caught in the process of dreaming. Watching them dream we feel they haven’t changed much and they have remained with the same dilemmas. Acculturation is brought into discussion as a way to show that we usually blame external circumstances for our inner problems which we ourselves can solve and that we usually hope for solutions from someone else and external sources. Yet happiness can only be found through our internal resources. History, literature, critical theory, history and other interdisciplinary fields associated with American Studies can shed light on the becoming of the American dream.
Drizou, Myrto, Valdosta State University, USA: “Phantasms of Excess: The Transatlantic Gothic of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country”

Panel speaker: Money, Wealth and Excess in American Literary Realism and Naturalism
Duclos-Orsello, Elizabeth, Salem State University, USA: “The Place of American Studies in Higher Education in the US and Globally: Examining a New Initiative of the ASA”

I have just been named Chair of a new Taskforce of the American Studies Association: The Task Force for American Studies in Higher Education in the United States and Globally. The goals of the Taskforce are listed below and what I am proposing is to host a discussion session with any/all interested parties/participants about the Taskforce, the needs of American Studies programs throughout Europe (and the world) and how the Taskforce might serve those needs. During the spring 2016 semester I will be a Fulbright Fellow at Socrates university of Thessaloniki, Greece, which makes it more possible than usual for me to attend the EAAS meeting and represent the ASA Taskforce in this manner. Goals of The Task Force for American Studies in Higher Education in the United States and Globally; 1) To highlight and leverage key aspects of current contemporary higher education and civil society/democracy landscapes/discourse in order to make case for centrality of American Studies in and for these sectors. 2) To articulate the organic intersections between American Studies scholarship, theory, praxis and pedagogy & the major emphases currently shaping higher education (funding, ranking, sustaining or ending programs) and civil society/democratic practice discourse in US, Europe and around the world. 3) To find ways to make explicit (for students, faculty, deans, trustees, governments) the central place of American Studies in these conversations and implementation; with possible particular focus on integrated learning/synthesis, intercultural competencies and links between academy and civil society/role of higher education in democratic societies, and the long history of American Studies in these areas/endeavors. 4) To develop materials, tools and metrics that will assist chairs, directors, coordinators, faculty garner support for sustaining and growing American Studies programs, majors/minors, centers, departments, concentrations, courses and/or to position articulate and demonstrate that American Studies (in all of its forms) is critically important to the success of higher education specifically and civil society generally. 5) To work with the ASA National Office to develop American Studies as its own Subject Area in the Tuning Project, and to identify funding opportunities such as the Tuning Project to develop American Studies.

Durán, Isabel, Complutense University of Madrid, Spain

Roundtable speaker: The Space of Communities - Representing U.S. Communities in Cinematic and TV Spaces