EUROPEAN ASSOCIATION FOR AMERICAN STUDIES
Biennial Conference Dublin, Ireland, March 26-29, 2010
Forever Young? The Changing Images of America
“The youth of America is their oldest tradition; it has been going on now for three hundred years.”
Oscar Wilde
Among the first explorers of America, many avowedly went looking for the fountain of youth. Whether or not this was the goal of all, America always represented the idea of a fresh start in pre-colonial and colonial days, and the history of American immigration up to our times testifies to the power of this image. But the image of America entertained by the population of the United States on the one hand and by non-Americans on the other has also been in a state of constant vacillation. Conflicting images and conceptions have in turn taken hold of imaginations, structured political arguments and determined reactions to positions or attitudes adopted by the United States. From an object of desire and yearning to one of diffidence, fear or hostility, from being seen as a benevolent power to being rejected for its unilateralism, the United States has in turn behaved and/or been perceived as liberator, oppressor, a haven or an evil empire, generous or selfish, conservative or constantly innovative. Does it still make sense to think of the United States as the ‘forever young’ country of the new, in Seymour Martin Lipset’s terms, ‘the First New Nation’? How does one account for the varying perceptions of America, temporally and spatially or culturally. How does literature affect the image of America? How do the arts? How does history? How does the desire to establish an American tradition, a permanent hunger for ‘the new thing’ and the recent recourse to permanent reinterpretation cohabitate? Is it because America is or no longer feels or looks ‘young’ that disaffection has set in? Or is the loss of “that lovin’ feelin’” a temporary moment in the evolution of America’s image? Are the various images of America, within and without, a hindrance to its actual evolution? This conference invites an examination, from all angles and in all periods, of the way images of America (based on reality, prejudice or fancy) impact its self-perception and its perception abroad.
WORKSHOP THEMES
Both workshop members and chairs should consult the Guidelines for Workshops (below). For further specifications of workshop themes, workshop contributors should contact the respective chairs.
Deadlines:
October 15, 2009: Workshop paper proposals (with 150-200 word abstract) to be sent to Workshop Chairs by those proposing individual papers. October 30, 2009: Deadline for sending the tentative list of speakers and titles of workshop papers to be included in the October 2009 issue of ASE. December 1, 2009: Deadline for submitting final titles of papers and names and addresses of speakers to the conference organizers. January 10, 2010: Deadline for information to be included in the 2010 biennial conference program.
Please send all information via e-mail to the EAAS Secretary General, Jenel Virden, at virden@eaas.eu.
“The youth of America is their oldest tradition; it has been going on now for three hundred years”
– Oscar Wilde
Workshop Guidelines
1. A workshop may be chaired by one person, or, preferably, by two persons from different countries. No one may (co-)chair a workshop at two consecutive EAAS conferences.
2. Workshop sessions are 2:00 hours.
3. Speakers are selected by the workshop chairs from those colleagues responding to the Call for Papers published in the ASE Newsletter of July 2009. The required number of speakers per session is four, the maximum number is eight (two sessions).
Note: Of the speakers in any workshop, not more than two may come from the same country. Speakers must be members of their national Association for American Studies if there exists one in their home country. Speakers from Canada, Israel, Japan, and the USA must be members of their respective American Studies Associations. No speaker can present
more than one paper at the conference.
4. Papers should be presented rather than read; chairs are encouraged to suggest this to their contributors.
5. The maximum presentation time for papers is 20 minutes; chairs must keep their speakers within that time frame. The overall structure of the workshop is the responsibility of chairs; chairs MUST comply with these rules in order to: 1) allot each paper the same amount of time; 2) allow sufficient time for discussion.
6. Proposals for workshop papers, together with abstracts (150-200 words) must reach the workshop chair(s) by October 15, 2009. Chairs are expected to send out acknowledgments of receipt of proposals and to inform proposers as early as possible whether their papers have been accepted.
7. Chairs are encouraged to send out photocopies or electronic versions of abstracts/papers to all speakers in their workshop prior to the conference.
8. Workshop chairs should briefly introduce the topic and the speakers at the beginning of the first session. At the end of the last session, chairs might want to sum up the conclusions of the presentations and discussions.
9. Speakers must present their papers in person; they are expected to be present at all sessions of their workshop.
Pro Memoria: Guidelines for EAAS Workshops
10. Chairs are responsible for selecting and editing TWO of their workshop presentations and recommending them, in order of preference, for publication in the EAAS conference volume. Chairs are also encouraged to produce individual volumes based on their workshop papers. Please note, though, that in compliance with a unanimous decision of the EAAS Board at the 1998 Lisbon conference, EAAS subsidies for such volumes are NO longer available.
11. Chairs will be asked to present a post-conference report to be published in the ASE Newsletter; it may therefore be useful to take notes during the sessions. The report of approximately 200-250 words should give readers of the ASE an idea of the major arguments of papers and of conclusions reached in the workshop.
12. If special technical equipment (data projection devices, screens, audio equipment, computers,
OHPs) is needed in a workshop, please inform the EAAS Secretary General (address below), who will consult with local organizers.
13. Please address all correspondence concerning workshop matters to the EAAS Secretary General in the first instance (address below). Please acknowledge all correspondence from the Secretary General.
14. Workshop chairs should make copies of these Guidelines available to their speakers.
15. A meeting of all workshop chairs with the EAAS Secretary General will be scheduled on the first afternoon of the conference to discuss last-minute arrangements.
Dr Jenel Virden
EAAS Secretary General
American Studies Department
University of Hull
Hull HU6 7RX
UNITED KINGDOM
Phone: +44 1482 465287
Fax: +44 1482 466107
E-mail: virden@eaas.eu
WORKSHOP OUTLINES
Workshop 1
“The Past is Dead – Long Live the Past!” – Changing Images of the South
Chairs:
Susan Castillo, King’s College London, London, UK
E-Mail: susan.castillo@kcl.ac.uk
John Andreas Fuchs, Katholische Universität Eichstätt-
Ingolstadt, Eichstätt, Germany
E-Mail: andreas.fuchs@ku-eichstaett.de
“The Future becomes the present, the present becomes the past, and the past turns into everlasting regret if you don’t plan for it” (Amanda Wingfield, The Glass Menagerie). Next to Scarlett O’Hara, Amanda is one of the best known literary personifications of the Southern Belle. Although Southern Belles may fade, they still seem to be forever young – or at least they dream of eternal youth. According to current stereotypes, Southerners appear to be obsessed with living in the past and with re-living the past. This is demonstrated not only in Southern literature but also in the popularity of Civil War re-enactments and lively discussions about the use of Confederate symbols. Does re-living the past and clinging to traditions imply that the Old South stays “forever young”? We invite papers that focus on:
Literary representations of change in the South and in Southerners;
Depictions of Southernness in visual arts, popular culture and Southern music;
Changing images of the Southern past as represented in museums, theme parks, historiography and Civil War re-enactments.
The changing faces of Southern cities either due to modernization (Atlanta) or catastrophes (New Orleans) and the changes in Southern demographics and social structures.
Submissions should be sent to Susan Castillo and John Andreas Fuchs.
Workshop 2
American Sport/American Athletes: Changing Images and Changing Perceptions in the 20th Century
Chair:
Olaf Stieglitz, University of Cologne, Germany
E-mail: olaf.stieglitz@uni-koeln.de
Sports affect the image and perception of the USA. Since the founding of the Union, its elites linked ideas of youth and the nation’s progress with notions of exercise, fitness and physical strength. This discourse grew increasingly powerful after 1880 and became an important element in a modern United Sates characterized by social hierarchies conceptualized along structural categories linked to human bodies, like race, gender, or age. Moreover, the development of modern sport was closely connected to other trends as well: At international sports events like the Olympic Games, athletes from all over the world (“the youth of the world”) met and were watched by ever growing audiences; media coverage increased with every new technology available; and athletes became part of global commercialized entertainment especially connected to ‘youthful’ life styles and fashions. This workshop calls for contributions that examine changing and ambivalent images created by American sport and American athletes during the 20th century. It invites papers dealing with any aspect of the history of this topic, including – but not limited to – questions of how individual athletes were regarded as representing America (or rather not), how ideas of youth were articulated or contested through physical exercise, how sport served in constructing (or deconstructing) ideas about gender, race, age or health.
Workshop 3
The US as a Cultural Fountain of Youth? American and Foreign Intellectuals’ Vision of US Culture in the 20th Century
Chairs:
Anne Ollivier-Mellios, University of Paris 13, France
E-mail: anne.mellios@wanadoo.fr
Marco Mariano, University of Vercelli (Eastern Piedmont),
Italy
E-mail: marco.mariano@unipmn.it
From 1913, when the Armory Show opened in New York and shocked a great many visitors to the present day, intellectuals have widely shaped and commented on the image of American culture; whether the US was hailed as a nation which, unlike Europe, was free from the weight of past traditions and old culture (see Romain Rolland’s editorial in the first issue of The Seven Arts in 1916), portrayed as a threat by Georges Duhamel or Arnaud Dandieu in the 1930s, or admired by Jean Paul Sartre, who helped convey a new (and positive) image of American films and jazz in the 1950s, foreign intellectuals have often offered a changing image of American culture and influenced public opinions both in Europe and in the US American intellectuals, from Van Wyck Brooks to Gore Vidal (including such various figures as Walter Lippmann, John Dos Passos, Ray Bradbury, to name just a few of them) have also conveyed changing images of US culture. This workshop will focus on the way the European and American visions sometimes overlapped, and on the way American intellectuals’ vision could influence foreign intellectuals’ perception of American culture and intellectual life. The chairs will also encourage presentations dealing with the impact of the two World Wars (and the Vietnam War) on the intellectuals’ perception of the US and its culture, or with the interaction between politics and culture i.e. the way some artists and intellectuals’ vision of culture was shaped by their political ideas and commitment, especially during the 1930s and the 1960s.
Workshop 4
Beginning America and the World: Walt Whitman
Chairs:
Sascha Pöhlmann, Ludwig-Maximilians-University
Munich, Germany
E-mail: poehlmann@lmu.de
Krystyna Mazur, University of Warsaw, Poland
E-mail: kmazur@uw.edu.pl
This workshop invites papers that discuss the question of the changing images of America with regard to the poet whose work has had, and continues to have, an unparalleled literary significance for how images of America are produced and perceived: Walt Whitman.
While he contributed greatly to the imaginative construction of America as a perpetual utopia, he also insistently maintained or carefully revised his imagination of America whenever the political situation differed from his vision of democracy. Contributors are encouraged to address the manifold issues arising from the complex relation of Whitman and his contemporaries to America as a paradox place of constant renewal, for example: How much did his images of America contribute to our view of it as “Still the New World” (Philip Fisher)? How significant is the effect of Whitman’s literary imagination of America, regarding both its reception in the US as well as in other cultures (in translation)? How significant is his imagination of globality? Does Whitman resolve the paradox between establishing an American poetic tradition and keeping poetry in tune with the perpetually new? How does Whitman’s poetic project compare to the imagemaking of his contemporary writers?
Workshop 5
The Undead and Forever Young: Ghosts, Zombies and the Unburied Corpse of Race
Chairs:
Justin D. Edwards, University of Wales, Bangor, UK
E-mail: els404@bangor.ac.uk
Agnieszka M. Soltysik, University of Lausanne,
Switzerland
E-mail: agnieszka.soltysikmonnet@unil.ch
This panel will explore ways in which the gothic genre stays forever young in America by constantly reinventing itself. Specifically, it will focus on the latest incarnation of the American Gothic as a political genre profoundly involved with the history and trauma of minority cultures in America (African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans and other victims of American domestic and foreign policies). In this guise, the gothic figures of the ghost, the undead, or the zombie function not as sensational entertainment (or at least, not only as such) but as metaphors for injustice, revenge or cultural memory. African American writers have proven particularly gifted in adapting the rhetorical figures of the gothic genre to their particular political and cultural needs. The panel organizers invite proposals for presentations that deal with this po16 litical or ethical dimension of the gothic in American (and Caribbean, anglophone) literature or film or other forms of representation.
Please send proposals of no more than 300 words to agnieszka.soltysikmonnet@ unil.ch and els404@bangor.ac.uk.
Workshop 6
Wars and New Beginnings in American History
Chairs:
Rob Kroes, Universities of Amsterdam and Utrecht,
The Netherlands
E-mail: R.Kroes@uva.nl
Jean Kempf, University of Lyon 2, France
E-mail: jean.kempf@univ-lyon2.fr
A new birth of freedom. These words spoken by Abraham Lincoln on a Civil War battlefield capture what this workshop intends to explore. Repeatedly, wars have been seen as offering new beginnings, requiring a new start, promising rejuvenation. At the time of World War I, Randolph Bourne advocated American non-intervention, seeing it as America’s chance to cut the umbilical cord with its English mother culture; as a chance finally for America to come into its own as a “transnational culture.” If war in this case was seen as offering a promise of American cultural emancipation from European tutelage, almost a century later leading European public intellectuals, such as Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, saw the Europe-wide protest against the American-led invasion of Iraq as the harbinger of a truly European public finding its voice; a new birth of European freedom. Clearly, in the transatlantic relationship, times of war may exacerbate the quest for a collective identity through “othering” - strategies that cast either America or Europeans oppressive and overbearing. On other occasions, as in the years following World War II, war brought the two sides of the Atlantic together in a shared sense of having to “start from scratch,” as artist Bartlett Newman put it, of erasing the past and making a tabula rasa. From the arts to the world of politics, renewal and reconstruction were the key words in those years, with America prominently weighing in as a force for renewal. This workshop sets out to explore the various ways in which wars have inspired moods in both Europe and the U.S. that led to a language of renewal, rejuvenation or even a fresh start. It also intends to explore the various configurations of America and Europe as adversarial parties divided by the Atlantic, or partners joined together by it.
Workshop 7
Perpetuating Youth in American Film
Chairs:
Penny Starfield, University of Paris 7 Denis Diderot, France
E-mail: starfield@univ-paris-diderot.fr
Marimar Azcona, University of Zaragoza, Spain
E-mail: marimarazcona@gmail.com
In the post-war era, the cinema sought to capitalise on the emerging teenage culture and teenage films and other films dealing with adolescence soon appeared. Filmic representations of youth have become multiple and diverse, from their first explosion in the fifties, to the “generation gap” films of the American New Wave in the late sixties, through the “gross-out” comedies and teen horror films of the late seventies, to the various generic configurations of the teenpic since the mid-1990s. This panel seeks to explore the variety in the representation of youth in US cinema. Possible issues to be tackled include the presence of youth in mainstream and independent cinema, generic configurations of adolescence, rebellion and conformism in the relationship with the status quo, contrasts and links between youth and old age, youth and innocence and/or the American Dream, youth as an agency of renewal, youth in “retro” nostalgia films, coming-of-age versus the older generation’s quest for perpetual youth, the idealisation of youth through Hollywood glamour and the star system, the performance of youth, ethnic and gender differences, and the importance of teenage spectatorship. Prospective panellists are welcome to propose other approaches to the topic from formal, historical, cultural or ideological perspectives.
Workshop 8
Regeneration, Rejuvenation, Rebirth and the American West
Chair:
Dean Rader, University of San Francisco, USA
Email: rader@usfca.edu
The American West has always been more than a geographical reality, and certainly not a fixed entity, but first and foremost a historical variable. Talking about the West requires geographical, historical and psychological qualifications of a seemingly innocuous designation. The American West is a metaphor fusing cognition with emotion, a product of the imagination rather than 17 empirical fact, an image expressing collective desires, a myth which transcends geography. The psychological West is as real as all the geographical and social frontiers of the “real West” have ever been. How and to which effect do writers and artists enact tropes of youth or rebirth in their work? What about notions that the West might be ageing or even degenerating? What are the implications for the American myth of the West and its regenerative influence (F. J. Turner)? What role do topoi such as progress and individualism play in contexts of the West and youth (culture)? This workshop continues the exploration of the American West in (recent) fiction, poetry, and visual culture and invites papers which approach the West through topics such as youth, regeneration and rebirth, race and ethnicity, and cultures and borders.
Workshop 9
The Kid: Changing Images of American Childhood
Chair:
Alex Runchman, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Email: runchmaa@tcd.ie
Children in American Literature have always tended to have a rough, self-sufficient edge. In early presentations of such children, epitomised by Huck Finn, such worldliness is often offset by an affecting innocence and even – as in The Scarlet Letter – the promise of redemption for the sins of parents. Since the early twentieth century, however, children have more commonly been presented as complex, sometimes troubled characters, and more recently outright disaffection has become a dominant characteristic. This workshop invites contributions to a discussion of how American childhood, as presented in literature, lost its innocence. Contributors might wish to consider how the fates of American children are inextricably entwined with – and often symbolic of – the fate of a nation that is still, at less than 250 years old, comparatively youthful. In order to focus a potentially overwhelming subject, papers should chiefly address literary texts in the period 1914 to 1975, dates suggested by the start of the First World War and the end of the Vietnam War, between which, to borrow lines from Ezra Pound’s ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,’ ‘Young blood and high blood’ became increasingly subject to ‘disillusions as never told in the old days.’
Workshop 10
Lobbying and American Democracy: Undue Influence or Dynamic Participatory Democracy?
Chair:
Salah Oueslati, University of Poitiers, France
E-mail: salah.oueslati@univ-poitiers.fr
Throughout its history lobbying has been recognized as a legitimate activity in the United States. But, as James Madison clearly understood, there is a potential for corruption and conflict of interest inherent in protecting the rights of groups to petition the government.
His classic statement in The Federalist (n°10) defended the need for a strong federal government to act as an effective counterbalance to the influence of what he called “faction.” However, this pessimistic vision of the role of “factions” was not shared by everyone. In
contrast to Madison’s position, De Tocqueville viewed the development of groups in the young American republic as an inspiration, specifically the positive impact and public-minded spirit of many associations. Since Madison’s and De Tocqueville observations, commentators have continued to note the vitality and growth of the group system, but they have also continued to be divided on the role they play in the decision making process. The paradox inherent in the group system, at once a route for popular representation and a threat
to good government, has indeed shaped the image of American democracy and the American democratic system. Whether it inspires rejection or admiration, the US group system has left few observers indifferent. On one side those who believe, like Charles Peters, editor-in-chief of The Washington Monthly, that “America is no longer a nation. It is a committee of lobbies”; and on the other side, those who consider the US group system with its constant change, innovation and evolution as a source of positive inspiration and a sign of renewal and rejuvenation of a young and dynamic participatory democracy. This workshop invites an examination of the way the group system has shaped the image of American democracy
and its perception in the US and abroad. We welcome papers incorporating the perspectives of different fields of social sciences: political science, sociology, civilization, history …
Workshop 11
Remembering the New Nation: Changing Images of 19th-Century America in Literature, Culture, and the Arts
Chairs:
Maria Holmgren Troy, University of Karlstad, Sweden
E-mail: maria.holmgren.troy@kau.se
Carmen Birkle, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany
E-mail: birkle@staff.uni-marburg.de
In the wake of the nation’s political independence, an interest in cultural as well as national identity developed. Throughout the 19th century, artists and writers from the US and abroad produced what could be called an American cultural memory, helping their own and later generations to remember the new nation together with its earlier colonial beginnings. With the need for stability and the simultaneous perpetuation of a rebellious spirit, the newly independent nation had to deal with crucial issues such as slavery, Native Americans, gender roles, immigration, and diseases and health issues. In attempts at coming to terms with these issues, movements and wars subverted any stabilizing impulses and caused ruptures that would demand a rethinking of the directions into which the young nation was moving. Therefore, our workshop proposes to read calls for newness as calls for remembering the idealistic beginnings of the young nation and for using critical and affirmative voices to shape the future. This workshop welcomes contributions dealing with literature, culture, and the arts from the19th to the 21st centuries.
Workshop 12
“Hell No, We Won’t Grow!: Innocence and Responsibility in U.S. War Literature
Chairs:
Cristina Alsina Rísquez, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain
E-mail: alsina@ub.edu
Cynthia Stretch, Southern Connecticut State University,
New Haven, CT, United States
E-mail: stretchc1@southernct.edu
Images abound of the United States as a country that, in its nearly compulsive youthfulness, enters successive armed conflicts buoyed by an inflated sense of its own perpetual innocence. American war literature – from William Bradford’s descriptions of the Pequot War to blog-posts out of Falluja – suggests a more complicated relationship between the reveries of national innocence and the trials of experience. This panel asks participants to analyze representations of those historical moments in which the tension between the images of America as blameless youth or as criminal establishment is felt most forcefully. We will be interested in representations of American youth at war as they explore the dynamics of responsibility and denial. As a crucial component of the conversation, we also invite papers that focus on representations of war protestors who paradoxically embody the possibility and hope inherent in their youth as well as a collective rejection of innocence as a national delusion.
Please send abstracts to Dr. Cristina Alsina Rísquez (alsina@ub.edu) or Dr. Cynthia Stretch (stretchc1@southernct.edu).
Workshop 13
Representational and Literary Futures: American Writing in the New Millennium
Chairs:
Arthur Redding, York University in Toronto, Canada
E-mail: aredding@yorku.ca
Tatiani Rapatzikou, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki,
Greece
E-mail: trapatz@enl.auth.gr
Coming close to the end of the first decade of the 21st century, it is crucial to examine the trends and sociocultural forces that are shaping American fiction nowadays, leading to a contemporary crisis of literacy in the wake of new media and digital technologies, to the impending collapse of global capitalism in the world financial crisis as well as to the waning of American influence in the abortive project of geographical or environmental imperialism. However, the surprising recent presidential election and inauguration of Barack Obama has been met with optimism as if America had turned a page, symbolically moving into a new era. In stressing a multiplicity of perspectives and viewing American fiction in the context of current cultural concerns and awakenings in a global scale, this workshop will seek to examine what comes next for American writing. Some of the topics that this workshop will attempt to address among others are environmental and political ethics, post-9/11 narrative realism, material production vis-à-vis digital textuality, subjectivity, the future of popular culture, consumer capitalism and cultural production in the 21st century and the like.
Workshop 14
“Oh, very young”: Music and Youth in 20th-Century America
Chairs:
Clare Hayes-Brady, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
E-mail: Cbrady5@tcd.ie
Johannah Duffy, University of Nottingham, England, UK
E-mail: Johannah.Duffy@nottingham.ac.uk
From the contrast between the nursery-rhyme bounce of swing and the seductive pulse of jazz, to the arch naïveté of Katy Perry, youth, maturity and the rocky passage between the two has always been a focus for American music. This panel invites papers that investigate representations of youth and age in American music. It is hoped that the panel will draw responses from musicologists and popular culture theorists, sociologists, linguists and literary theorists. Speakers could investigate, among other things, shifting attitudes to adulthood and sex, the impact of politics and social change on music and vice versa, poetry in music, music in poetry and other literary forms, identification with particular musical styles according to age, and the rapidly shifting locus of “cool.” How has music changed, and how has it changed its audiences? Where does the future lie for American music when America is urged to “put away childish things,” as it was by President Obama? If it is no longer enough for America to say with Tom Waits “I don’t wanna grow up,” then where next for the American Songbook?
Abstracts of 250 words should be sent to either chair.
Workshop 15
Old Stories, Young Perspectives: Contemporary Chicano Voices
Chairs:
Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo, University of the Basque Country, Spain
E-mail: amaia.ibarraran@ehu.es
Francisca Sánchez Ortiz, University of Aberdeen, UK
E-mail: spn070@abdn.ac.uk
Nearly a decade after the beginning of the 21st century, the political changes underway in the US signify, for many, the outset of a new era which is contributing to the resurgence of its perception as a free, young country on the move, where opportunities are available to all, and particularly to those who were considered “peripheral” in the past, such as the Chicano community and others. Looking back in time, the significance of the Movimiento Chicano, and the resulting literary and artistic movement that favored the process of social liberation and the redefinition of the public image of the group, is unquestionable and its achievements are still perceivable today. However, regardless of these new, “better” times, more subtle ways of discrimination are emerging which often affect the young. High rates of teen pregnancy, a lack of educational resources and an increasingly violent gang culture are some of the problems that young Chicanos are facing now. The aim of this workshop is to analyze the way this new reality is portrayed by contemporary Chicano writers and artists. Papers that discuss the rejuvenation of Chicano artistic and literary production through
new forms of literature and popular culture are also welcome.
Workshop 16
Queer Youth(s)
Chairs:
Roman Trušník, Tomas Bata University in Zlín, Czech Republic
Email: trusnik@fhs.utb.cz
Tomasz Basiuk, University of Warsaw, Poland
Email: tbasiuk@uw.edu.pl
A celebratory focus on youth seems especially pronounced in queer contexts, and while the United States is hardly exceptional in this regard, its queer culture may be a privileged site for calling such aesthetic and sexual ideals into question and for displacing them, whether through popular representations or in theoretical descriptions of LGBTQ persons and groups. As lesbian and gay liberation advanced in years, its activists and its beneficiaries were being ever more publicly confronted with the realities of reaching middle age and becoming old, prompting revisions of, or tensions within, the social and political ideals embraced by their own younger selves. Meanwhile, a very significant part of the gay male population was experiencing premature deaths and bodily deterioration due to AIDS. In another way, gay marriage and registered unions, as well as child rearing by lesbian and gay couples, have impacted individual and communal temporalities of many queer lives, re-emphasizing youth in an entirely new sense, and re-stating the terms of the familiar stand-off between assimilation and confrontation. We are seeking contributions that would illuminate a range of perspectives on queer youth(s) in the American context, be they theoretical, retrospective, hopeful, or disillusioned. Contributions may be illustrated by fictional as well as non-fictional narratives, images in popular culture, and other representations of queer experience.
Workshop 17
Positioning the New: Chinese American Literature and the Changing Image of the American Literary “Canon”
Chairs:
Elisabetta Marino, University of Rome Tor Vergata
Rome, Italy
Email: marino@lettere.uniroma2.it
Tanfer Emin Tunc, Hacettepe University
Ankara, Turkey
Email: tanfer.emin@gmail.com
The reception of Chinese American literature by American critics and readers has undergone numerous changes since the marginalization of the first Chinese American writers. Today, Chinese American authors such as Ruthanne Lum McCunn and Amy Tan earn the praise of both scholars and the lay public alike and collectively, their work has played an important role in transforming the image of the United States. As a recently published collection of essays edited by Harold Bloom entitled Amy Tan (2009) conveys, writers of Chinese origin are reshaping the American literary arena, and in the process are conveying the power that can emerge from cultural hybridity and multiculturalism. Their works are also regenerating and rejuvenating the image of America, rendering it in a constant state of flux. This perpetual process of reinvention, however, has problematized the American literary canon, prompting scholars to ask if one can actually exist in a nation that is continually redefining itself – and remaining “forever young” – by prioritizing inventiveness and innovation over tradition and convention. This workshop seeks to explore the past, present and future position of Chinese American authors within the framework of what Bloom identified as the “Western literary canon.” Is Chinese American literature inside or outside the “canon”? If it is included in the canon, what are the social, political and cultural implications of this inclusion? In other words, how does its inclusion impact the evolving identity of the United States? Workshop chairs encourage the submission of proposals focusing on Chinese American literature (especially novels, poetry and plays) and literary criticism dealing with the “canon.”
Workshop 18
Rhetorical Constructions of Youth from the American Revolution to the Civil War
Chairs:
Andrew S. Gross, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
E-mail: asgross@zedat.fu-berlin.de
Marek Paryz, University of Warsaw, Poland
E-mail: m.a.paryz@uw.edu.pl
This workshop will explore the rhetorical constructions of youth and their ideological functions across a range of literary and non-literary discourses from the American Revolution to the Civil War. Antebellum figurations of youth were instrumental in shaping the discourse of the nation, developing a national mythology, and ingraining nationalist sentiments in the Early Republic. The figure of the Young American became a major ideological construct in the expansionist era. Youth was considered synonymous with power, potential, ambition, energy, expansiveness. It had a touch of the divine and the innocent; therefore it strengthened the sense of exceptionalism. It harmonized with the tropes of rebirth, emergence, and new beginning; these tropes were often invoked in literature and politics, facilitating reconsiderations of the concept of history and political articulations of America’s place in history. At the same time, the trope of youth concealed America’s troubled relation to its own past, including the multiple cultural, political, and economic links to the Old World and to European colonialism and the slave trade; and the long history of indigenous habitation and warfare, erased by the very concept of the New World. Transatlantic cultural relations constitute a significant context for the analysis of American representations of youth, which often project European antecedence as old age or irrelevance to mask indebtedness and belatedness. Another important context is the continuing concern with the legacy of the American Revolution as manifested in those literary and non-literary writings that gave specific shape to notions of descent and memory. Last but not least, it is worth considering how concepts of generational conflict were used to represent class, ethnic, and regional tensions within the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Workshop 19
From Bully Pulpit to Blackberry: Technological Change, Generational Change and Presidential Leadership
Chairs:
Subarno Chattarji, University of Swansea, UK
Email: s.chattarji@swansea.ac.uk
Eric J. Sandeen, University of Wyoming, USA
E-mail: Esandeen@uwyo.edu
Barack Obama’s campaign was marked by its use of the internet and social networking tools to create a significant pool of support and funding. This workshop examines the relationship between political leadership, generational change, and technological innovation in terms of media developments. Is it possible to trace trajectories that inform the relationship between Theodore Roosevelt and the press, John F. Kennedy and TV, and Obama and the internet? Are Franklin D. Roosevelt (mid-50s when elected) and radio and Bill Clinton (baby boomer) with no real use of new technology outside this paradigm? In what ways does Presidential preference for a particular medium – radio or You Tube – reflect on him, the messages conveyed, and larger cultural and technological contexts? How have Presidential campaigns and governance been shaped by technological determinants? How are ideas of democracy shaped and reformulated by the interface between different kinds of media and Presidents in their particular media eras? Crucially, how have Presidents employed media to reinvigorate the idea of America? Papers are invited to focus on the nexus between media technologies, political change and leadership styles that impact on the imagining of America as a nation continually rewriting the past to move to a promised future.
Workshop 20
Young Adam and Old Eve: Changing Images of American Culture
Chair:
Aagje Swinnen, University of Maastricht, The Netherlands
E-mail: a.swinnen@maastrichtuniversity.nl
The American cultural narrative of personal identity has been formative of the study of American literature. Since the mid 1970s, the female hero has supplemented the prototypical American male protagonist with his quest for self as a rebel against societal pressure. Feminist literary criticism reclaimed the female hero of traditional literature and reinterpreted her in the light of feminist analysis. When Susan Koppelman Cornillon wrote in one of the first feminist contributions to academic literary scholarship – Images of Women in Fiction (1972) – that “people are beginning to see literature in a new perspective,” this can be also said of literary scholarship taking place at the beginning of the 21st century in the field of age and aging studies. Feminist literary scholarship in the late 1970s turned from analyzing female characters in male texts according to male experience, to female experience and perspective. In 1978, Nina Baym criticized American literary scholarship for having a bias in favor of things male: whaling ships rather than sewing circles as a symbol of the human community. Baym speaks of literary critics as “displaying an exquisite compassion for the crises of the adolescent male, but altogether impatient with the parallel crises of the female.” Whereas the second wave of feminism in the 1970s and 1980s emphasized issues associated with the earlier years in life, with “the graying of American feminism” it is no longer adolescence but old and middle age that has become of concern to feminists, and age has been introduced as a social and cultural marker. In the 1981 study of The Female Hero in American and British Literature, the main emphasis of the investigation is on youth. As if anticipating the shift of focus in later years, the two feminist critics of this study, Pearson and Pope, at one point in the text acknowledge the possibility of age as a decisive factor of the heroic: “In many cases, women begin new lives in old age.” Female aging can thus be read as a paradigm of American culture in contrast to the conventional perception as young and male. Aging – in contrast to stereotypical notions – does not bring a loss of identity, but emphasizes difference instead of communality, and expresses individualism more prominently than in youth. In addition, aging as a continuum questions the definition of identity as such: What is essential and what is changeable in oneself? In American culture, identity is discussed as both the possibilities as well as the limitations of the individual within social boundaries, which leads to the necessity of narrating the search of the self within a social context as an expression of this identity. The old woman (“American Eve”) can be seen as having replaced the image of the young man (“American Adam”) as an icon of American culture. Leslie Fiedler stated that American literature was determined by the myth of a mostly young “hero” who, in order to find truth and meaning, confronts himself in the conflict with the forces of nature. In contrast, this workshop will look at old female protagonists representing the particular intellectual disputes, departures and crises of American culture. The special perspective of women, determined by race, class, gender, and age, allows us to draw conclusions about the general connections relating to the history of ideas in American culture and offers a new approach to American Studies. Welcome
contributions are those that explore the importance - for group as well as personal identity - of memory and narration in the context of gender, race, class, and age, and the way age identity is constructed in literature and society to define American culture and society.
Workshop 21
Different Images of the American Presidency Abroad
Chair:
Antonia Sagredo, National University of Distance
Learning, Madrid, Spain
E-mail: asagredo@flog.uned.es
This workshop aims at examining different kinds of images of the American presidency which have circulated all over the world in the last centuries. Different communities and ethnic groups and their social and cultural inheritance formed the American historical background. All these factors constitute the melting pot which is usually applied to describe American social plurality. This workshop invites an examination, from all angles and in all aspects, of the way images of American presidency (based on reality, prejudice or fancy) impact its self-perception and its perception abroad, especially in the different European countries. We welcome paper proposals in relation to the roles that any of the different social, political, economical and cultural aspects that pertain to the American presidency. These papers will be focusing on the development of American historical interpretations in Europe, and on publishing patterns and policies, in order to discover which themes have predominated and the images of the North American presidency that have been projected in the different European nations, and the factors that have contributed to introduce some changes in the presidential image. The workshop will create the opportunity for a dialogue among scholars in American Studies, approaching the United States’ presidency from a variety of perspectives.
Workshop 22
The American Youth Culture Story in Fiction & Film
Chairs:
John Dean, University of Versailles, France
E-mail: jdeureka@yahoo.com
Gigliola Nocera, University of Catania, Ragusa, Italy
E-mail: noceragi@unict.it
This workshop will focus on the key comparative questions: How has the story of America’s young been conditioned by the way it has been told in US fiction and film? What has been the significant interface between American literature & cinema when relating the life stories and key events characteristic of American youth? Among pertinent issues and debates could be: How and why has US literature been adapted to US film when the intention has been to bring to a point the problems confronting American youth? How important has the written word been for youth culture cinema? How have movies, in turn, effected the common understanding of America’s young within US civilization? A vast legion of US youth culture movies and literature exist as data base; notably with the case of traditional American youth culture classics from colonial times through the mid 20th Century and with contemporary best sellers adapted to the screen. Where and what is the literary component between media? How has US youth culture literature and the American bildungsroman become cinematic? Why exactly have certain US youth culture classics never been translated into cinematic form (one notable case: Catcher in the Rye; or told successfully)? What happens to the art of literature in a movie script, screenplay, and film dialogue? Essential to this topic are fundamental theoretical issues of form, genre, intermediality, and adaptation.
In short, we invite members of the European Association of American Studies to consider an embarrassment of riches for research and analysis.
Workshop 23
Remediating The Beats – Visual, Auditory, and Interarts Legacies
Chairs:
Bent Sørensen, Aalborg University, Denmark
E-mail: i12bent@hum.aau.dk
Erik Mortensen, Koc University, Turkey
E-mail: emortenson@ku.edu.tr
Interarts and intermedial approaches have been severely underrepresented in academic work on the Beat Generation. This workshop proposes to examine visual treatments of the Beats and their literature, as well as other remediations of the Beat legacy – in film, art and music. Remediations and interarts treatments of Beat material contribute vitally to ensuring that Beat literature stays “Forever Young” – as witnessed by the consistent interest in new Beat-related material across the New Media and in Beat events that feature a strong audio-visual dimension. From the inception of Beat literature, the link between music, photography, film and art has been explicitly built into it. We invite papers that examine interarts links in Beat literature from its very genesis, and potentially thematize comparatively whether Beat literature is in fact more saturated with multimedia potential than other contemporary American literary works. Papers are equally encouraged on recent films on Beat figures, their biography, cultural environment and their literary output. Likewise we welcome work on adaptations of Beat material into audio media: songs, instrumental compositions, spoken word etc. Finally, work on remediations of Beat material into various art products (painting, installation, video etc.) will be considered.
Workshop 24
The New Generation at 50: Commemorations and Representations of President John F. Kennedy and the American 1960s
Chairs:
John A. Kirk, Royal Holloway College, University of
London, England, UK
E-mail: j.kirk@rhul.ac.uk
Andreas Etges, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
E-mail: etges@jfki.fu-berlin.de
President John F. Kennedy declared his 1960 election “a celebration of freedom – symbolizing an end, as well as a beginning – signifying renewal, as well as change.” Kennedy’s assassination one-thousand days later cemented an idea of a president who was “forever young.” Kennedy’s presidency, and the American 1960s more broadly, has become entwined with the concept of American youth and innocence in popular memory, not just in the United States, but in Europe and around the world. This workshop will address how Kennedy, his presidency, and the American 1960s, has been commemorated and represented in a domestic, transatlantic and global context. What do such representations and commemorations tell us about America’s ongoing project of rebirth and renewal? How and why have such commemorations and representations changed over time? Are there parallels with other American icons and historical eras and the ways in which they have been commemorated and represented? How have perceptions of such pasts differed in the United States, in Europe and around the world? The workshop encourages inter- and multi-disciplinary papers on the subject that could encompass history to literature, politics to film, and music to memorials, among other approaches.
Both workshop members and chairs should consult the Guidelines for Workshops (below). For further specifications of workshop themes, workshop contributors should contact the respective chairs.
Deadlines:
October 15, 2009: Workshop paper proposals (with 150-200 word abstract) to be sent to Workshop Chairs by those proposing individual papers. October 30, 2009: Deadline for sending the tentative list of speakers and titles of workshop papers to be included in the October 2009 issue of ASE. December 1, 2009: Deadline for submitting final titles of papers and names and addresses of speakers to the conference organizers. January 10, 2010: Deadline for information to be included in the 2010 biennial conference program.
Please send all information via e-mail to the EAAS Secretary General, Jenel Virden, at virden@eaas.eu.
“The youth of America is their oldest tradition; it has been going on now for three hundred years”
– Oscar Wilde
Workshop Guidelines
1. A workshop may be chaired by one person, or, preferably, by two persons from different countries. No one may (co-)chair a workshop at two consecutive EAAS conferences.
2. Workshop sessions are 2:00 hours.
3. Speakers are selected by the workshop chairs from those colleagues responding to the Call for Papers published in the ASE Newsletter of July 2009. The required number of speakers per session is four, the maximum number is eight (two sessions).
Note: Of the speakers in any workshop, not more than two may come from the same country. Speakers must be members of their national Association for American Studies if there exists one in their home country. Speakers from Canada, Israel, Japan, and the USA must be members of their respective American Studies Associations. No speaker can present
more than one paper at the conference.
4. Papers should be presented rather than read; chairs are encouraged to suggest this to their contributors.
5. The maximum presentation time for papers is 20 minutes; chairs must keep their speakers within that time frame. The overall structure of the workshop is the responsibility of chairs; chairs MUST comply with these rules in order to: 1) allot each paper the same amount of time; 2) allow sufficient time for discussion.
6. Proposals for workshop papers, together with abstracts (150-200 words) must reach the workshop chair(s) by October 15, 2009. Chairs are expected to send out acknowledgments of receipt of proposals and to inform proposers as early as possible whether their papers have been accepted.
7. Chairs are encouraged to send out photocopies or electronic versions of abstracts/papers to all speakers in their workshop prior to the conference.
8. Workshop chairs should briefly introduce the topic and the speakers at the beginning of the first session. At the end of the last session, chairs might want to sum up the conclusions of the presentations and discussions.
9. Speakers must present their papers in person; they are expected to be present at all sessions of their workshop.
Pro Memoria: Guidelines for EAAS Workshops
10. Chairs are responsible for selecting and editing TWO of their workshop presentations and recommending them, in order of preference, for publication in the EAAS conference volume. Chairs are also encouraged to produce individual volumes based on their workshop papers. Please note, though, that in compliance with a unanimous decision of the EAAS Board at the 1998 Lisbon conference, EAAS subsidies for such volumes are NO longer available.
11. Chairs will be asked to present a post-conference report to be published in the ASE Newsletter; it may therefore be useful to take notes during the sessions. The report of approximately 200-250 words should give readers of the ASE an idea of the major arguments of papers and of conclusions reached in the workshop.
12. If special technical equipment (data projection devices, screens, audio equipment, computers,
OHPs) is needed in a workshop, please inform the EAAS Secretary General (address below), who will consult with local organizers.
13. Please address all correspondence concerning workshop matters to the EAAS Secretary General in the first instance (address below). Please acknowledge all correspondence from the Secretary General.
14. Workshop chairs should make copies of these Guidelines available to their speakers.
15. A meeting of all workshop chairs with the EAAS Secretary General will be scheduled on the first afternoon of the conference to discuss last-minute arrangements.
Dr Jenel Virden
EAAS Secretary General
American Studies Department
University of Hull
Hull HU6 7RX
UNITED KINGDOM
Phone: +44 1482 465287
Fax: +44 1482 466107
E-mail: virden@eaas.eu
WORKSHOP OUTLINES
Workshop 1
“The Past is Dead – Long Live the Past!” – Changing Images of the South
Chairs:
Susan Castillo, King’s College London, London, UK
E-Mail: susan.castillo@kcl.ac.uk
John Andreas Fuchs, Katholische Universität Eichstätt-
Ingolstadt, Eichstätt, Germany
E-Mail: andreas.fuchs@ku-eichstaett.de
“The Future becomes the present, the present becomes the past, and the past turns into everlasting regret if you don’t plan for it” (Amanda Wingfield, The Glass Menagerie). Next to Scarlett O’Hara, Amanda is one of the best known literary personifications of the Southern Belle. Although Southern Belles may fade, they still seem to be forever young – or at least they dream of eternal youth. According to current stereotypes, Southerners appear to be obsessed with living in the past and with re-living the past. This is demonstrated not only in Southern literature but also in the popularity of Civil War re-enactments and lively discussions about the use of Confederate symbols. Does re-living the past and clinging to traditions imply that the Old South stays “forever young”? We invite papers that focus on:
Literary representations of change in the South and in Southerners;
Depictions of Southernness in visual arts, popular culture and Southern music;
Changing images of the Southern past as represented in museums, theme parks, historiography and Civil War re-enactments.
The changing faces of Southern cities either due to modernization (Atlanta) or catastrophes (New Orleans) and the changes in Southern demographics and social structures.
Submissions should be sent to Susan Castillo and John Andreas Fuchs.
Workshop 2
American Sport/American Athletes: Changing Images and Changing Perceptions in the 20th Century
Chair:
Olaf Stieglitz, University of Cologne, Germany
E-mail: olaf.stieglitz@uni-koeln.de
Sports affect the image and perception of the USA. Since the founding of the Union, its elites linked ideas of youth and the nation’s progress with notions of exercise, fitness and physical strength. This discourse grew increasingly powerful after 1880 and became an important element in a modern United Sates characterized by social hierarchies conceptualized along structural categories linked to human bodies, like race, gender, or age. Moreover, the development of modern sport was closely connected to other trends as well: At international sports events like the Olympic Games, athletes from all over the world (“the youth of the world”) met and were watched by ever growing audiences; media coverage increased with every new technology available; and athletes became part of global commercialized entertainment especially connected to ‘youthful’ life styles and fashions. This workshop calls for contributions that examine changing and ambivalent images created by American sport and American athletes during the 20th century. It invites papers dealing with any aspect of the history of this topic, including – but not limited to – questions of how individual athletes were regarded as representing America (or rather not), how ideas of youth were articulated or contested through physical exercise, how sport served in constructing (or deconstructing) ideas about gender, race, age or health.
Workshop 3
The US as a Cultural Fountain of Youth? American and Foreign Intellectuals’ Vision of US Culture in the 20th Century
Chairs:
Anne Ollivier-Mellios, University of Paris 13, France
E-mail: anne.mellios@wanadoo.fr
Marco Mariano, University of Vercelli (Eastern Piedmont),
Italy
E-mail: marco.mariano@unipmn.it
From 1913, when the Armory Show opened in New York and shocked a great many visitors to the present day, intellectuals have widely shaped and commented on the image of American culture; whether the US was hailed as a nation which, unlike Europe, was free from the weight of past traditions and old culture (see Romain Rolland’s editorial in the first issue of The Seven Arts in 1916), portrayed as a threat by Georges Duhamel or Arnaud Dandieu in the 1930s, or admired by Jean Paul Sartre, who helped convey a new (and positive) image of American films and jazz in the 1950s, foreign intellectuals have often offered a changing image of American culture and influenced public opinions both in Europe and in the US American intellectuals, from Van Wyck Brooks to Gore Vidal (including such various figures as Walter Lippmann, John Dos Passos, Ray Bradbury, to name just a few of them) have also conveyed changing images of US culture. This workshop will focus on the way the European and American visions sometimes overlapped, and on the way American intellectuals’ vision could influence foreign intellectuals’ perception of American culture and intellectual life. The chairs will also encourage presentations dealing with the impact of the two World Wars (and the Vietnam War) on the intellectuals’ perception of the US and its culture, or with the interaction between politics and culture i.e. the way some artists and intellectuals’ vision of culture was shaped by their political ideas and commitment, especially during the 1930s and the 1960s.
Workshop 4
Beginning America and the World: Walt Whitman
Chairs:
Sascha Pöhlmann, Ludwig-Maximilians-University
Munich, Germany
E-mail: poehlmann@lmu.de
Krystyna Mazur, University of Warsaw, Poland
E-mail: kmazur@uw.edu.pl
This workshop invites papers that discuss the question of the changing images of America with regard to the poet whose work has had, and continues to have, an unparalleled literary significance for how images of America are produced and perceived: Walt Whitman.
While he contributed greatly to the imaginative construction of America as a perpetual utopia, he also insistently maintained or carefully revised his imagination of America whenever the political situation differed from his vision of democracy. Contributors are encouraged to address the manifold issues arising from the complex relation of Whitman and his contemporaries to America as a paradox place of constant renewal, for example: How much did his images of America contribute to our view of it as “Still the New World” (Philip Fisher)? How significant is the effect of Whitman’s literary imagination of America, regarding both its reception in the US as well as in other cultures (in translation)? How significant is his imagination of globality? Does Whitman resolve the paradox between establishing an American poetic tradition and keeping poetry in tune with the perpetually new? How does Whitman’s poetic project compare to the imagemaking of his contemporary writers?
Workshop 5
The Undead and Forever Young: Ghosts, Zombies and the Unburied Corpse of Race
Chairs:
Justin D. Edwards, University of Wales, Bangor, UK
E-mail: els404@bangor.ac.uk
Agnieszka M. Soltysik, University of Lausanne,
Switzerland
E-mail: agnieszka.soltysikmonnet@unil.ch
This panel will explore ways in which the gothic genre stays forever young in America by constantly reinventing itself. Specifically, it will focus on the latest incarnation of the American Gothic as a political genre profoundly involved with the history and trauma of minority cultures in America (African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans and other victims of American domestic and foreign policies). In this guise, the gothic figures of the ghost, the undead, or the zombie function not as sensational entertainment (or at least, not only as such) but as metaphors for injustice, revenge or cultural memory. African American writers have proven particularly gifted in adapting the rhetorical figures of the gothic genre to their particular political and cultural needs. The panel organizers invite proposals for presentations that deal with this po16 litical or ethical dimension of the gothic in American (and Caribbean, anglophone) literature or film or other forms of representation.
Please send proposals of no more than 300 words to agnieszka.soltysikmonnet@ unil.ch and els404@bangor.ac.uk.
Workshop 6
Wars and New Beginnings in American History
Chairs:
Rob Kroes, Universities of Amsterdam and Utrecht,
The Netherlands
E-mail: R.Kroes@uva.nl
Jean Kempf, University of Lyon 2, France
E-mail: jean.kempf@univ-lyon2.fr
A new birth of freedom. These words spoken by Abraham Lincoln on a Civil War battlefield capture what this workshop intends to explore. Repeatedly, wars have been seen as offering new beginnings, requiring a new start, promising rejuvenation. At the time of World War I, Randolph Bourne advocated American non-intervention, seeing it as America’s chance to cut the umbilical cord with its English mother culture; as a chance finally for America to come into its own as a “transnational culture.” If war in this case was seen as offering a promise of American cultural emancipation from European tutelage, almost a century later leading European public intellectuals, such as Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, saw the Europe-wide protest against the American-led invasion of Iraq as the harbinger of a truly European public finding its voice; a new birth of European freedom. Clearly, in the transatlantic relationship, times of war may exacerbate the quest for a collective identity through “othering” - strategies that cast either America or Europeans oppressive and overbearing. On other occasions, as in the years following World War II, war brought the two sides of the Atlantic together in a shared sense of having to “start from scratch,” as artist Bartlett Newman put it, of erasing the past and making a tabula rasa. From the arts to the world of politics, renewal and reconstruction were the key words in those years, with America prominently weighing in as a force for renewal. This workshop sets out to explore the various ways in which wars have inspired moods in both Europe and the U.S. that led to a language of renewal, rejuvenation or even a fresh start. It also intends to explore the various configurations of America and Europe as adversarial parties divided by the Atlantic, or partners joined together by it.
Workshop 7
Perpetuating Youth in American Film
Chairs:
Penny Starfield, University of Paris 7 Denis Diderot, France
E-mail: starfield@univ-paris-diderot.fr
Marimar Azcona, University of Zaragoza, Spain
E-mail: marimarazcona@gmail.com
In the post-war era, the cinema sought to capitalise on the emerging teenage culture and teenage films and other films dealing with adolescence soon appeared. Filmic representations of youth have become multiple and diverse, from their first explosion in the fifties, to the “generation gap” films of the American New Wave in the late sixties, through the “gross-out” comedies and teen horror films of the late seventies, to the various generic configurations of the teenpic since the mid-1990s. This panel seeks to explore the variety in the representation of youth in US cinema. Possible issues to be tackled include the presence of youth in mainstream and independent cinema, generic configurations of adolescence, rebellion and conformism in the relationship with the status quo, contrasts and links between youth and old age, youth and innocence and/or the American Dream, youth as an agency of renewal, youth in “retro” nostalgia films, coming-of-age versus the older generation’s quest for perpetual youth, the idealisation of youth through Hollywood glamour and the star system, the performance of youth, ethnic and gender differences, and the importance of teenage spectatorship. Prospective panellists are welcome to propose other approaches to the topic from formal, historical, cultural or ideological perspectives.
Workshop 8
Regeneration, Rejuvenation, Rebirth and the American West
Chair:
Dean Rader, University of San Francisco, USA
Email: rader@usfca.edu
The American West has always been more than a geographical reality, and certainly not a fixed entity, but first and foremost a historical variable. Talking about the West requires geographical, historical and psychological qualifications of a seemingly innocuous designation. The American West is a metaphor fusing cognition with emotion, a product of the imagination rather than 17 empirical fact, an image expressing collective desires, a myth which transcends geography. The psychological West is as real as all the geographical and social frontiers of the “real West” have ever been. How and to which effect do writers and artists enact tropes of youth or rebirth in their work? What about notions that the West might be ageing or even degenerating? What are the implications for the American myth of the West and its regenerative influence (F. J. Turner)? What role do topoi such as progress and individualism play in contexts of the West and youth (culture)? This workshop continues the exploration of the American West in (recent) fiction, poetry, and visual culture and invites papers which approach the West through topics such as youth, regeneration and rebirth, race and ethnicity, and cultures and borders.
Workshop 9
The Kid: Changing Images of American Childhood
Chair:
Alex Runchman, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Email: runchmaa@tcd.ie
Children in American Literature have always tended to have a rough, self-sufficient edge. In early presentations of such children, epitomised by Huck Finn, such worldliness is often offset by an affecting innocence and even – as in The Scarlet Letter – the promise of redemption for the sins of parents. Since the early twentieth century, however, children have more commonly been presented as complex, sometimes troubled characters, and more recently outright disaffection has become a dominant characteristic. This workshop invites contributions to a discussion of how American childhood, as presented in literature, lost its innocence. Contributors might wish to consider how the fates of American children are inextricably entwined with – and often symbolic of – the fate of a nation that is still, at less than 250 years old, comparatively youthful. In order to focus a potentially overwhelming subject, papers should chiefly address literary texts in the period 1914 to 1975, dates suggested by the start of the First World War and the end of the Vietnam War, between which, to borrow lines from Ezra Pound’s ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,’ ‘Young blood and high blood’ became increasingly subject to ‘disillusions as never told in the old days.’
Workshop 10
Lobbying and American Democracy: Undue Influence or Dynamic Participatory Democracy?
Chair:
Salah Oueslati, University of Poitiers, France
E-mail: salah.oueslati@univ-poitiers.fr
Throughout its history lobbying has been recognized as a legitimate activity in the United States. But, as James Madison clearly understood, there is a potential for corruption and conflict of interest inherent in protecting the rights of groups to petition the government.
His classic statement in The Federalist (n°10) defended the need for a strong federal government to act as an effective counterbalance to the influence of what he called “faction.” However, this pessimistic vision of the role of “factions” was not shared by everyone. In
contrast to Madison’s position, De Tocqueville viewed the development of groups in the young American republic as an inspiration, specifically the positive impact and public-minded spirit of many associations. Since Madison’s and De Tocqueville observations, commentators have continued to note the vitality and growth of the group system, but they have also continued to be divided on the role they play in the decision making process. The paradox inherent in the group system, at once a route for popular representation and a threat
to good government, has indeed shaped the image of American democracy and the American democratic system. Whether it inspires rejection or admiration, the US group system has left few observers indifferent. On one side those who believe, like Charles Peters, editor-in-chief of The Washington Monthly, that “America is no longer a nation. It is a committee of lobbies”; and on the other side, those who consider the US group system with its constant change, innovation and evolution as a source of positive inspiration and a sign of renewal and rejuvenation of a young and dynamic participatory democracy. This workshop invites an examination of the way the group system has shaped the image of American democracy
and its perception in the US and abroad. We welcome papers incorporating the perspectives of different fields of social sciences: political science, sociology, civilization, history …
Workshop 11
Remembering the New Nation: Changing Images of 19th-Century America in Literature, Culture, and the Arts
Chairs:
Maria Holmgren Troy, University of Karlstad, Sweden
E-mail: maria.holmgren.troy@kau.se
Carmen Birkle, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany
E-mail: birkle@staff.uni-marburg.de
In the wake of the nation’s political independence, an interest in cultural as well as national identity developed. Throughout the 19th century, artists and writers from the US and abroad produced what could be called an American cultural memory, helping their own and later generations to remember the new nation together with its earlier colonial beginnings. With the need for stability and the simultaneous perpetuation of a rebellious spirit, the newly independent nation had to deal with crucial issues such as slavery, Native Americans, gender roles, immigration, and diseases and health issues. In attempts at coming to terms with these issues, movements and wars subverted any stabilizing impulses and caused ruptures that would demand a rethinking of the directions into which the young nation was moving. Therefore, our workshop proposes to read calls for newness as calls for remembering the idealistic beginnings of the young nation and for using critical and affirmative voices to shape the future. This workshop welcomes contributions dealing with literature, culture, and the arts from the19th to the 21st centuries.
Workshop 12
“Hell No, We Won’t Grow!: Innocence and Responsibility in U.S. War Literature
Chairs:
Cristina Alsina Rísquez, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain
E-mail: alsina@ub.edu
Cynthia Stretch, Southern Connecticut State University,
New Haven, CT, United States
E-mail: stretchc1@southernct.edu
Images abound of the United States as a country that, in its nearly compulsive youthfulness, enters successive armed conflicts buoyed by an inflated sense of its own perpetual innocence. American war literature – from William Bradford’s descriptions of the Pequot War to blog-posts out of Falluja – suggests a more complicated relationship between the reveries of national innocence and the trials of experience. This panel asks participants to analyze representations of those historical moments in which the tension between the images of America as blameless youth or as criminal establishment is felt most forcefully. We will be interested in representations of American youth at war as they explore the dynamics of responsibility and denial. As a crucial component of the conversation, we also invite papers that focus on representations of war protestors who paradoxically embody the possibility and hope inherent in their youth as well as a collective rejection of innocence as a national delusion.
Please send abstracts to Dr. Cristina Alsina Rísquez (alsina@ub.edu) or Dr. Cynthia Stretch (stretchc1@southernct.edu).
Workshop 13
Representational and Literary Futures: American Writing in the New Millennium
Chairs:
Arthur Redding, York University in Toronto, Canada
E-mail: aredding@yorku.ca
Tatiani Rapatzikou, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki,
Greece
E-mail: trapatz@enl.auth.gr
Coming close to the end of the first decade of the 21st century, it is crucial to examine the trends and sociocultural forces that are shaping American fiction nowadays, leading to a contemporary crisis of literacy in the wake of new media and digital technologies, to the impending collapse of global capitalism in the world financial crisis as well as to the waning of American influence in the abortive project of geographical or environmental imperialism. However, the surprising recent presidential election and inauguration of Barack Obama has been met with optimism as if America had turned a page, symbolically moving into a new era. In stressing a multiplicity of perspectives and viewing American fiction in the context of current cultural concerns and awakenings in a global scale, this workshop will seek to examine what comes next for American writing. Some of the topics that this workshop will attempt to address among others are environmental and political ethics, post-9/11 narrative realism, material production vis-à-vis digital textuality, subjectivity, the future of popular culture, consumer capitalism and cultural production in the 21st century and the like.
Workshop 14
“Oh, very young”: Music and Youth in 20th-Century America
Chairs:
Clare Hayes-Brady, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
E-mail: Cbrady5@tcd.ie
Johannah Duffy, University of Nottingham, England, UK
E-mail: Johannah.Duffy@nottingham.ac.uk
From the contrast between the nursery-rhyme bounce of swing and the seductive pulse of jazz, to the arch naïveté of Katy Perry, youth, maturity and the rocky passage between the two has always been a focus for American music. This panel invites papers that investigate representations of youth and age in American music. It is hoped that the panel will draw responses from musicologists and popular culture theorists, sociologists, linguists and literary theorists. Speakers could investigate, among other things, shifting attitudes to adulthood and sex, the impact of politics and social change on music and vice versa, poetry in music, music in poetry and other literary forms, identification with particular musical styles according to age, and the rapidly shifting locus of “cool.” How has music changed, and how has it changed its audiences? Where does the future lie for American music when America is urged to “put away childish things,” as it was by President Obama? If it is no longer enough for America to say with Tom Waits “I don’t wanna grow up,” then where next for the American Songbook?
Abstracts of 250 words should be sent to either chair.
Workshop 15
Old Stories, Young Perspectives: Contemporary Chicano Voices
Chairs:
Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo, University of the Basque Country, Spain
E-mail: amaia.ibarraran@ehu.es
Francisca Sánchez Ortiz, University of Aberdeen, UK
E-mail: spn070@abdn.ac.uk
Nearly a decade after the beginning of the 21st century, the political changes underway in the US signify, for many, the outset of a new era which is contributing to the resurgence of its perception as a free, young country on the move, where opportunities are available to all, and particularly to those who were considered “peripheral” in the past, such as the Chicano community and others. Looking back in time, the significance of the Movimiento Chicano, and the resulting literary and artistic movement that favored the process of social liberation and the redefinition of the public image of the group, is unquestionable and its achievements are still perceivable today. However, regardless of these new, “better” times, more subtle ways of discrimination are emerging which often affect the young. High rates of teen pregnancy, a lack of educational resources and an increasingly violent gang culture are some of the problems that young Chicanos are facing now. The aim of this workshop is to analyze the way this new reality is portrayed by contemporary Chicano writers and artists. Papers that discuss the rejuvenation of Chicano artistic and literary production through
new forms of literature and popular culture are also welcome.
Workshop 16
Queer Youth(s)
Chairs:
Roman Trušník, Tomas Bata University in Zlín, Czech Republic
Email: trusnik@fhs.utb.cz
Tomasz Basiuk, University of Warsaw, Poland
Email: tbasiuk@uw.edu.pl
A celebratory focus on youth seems especially pronounced in queer contexts, and while the United States is hardly exceptional in this regard, its queer culture may be a privileged site for calling such aesthetic and sexual ideals into question and for displacing them, whether through popular representations or in theoretical descriptions of LGBTQ persons and groups. As lesbian and gay liberation advanced in years, its activists and its beneficiaries were being ever more publicly confronted with the realities of reaching middle age and becoming old, prompting revisions of, or tensions within, the social and political ideals embraced by their own younger selves. Meanwhile, a very significant part of the gay male population was experiencing premature deaths and bodily deterioration due to AIDS. In another way, gay marriage and registered unions, as well as child rearing by lesbian and gay couples, have impacted individual and communal temporalities of many queer lives, re-emphasizing youth in an entirely new sense, and re-stating the terms of the familiar stand-off between assimilation and confrontation. We are seeking contributions that would illuminate a range of perspectives on queer youth(s) in the American context, be they theoretical, retrospective, hopeful, or disillusioned. Contributions may be illustrated by fictional as well as non-fictional narratives, images in popular culture, and other representations of queer experience.
Workshop 17
Positioning the New: Chinese American Literature and the Changing Image of the American Literary “Canon”
Chairs:
Elisabetta Marino, University of Rome Tor Vergata
Rome, Italy
Email: marino@lettere.uniroma2.it
Tanfer Emin Tunc, Hacettepe University
Ankara, Turkey
Email: tanfer.emin@gmail.com
The reception of Chinese American literature by American critics and readers has undergone numerous changes since the marginalization of the first Chinese American writers. Today, Chinese American authors such as Ruthanne Lum McCunn and Amy Tan earn the praise of both scholars and the lay public alike and collectively, their work has played an important role in transforming the image of the United States. As a recently published collection of essays edited by Harold Bloom entitled Amy Tan (2009) conveys, writers of Chinese origin are reshaping the American literary arena, and in the process are conveying the power that can emerge from cultural hybridity and multiculturalism. Their works are also regenerating and rejuvenating the image of America, rendering it in a constant state of flux. This perpetual process of reinvention, however, has problematized the American literary canon, prompting scholars to ask if one can actually exist in a nation that is continually redefining itself – and remaining “forever young” – by prioritizing inventiveness and innovation over tradition and convention. This workshop seeks to explore the past, present and future position of Chinese American authors within the framework of what Bloom identified as the “Western literary canon.” Is Chinese American literature inside or outside the “canon”? If it is included in the canon, what are the social, political and cultural implications of this inclusion? In other words, how does its inclusion impact the evolving identity of the United States? Workshop chairs encourage the submission of proposals focusing on Chinese American literature (especially novels, poetry and plays) and literary criticism dealing with the “canon.”
Workshop 18
Rhetorical Constructions of Youth from the American Revolution to the Civil War
Chairs:
Andrew S. Gross, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
E-mail: asgross@zedat.fu-berlin.de
Marek Paryz, University of Warsaw, Poland
E-mail: m.a.paryz@uw.edu.pl
This workshop will explore the rhetorical constructions of youth and their ideological functions across a range of literary and non-literary discourses from the American Revolution to the Civil War. Antebellum figurations of youth were instrumental in shaping the discourse of the nation, developing a national mythology, and ingraining nationalist sentiments in the Early Republic. The figure of the Young American became a major ideological construct in the expansionist era. Youth was considered synonymous with power, potential, ambition, energy, expansiveness. It had a touch of the divine and the innocent; therefore it strengthened the sense of exceptionalism. It harmonized with the tropes of rebirth, emergence, and new beginning; these tropes were often invoked in literature and politics, facilitating reconsiderations of the concept of history and political articulations of America’s place in history. At the same time, the trope of youth concealed America’s troubled relation to its own past, including the multiple cultural, political, and economic links to the Old World and to European colonialism and the slave trade; and the long history of indigenous habitation and warfare, erased by the very concept of the New World. Transatlantic cultural relations constitute a significant context for the analysis of American representations of youth, which often project European antecedence as old age or irrelevance to mask indebtedness and belatedness. Another important context is the continuing concern with the legacy of the American Revolution as manifested in those literary and non-literary writings that gave specific shape to notions of descent and memory. Last but not least, it is worth considering how concepts of generational conflict were used to represent class, ethnic, and regional tensions within the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Workshop 19
From Bully Pulpit to Blackberry: Technological Change, Generational Change and Presidential Leadership
Chairs:
Subarno Chattarji, University of Swansea, UK
Email: s.chattarji@swansea.ac.uk
Eric J. Sandeen, University of Wyoming, USA
E-mail: Esandeen@uwyo.edu
Barack Obama’s campaign was marked by its use of the internet and social networking tools to create a significant pool of support and funding. This workshop examines the relationship between political leadership, generational change, and technological innovation in terms of media developments. Is it possible to trace trajectories that inform the relationship between Theodore Roosevelt and the press, John F. Kennedy and TV, and Obama and the internet? Are Franklin D. Roosevelt (mid-50s when elected) and radio and Bill Clinton (baby boomer) with no real use of new technology outside this paradigm? In what ways does Presidential preference for a particular medium – radio or You Tube – reflect on him, the messages conveyed, and larger cultural and technological contexts? How have Presidential campaigns and governance been shaped by technological determinants? How are ideas of democracy shaped and reformulated by the interface between different kinds of media and Presidents in their particular media eras? Crucially, how have Presidents employed media to reinvigorate the idea of America? Papers are invited to focus on the nexus between media technologies, political change and leadership styles that impact on the imagining of America as a nation continually rewriting the past to move to a promised future.
Workshop 20
Young Adam and Old Eve: Changing Images of American Culture
Chair:
Aagje Swinnen, University of Maastricht, The Netherlands
E-mail: a.swinnen@maastrichtuniversity.nl
The American cultural narrative of personal identity has been formative of the study of American literature. Since the mid 1970s, the female hero has supplemented the prototypical American male protagonist with his quest for self as a rebel against societal pressure. Feminist literary criticism reclaimed the female hero of traditional literature and reinterpreted her in the light of feminist analysis. When Susan Koppelman Cornillon wrote in one of the first feminist contributions to academic literary scholarship – Images of Women in Fiction (1972) – that “people are beginning to see literature in a new perspective,” this can be also said of literary scholarship taking place at the beginning of the 21st century in the field of age and aging studies. Feminist literary scholarship in the late 1970s turned from analyzing female characters in male texts according to male experience, to female experience and perspective. In 1978, Nina Baym criticized American literary scholarship for having a bias in favor of things male: whaling ships rather than sewing circles as a symbol of the human community. Baym speaks of literary critics as “displaying an exquisite compassion for the crises of the adolescent male, but altogether impatient with the parallel crises of the female.” Whereas the second wave of feminism in the 1970s and 1980s emphasized issues associated with the earlier years in life, with “the graying of American feminism” it is no longer adolescence but old and middle age that has become of concern to feminists, and age has been introduced as a social and cultural marker. In the 1981 study of The Female Hero in American and British Literature, the main emphasis of the investigation is on youth. As if anticipating the shift of focus in later years, the two feminist critics of this study, Pearson and Pope, at one point in the text acknowledge the possibility of age as a decisive factor of the heroic: “In many cases, women begin new lives in old age.” Female aging can thus be read as a paradigm of American culture in contrast to the conventional perception as young and male. Aging – in contrast to stereotypical notions – does not bring a loss of identity, but emphasizes difference instead of communality, and expresses individualism more prominently than in youth. In addition, aging as a continuum questions the definition of identity as such: What is essential and what is changeable in oneself? In American culture, identity is discussed as both the possibilities as well as the limitations of the individual within social boundaries, which leads to the necessity of narrating the search of the self within a social context as an expression of this identity. The old woman (“American Eve”) can be seen as having replaced the image of the young man (“American Adam”) as an icon of American culture. Leslie Fiedler stated that American literature was determined by the myth of a mostly young “hero” who, in order to find truth and meaning, confronts himself in the conflict with the forces of nature. In contrast, this workshop will look at old female protagonists representing the particular intellectual disputes, departures and crises of American culture. The special perspective of women, determined by race, class, gender, and age, allows us to draw conclusions about the general connections relating to the history of ideas in American culture and offers a new approach to American Studies. Welcome
contributions are those that explore the importance - for group as well as personal identity - of memory and narration in the context of gender, race, class, and age, and the way age identity is constructed in literature and society to define American culture and society.
Workshop 21
Different Images of the American Presidency Abroad
Chair:
Antonia Sagredo, National University of Distance
Learning, Madrid, Spain
E-mail: asagredo@flog.uned.es
This workshop aims at examining different kinds of images of the American presidency which have circulated all over the world in the last centuries. Different communities and ethnic groups and their social and cultural inheritance formed the American historical background. All these factors constitute the melting pot which is usually applied to describe American social plurality. This workshop invites an examination, from all angles and in all aspects, of the way images of American presidency (based on reality, prejudice or fancy) impact its self-perception and its perception abroad, especially in the different European countries. We welcome paper proposals in relation to the roles that any of the different social, political, economical and cultural aspects that pertain to the American presidency. These papers will be focusing on the development of American historical interpretations in Europe, and on publishing patterns and policies, in order to discover which themes have predominated and the images of the North American presidency that have been projected in the different European nations, and the factors that have contributed to introduce some changes in the presidential image. The workshop will create the opportunity for a dialogue among scholars in American Studies, approaching the United States’ presidency from a variety of perspectives.
Workshop 22
The American Youth Culture Story in Fiction & Film
Chairs:
John Dean, University of Versailles, France
E-mail: jdeureka@yahoo.com
Gigliola Nocera, University of Catania, Ragusa, Italy
E-mail: noceragi@unict.it
This workshop will focus on the key comparative questions: How has the story of America’s young been conditioned by the way it has been told in US fiction and film? What has been the significant interface between American literature & cinema when relating the life stories and key events characteristic of American youth? Among pertinent issues and debates could be: How and why has US literature been adapted to US film when the intention has been to bring to a point the problems confronting American youth? How important has the written word been for youth culture cinema? How have movies, in turn, effected the common understanding of America’s young within US civilization? A vast legion of US youth culture movies and literature exist as data base; notably with the case of traditional American youth culture classics from colonial times through the mid 20th Century and with contemporary best sellers adapted to the screen. Where and what is the literary component between media? How has US youth culture literature and the American bildungsroman become cinematic? Why exactly have certain US youth culture classics never been translated into cinematic form (one notable case: Catcher in the Rye; or told successfully)? What happens to the art of literature in a movie script, screenplay, and film dialogue? Essential to this topic are fundamental theoretical issues of form, genre, intermediality, and adaptation.
In short, we invite members of the European Association of American Studies to consider an embarrassment of riches for research and analysis.
Workshop 23
Remediating The Beats – Visual, Auditory, and Interarts Legacies
Chairs:
Bent Sørensen, Aalborg University, Denmark
E-mail: i12bent@hum.aau.dk
Erik Mortensen, Koc University, Turkey
E-mail: emortenson@ku.edu.tr
Interarts and intermedial approaches have been severely underrepresented in academic work on the Beat Generation. This workshop proposes to examine visual treatments of the Beats and their literature, as well as other remediations of the Beat legacy – in film, art and music. Remediations and interarts treatments of Beat material contribute vitally to ensuring that Beat literature stays “Forever Young” – as witnessed by the consistent interest in new Beat-related material across the New Media and in Beat events that feature a strong audio-visual dimension. From the inception of Beat literature, the link between music, photography, film and art has been explicitly built into it. We invite papers that examine interarts links in Beat literature from its very genesis, and potentially thematize comparatively whether Beat literature is in fact more saturated with multimedia potential than other contemporary American literary works. Papers are equally encouraged on recent films on Beat figures, their biography, cultural environment and their literary output. Likewise we welcome work on adaptations of Beat material into audio media: songs, instrumental compositions, spoken word etc. Finally, work on remediations of Beat material into various art products (painting, installation, video etc.) will be considered.
Workshop 24
The New Generation at 50: Commemorations and Representations of President John F. Kennedy and the American 1960s
Chairs:
John A. Kirk, Royal Holloway College, University of
London, England, UK
E-mail: j.kirk@rhul.ac.uk
Andreas Etges, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
E-mail: etges@jfki.fu-berlin.de
President John F. Kennedy declared his 1960 election “a celebration of freedom – symbolizing an end, as well as a beginning – signifying renewal, as well as change.” Kennedy’s assassination one-thousand days later cemented an idea of a president who was “forever young.” Kennedy’s presidency, and the American 1960s more broadly, has become entwined with the concept of American youth and innocence in popular memory, not just in the United States, but in Europe and around the world. This workshop will address how Kennedy, his presidency, and the American 1960s, has been commemorated and represented in a domestic, transatlantic and global context. What do such representations and commemorations tell us about America’s ongoing project of rebirth and renewal? How and why have such commemorations and representations changed over time? Are there parallels with other American icons and historical eras and the ways in which they have been commemorated and represented? How have perceptions of such pasts differed in the United States, in Europe and around the world? The workshop encourages inter- and multi-disciplinary papers on the subject that could encompass history to literature, politics to film, and music to memorials, among other approaches.
December 1, 2009: Deadline for submitting FINAL titles of papers and names and addresses of speakers to the conference organizers.
January 10, 2010: Deadline for information to be included in the 2010 biennial conference program.
Please send all information via e-mail to the EAAS Secretary General, Jenel Virden, at virden@eaas.eu.