US STUDIES
Panel coordinator: Patricia Fra López (Universidad de Santiago de Compostela) Departamento de Filoloxía Inglesa, Facultade de Filoloxía, Avda. Castelao s/n, 15782 Santiago de Compostela.
PANEL 1
Autor: Maika Aira Gallardo (Universidad: Santiago de Compostela)
Título: Can’t trust anybody:’ female bonding in Norman’s Getting Out
Propuesta: Comunicación
Abstract: The topic of female bonding has become interesting for literary research during the last century. However, there is a controversy surrounding this topic. Whereas it is clear that we can speak of male bonding, mainly due to the trauma provoked by the different wars which happened during the twentieth century, many people tend to think that we cannot talk about female bonding since the main bond a woman establishes is with a man, with her husband. This idea, which comes from the old Victorian ideals and has been perpetuated by the patriarchal system, has recently been debated and it seems that some sort of consensus has eventually been reached. The problem arises when theorists on the field do not agree if the type of bond established among women is natural (biological) or sociocultural. In this essay, we will see how, although there may exist some kind of biological bonding, especially between mother and daughter, there is an important sociocultural bond established among women who have undergone and have overcome a similar traumatic experience in life, at least in part. In order to prove this hypothesis we will be using Marsha Norman’s play Getting Out whose protagonist provides key elements to enter into this debate. KEY WORDS: female bonding, biology, culture, violence, trauma, American drama.
Autor: Patricia Álvarez Caldas Universidad: Santiago de Compostela
Título: The Musical Goes West: An Analysis of Genre and Gender in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954)
Propuesta: Comunicación
Abstract: During the decade of the 1950s, the musicals conquered new horizons: a series of films were settled on the Western frontier and brought the audience a romanticized vision of the American past. The so-called “folk musical” borrowed the vocabulary of the American regional art, and presented a series of themes and characters that were easily accessible by modern audiences despite their distance from a historical perspective. The film Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (Donen, 1954) managed to present an ironic view of marriage and of the whole process of courting which the musical genre had always mythologized. The Western setting and the musical numbers eased the social comments that the story presented, and proved that it was possible to break the social conventions while following the patterns imposed by the genre.
Autor: Jesús Blanco Hidalga (Universidad de Córdoba)
Título: In the \"Vacuum\": Political Readings and Misreadings of Jonathan Franzen\'s novels
Propuesta: Comunicación
Abstract: Ever since the release of The Corrections (2001), American novelist Jonathan Franzen has been— willingly or not—involved in a number of contemporary cultural debates, a fact accountable not only by the extraordinary visibility he has achieved in the contemporary literary scene, but also by the relevance of his work to highly topical ongoing social and cultural discussions. Franzen’s work has been characterized by an ambitiously wide critical intention from the outset. Accordingly, a significant part of the otherwise strikingly small amount of academic criticism received by Franzen’s work is of an overly ideological nature and for the most part rather critical. The analysis of this criticism shows the difficulty involved for an author like Franzen to take hold of a firm, stable position of his own from where to cast a broad critical vision on contemporary American society. Thus, certain critics have undermined Franzen’s critical stand on account of his alleged complacency with hegemonic discourses. Then, while his work has been saluted as signalling a healthy way out of a now sterile postmodernism and a welcome return to a socially engaged novel, Franzen has also been heavily criticized for his not standing up to ideological expectations apparently raised by his own work. This ambivalence is partly taken as reflecting certain ambiguities in Franzen’s position and, by analogy, in contemporary American left-liberal discourse.
Key words: Jonathan Franzen, American novel, postmodernism, post-postmodernism, critical reception, ideology, left politics, globalization, community.
PANEL 2
Autor: Sonia Baelo Allué Universidad: Universidad de Zaragoza
Título: Blank Fiction and Trauma: Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters (1999)
Propuesta: Comunicación
Abstract: Invisible Monsters is the story of two siblings\' journey to discover their own identity and place in a changing world. The novel can be defined as a blank fiction trauma novel that lacks a point of departure and a point of arrival and whose main characters possess liquid identities that are created, shaped and changed as they travel up and down the West Coast. In this presentation I want to explore the function of blank fiction and the ambiguities it generates due to the combination of violence and excess with a distant narrator that cannot face her past and her traumatic present. I will analyse the ambiguous effects of this combination and whether the novel celebrates or condemns the power of generous love and resilience to transform identity and overcome traumatic experiences.
Keywords: Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters, Blank Fiction, trauma studies, American novel.
Autor: Anna Mª Brígido Corachán Universidad: Universitat de València
Título: The Performative Power of Language in N. Scott Momaday\'s The Way to Rainy Mountain
Propuesta: Comunicación
Abstract: This essay focuses on N. Scott Momaday´s historical and autobiographical work The Way to RainyMountain. It delves into the role of orality and performative conceptions of language in the Kiowa storytelling tradition, where words are conceived as speech acts that have the power to intervene in surrounding realities. It also reflects on the nostalgic yet anti-colonial role native languages play in contemporary Native American Literature, which has been mostly written in the English language.
Autor: Aitor Ibarrola Armendáriz (Universidad de Deusto)
Título: Time Traveling as a Burden and/or Opportunity in Sherman Alexie\'s Flight
Propuesta: Comunicación
Abstract: Zits, the protagonist of Sherman Alexie’s Flight (2007), is a half-breed Native American teenager who has serious problems to define his own identity and to find his place in contemporary U.S. society. A lack of parental guidance and the cruelty of the foster-care system turn him into an angry and dysfunctional young man who is brought close to committing a massacre. However, just when he is about to pull the trigger, he “falls through time” to revisit some of the key episodes in Native-American history and a few other recent events in the shoes of characters belonging to diverse racial and social categories. This figurative journey through history allows Alexie—and Zits—to dig deep into the motives behind some conflicts that may explain the plight of Native Americans today. Time-traveling proves an effective fictional device that helps the author—and his readers—to explore these historical junctures from unusual viewpoints in order to see what official accounts have neglected or willfully forgotten. Flight represents, therefore, an illuminating instance of historiographic metafiction in which the writer manages both to retrieve and reconstruct important segments of his peoples’ collective past and to figure out the kind of light that those events cast on their present condition.
PANEL 3
Autor: Àngels Carabí Ribera (Universitat de Barcelona)
Título: Historicizing the Male Body in U.S. Fiction
Propuesta: Mesa redondaPanel: US Studies
Abstract: ABSTRACT Round Table: “Historicizing the Male Body in U.S. Fiction” Chair: Àngels Carabí, UB Josep M Armengol, UCLM Marta Bosch, UB Mercè Cuenca, UB This round table will explore how historical, economic, social, and cultural values have shaped different constructions of the male body in U.S. fiction throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. This investigation is being developed as part of the research project “Men in Fiction: Towards a History of Masculinity through U.S. Literature and Cinema, 20th and 21st Centuries” (FF12011-23589) (IP: A.Carabí), and will be reflected in the book Embodying Masculinities: Historicizing the Male Body in U.S. Fiction and Film (J.M. Armengol, ed). In the round table, we will discuss, on the one hand, the period of the Great Depression, when the workplace, a key definer for the American Self-Made man, turned to be insecure, unreliable, or inexistent, making men feel as emasculated and impotent patriarchs. While some popular icons such as Superman came to embody a muscular model of manhood to compensate, at least in fiction, for men’s inner insecurities, documentary photographs like those of Dorothea Lange provided images of vulnerable -yet dignified- male bodily representations, just as some writers, like John Steinbeck, tried to reformulate bodily competitive masculinities and call for a less physical and more community-minded way to assert manhood.We will also explore how while mainstream masculinity of the 1950s was explicitly defined as pertaining to those men who fulfilled the roles of breadwinner, heterosexual husband and father, the corporeality of men was not considered central to the development of manhood. As a matter of fact, the capitalist idealization of the middle-class, white-collar worker, who came to embody the “common man” in mid-twentieth-century America, had the paradoxical effect of invisibilizing the male body as a marker of masculinity, and physically alluring bodies became culturally associated to “otherness,” in terms of race, social class, sexuality, and even ethical values. In the contemporary world, we shall explore the construction of Arab corporealities in the West as well as the building of an Arab American identity, taking into account the hypervisibilization of Arabs after 9/11. We will analyze the use of characteristics traditionally ascribed to the Arab male body as a strategy of denunciation of racism in post-9/11 Arab American literature. Key Words: Masculinity, Male Body, Race, Class, American literatura
PANEL 4
Autor: Silvia del Pilar Castro Borrego (Universidad de Málaga)
Coautores: Concepción Parrondo Carretero Florina Bako
Título: Realist Theory and The possibilites of Wholeness in Contemporary African American Women’s Writing.
Propuesta: Mesa redonda
Abstract: We would like to approach the reading of African American literature in ways that allow the African American experience to be part of a theory which accounts for the epistemic dimensions of identity. Our round table proposes to approach the texts of contemporary African American writers from the standpoint of post-positivist realist theory because it serves as a dialogical basis for an objective understanding of lived experience and its literary representations.
PANEL 5
Autor: Ángel Chaparro Sáinz
Coautores: David Río Raigadas, Juan Ignacio Guijarro González, Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo
Universidad: Universidad del País Vasco - Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea y Universidad de Sevilla
Título: Neglected Genres and Neglected Voices in the 21st Century American West
Propuesta: Mesa redonda
Abstract: New approaches to the American West show that this is a composite milieu in which several aspects and different cultures combine to prevent from resorting to a limited perspective. There is a responsible possibility to understand the American West as a place in which the interaction of cultures and ethnicities proves to be a key element, either when considering race (Chicanos and Native Americans), faith (Mormons) or gender (women). These new approaches have been modeled and articulated within a cultural frame. However, these new focuses on the American West have been usually developed through literature. This genre has monopolized academic attention. In this proposal, we suggest that different genres have helped to complicate the communicative expertise of those voices that remained neglected within the frame of the American West. Today, they rely on neglected genres to expose their messages and emotions with a relevance that seems to establish a parallel between their own neglected voices and those neglected genres. After presenting these facts, the chair will introduce each participant. The first participant will be expanding on cowboy poetry to explain how this genre is traditionally undervalued by mainstream literary criticism. Nevertheless, recent cowboy poets also experiment with meter and deal with the so-called “non-cowboy world”, including subjects such as racism, environmentalism, 9/11, and war. The second participant approaches contemporary Chicano identity as performed both in a TV series such as American Family: A Journey of Dreams and in the musical production of the Mexican/Chicano corrido band, Los Tigres del Norte. The third participant deals with Spike Lee\'s film 25th Hour (2002) to explore the classic myth of the American West as a land for male pioneers to explore and inhabit, only to conclude that the film functions as a unique African-American Neo Western.
PANEL 6
Autor: Cristina María Gámez Fernández
Coautores: Anne Dewey, José Rodríguez Herrera
Universidad: Saint Louis University, Madrid Campus; Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
Título: Hispanic Influence in Denise Levertov’s Poetry and Poetics
Propuesta: Mesa redonda
Abstract: Many reasons make Denise Levertov an outstanding figure within American letters. Her family and her special upbringing in Essex, England, play an important role in Levertov’s life commitment with political and ecological activism, aspect which took over many of her lines. The aim of this round table is to discuss Hispanic influences in Denise Levertov’s poetry and poetics from three different but complementary perspectives: first, the agency of Mexican landscape in her language, as the poet understood that language is a malleable element in which many aspects embody and take shape; second, Levertov’s attraction to the poetry of Pablo Neruda, manifest in her verse; and third, the call Levertov felt for distinct Hispanic affairs, from literature to politics, culture and so on, either from Spain or South American countries, which materialized early in the conformation of her poetics as she tried translations of poems, or short stories by Spanish texts or as she corresponded with authors like Octavio Paz.