2003 Annual Meeting

AMERICAN NAME SOCIETY

27-30 December 2003

Doubletree Club San Diego, Mission Hills,

San Diego, California

NOTE: Allow an hour of transportation time between the end of a session at Doubletree and the start of a session at the downtown San Diego Grand Hyatt, where the MLA sessions are being held. The San Diego trolley stops just outside the door every 15 minutes. It will take you downtown, to the Convention Center/San Diego Grand Hyatt, and/or around the loop.

SATURDAY, 27 DECEMBER 2003

8:30 A.M. – 2:00 P.M. EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE MEETING

2:30 p.m. Welcome: ANS President, Chris DeVinne,

Ursuline College, Pepper Pike, Ohio

2:45 – 4:00 p.m. ANS Session #1 Place Names in Literature and Reality

Chair: Alleen Nilsen, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona

“Naming Empire in the Spanish fin-de-siecle”

(Carlos Barriuso, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey)

In fin-de-siecle Spain, empire is an absent reality, composed only of dreams and memories. However, it is a widely used term to uphold the international prestige of the decadent Spanish nationality. I propose to analyze this significant contradiction through the study of names in two novels. In ngel Ganivet’s La conquista del Reino de Maya (The Conquest of the Mayan Kingdom, 1897), Po Cid, the protagonist, bears the mark of two names in conflict: one of weakness (pious) and other of force (Cid, the Spanish medieval conqueror). He conquers the Kingdom of Maya: the name of unreality by excellence, in which he in turn will have to name many new realities. In addition, the shifting names in Juan Valeras Morsamor (1899) negate any personal meaning for its characters. For instance, Morsamor, the name of the hero, relates to both death (mors,

in Latin) and love (amor).

This contrast between finitude and transcendence relates to the dimension of the Spanish empire in the period: his conquest of an empire is also a search for a new mythical language with which to conceal the inexistence of its hegemony. For the names of empire are nothing but masks of a lost power that relate only to vanishing fictions.

“To Name or not to Name: Squaw-Piestewa Peak Controversy”

(Wendy C. Kelleher, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona)

The seven year controversy over the name of Squaw Peak, a prominent Phoenix landmark, intensified to the boiling point earlier this spring when Governor Janet Napolitano pressed the AZ State Board of Names to waive the required five year waiting period for commemorative names and name the mountain after the first Native American woman killed in combat, Lori Piestewa. The board might have come to this decision without gubernatorial pressure, but then Arizona State Board of Names chairman, Tim Norton, circumvented the process by initially refusing to include the governor's request on the board's spring agenda, then by boycotting the next two meetings. Though the name eventually became official in the state of Arizona, the US Board of Names decided to wait out the required five years. Many Arizona voters felt the governor overstepped her bounds, and the commemorative naming became politicized, cheapening the sacrifice Lori Piestewa made for her country. Others felt Governor Napolitano used her political power for the good of the state and the good of Native Americans who had been lobbying for over twenty years to remove the derogatory name from not only this landmark, but all Arizona place names. The controversy may not ever be resolved, but many philosophical and procedural precedents were established throughout the process. This paper summarizes the events surrounding this controversial renaming, and provides a commentary on how one state and one city handled the derogatory name issue.

“Placenames of Dinè Bikèyah: Chaco Canyon”

(Jay Williams, Chaco Culture National Historical Park and

Taft Blackhorse, Archaeolgist)

An onomastic investigation of Navajo placenames in Chaco Canyon reveals more than just a listing of Navajo names for pre-Columbian ruins dating from 900 to 1275 A.D.? Besides representing narrative events of Creation Stories (Dinè Bahane'), Origin Legends, or segments of Oral, Navajo onomastics reveal the metaphorical mapping of deities to the landscape and the metonymical incorporation of astronomical properties? within the architecture. These places are not considered as random, isolated, abandoned shells from an ancient, bygone people. The realms of astronomy, landscape, and architecture are so tightly interwoven that the activation of one domain activates others. They are one and the same. They are hoodiiyingo haz'± 'places of holiness.'? Navajo onomastics of pre-Columbian ruins demonstrates cultural perspectives of astronomy,

geography, and architecture.

5:15 – 6:30 p.m. ANS Session #2/MLA Session #74

(San Diego Grand Hyatt, downtown)

The Name of the Father/Brother/Self

Cunningham B, Manchester Grand Hyatt

Chair: Christine DeVinne, Ursuline College, Pepper Pike, Ohio

"The Importance of Wilde in Shashi Tharoor's Riot”

(Stephen da Silva, Houston, Texas)

Lakshman, the protagonist of Shashi Tharoor's novel, Riot, repeatedly invokes the name of Oscar Wilde and cites him. While Harold Bloom has discussed literary influence in psychosexual terms, he has not considered the strategic political uses that can be made of precursors. Tharoor uses Wilde's witty assault on patriarchal naming and patriarchal authority to mount his own challenge to Hindu fundamentalists' fetishizing of the

signifiers "Rama" and "India" as guarantors of Hindu purity. However, to employ Wilde in this fashion, Tharoor reads Wilde's onomastic politics selectively: the novel repeatedly turns to The Importance of Being Earnest, where Wilde wittily undercuts the name of the father, but it strategically ignores Wilde's famous defense of the love that dare not speak its name where the writer affiliates his forbidden love with a catalog of canonical patriarchal names in order to legitimate it.

"Jane Austen's Fictional Men with the First Names of Her Brothers and Father"

(Herbert Barry, III, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)

Jane Austen's six novels contain men with the same first name as each of her six brothers. The heroine married three: Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey, Edward Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility, and George Knightly in Emma. Brother Henry, four years older than Jane, has been described as her favorite. Brother Edward, eight years older than Jane, was adopted by a wealthy family. Brother George, nine years older than Jane, was mentally deficient and lived in a foster home. George was also the name of Jane's father, who was the model for George Knightly. Fictional men with the first names of the other three brothers were less important characters: CharlesMusgrove in Persuasion, James Morland in Northanger Abbey, and Frank Churchill in Emma. These brothers appear to have been less closely affiliated with Jane. The author's choices of the names support inferences about her sentiments toward her brothers and father.

"'Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius': Name Branding and the Construction of Market

Identity in the Little Blue Books"

(Melanie Brown, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Minnesota)

Emanuel Haldeman-Julius's Little Blue Books sold an unprecedented hundred million copies in their first decade of publication from 1919-1928. So conscious of the sociopolitical power of naming that he hyphenated his surname upon marriage, the publisher experimented with the name of his series, testing its popularity in three different incarnations. Regardless of the series' title, his own name appeared on every book he sold, a tactic generating such curiosity among his readers that he published a Little Blue Book about himself (No. 678, E. Haldeman Julius: The Man and His Work,

1924). I argue that Haldeman-Julius's strategy of self-branding and his widely criticized practice of changing book titles to increase sales participated in familiar early-twentieth-century advertising trends and, much to the consternation of his loftier competition, whetted an insatiable appetite for great literature in cheap, paper-covered books that became ubiquitous objects of mass consumption.

Saturday Night FREE (on your own)

SUNDAY, 28 DECEMBER 2003

10:00 – 12:00 p.m. Executive Committee Meeting

1:45 – 3:00 p.m. ANS Session #3 (MLA Session #309)

(San Diego Grand Hyatt, downtown)

Naming and Its Absence

Molly A, Manchester Grand Hyatt

Chair: Grant W. Smith, Eastern Washington University, Spokane, Washington

"Steps toward a Theory of Names”

(Grant W. Smith, Eastern Washington University, Spokane, Washington)

Naming is the use of language symbols to distinguish and refer to a specific entity from among a number of similar things. The symbols are chosen because of their lexical values, prosodic values, and/or visual values (e.g., orthoghraphic presentation). The symbols transfer such values from other domains of meaning much like metaphors (i.e., in partial, incomplete form). Names are often composites with parts drawn from different domains.

This paper will try to show how human values (whether emotive or utilitarian) are transferred to the entity named from previous meanings, sounds, and/or graphic image of the word(s) used. Thus, name study involves more than the compilation (as in dictionaries and databases) or administration of names. It also illuminates basic humanistic issues, such as athletic skill, religiosity, identity with nature, uniqueness and

individuality, rebellion or attachment, group identity, and cultural contact. Examples of commercial, literary, personal, and place names will be analyzed.

"Naming Names: Identity and Identification in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale," Tom Henthorne, Pace University, New York

Critics have long argued that the female protagonists in feminist texts such

as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Daphne du Maurier's

Rebecca are unnamed because their blight represents the plight of women in general. In The Handmaid's Tale, however, Margaret Atwood leaves her narrator unnamed for a different reason. Rather than make the narrator's name indeterminable, Atwood presents the narrator's name as a puzzle to be solved: attentive readers are able to ascertain that the protagonist--who is known only as "Offred" in the novel (meaning "of Fred" or belonging to Fred") was once known as "June." As I shall argue in this paper, by making

the narrator's name a puzzle, Atwood creates an active recovery of the protagonist's name, an action that would be forbidden within Gilead, the dystopian state in which the novel is set. Rather than simply use namelessness to indicate powerlessness as so many other feminist authors do, Atwood uses namelessness to create a radical, interactive text that involves readers directly with the protagonist's subversive activities, thus enabling

them to identify more strongly with her and her situation.

"The Name of the Author (or the Lack Thereof) in Fifteenth-Century English Poetry: 'A Reproof to Lydgate," Robert J. Meyer-Lee, Rhodes College, Memphis, Tennessee

The first English poem to castigate a fellow vernacular poet by name did not appear until the 1440s. The object of attach is John Lydgate, a self-proclaimed disciple of Chaucer and the most dominant writer of English verse of the fifteenth century. Significantly, however, the attacker never names himself. In my paper I show, through a close reading of the poem and its placement in its historical context, how the disjunction between the

anonymity of its author and his naming of Lydgate points to a greater disjunction in fifteenth-century poetry: that between traditional, courtly verse--which was characteristically anonymous--and the newly dominant didactic clerical verse, which was typically backed with the authority of anamed author. Ultimately, in the early sixteenth century, this conflict gives was to a hybrid, in which, with Wyatt, the concrete, historicized author takes over the "I" of formally nameless courtly lyric.

"Affirmative Naming in No Name" Amy R. Leal,

(Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York)

In No Name, Wilkie Collins introduces Magdalen by saying that she is a misnomer. "Surely," he writes, "the grand old Bible name--suggestive of a sad and somber dignity" and "penitence and seclusion--had been inappropriately bestowed?" Outwardly, the blithely innocent Magdalen seems the polar opposite of her Biblical namesake, yet underneath the "glitter of [her] bright spirits" lurks another self whose disposition embodies the associations of her name: a sinful, suffering, and isolated woman.

Paradoxically, the calamity that leaves her "Nobody's child" and strips her of her name is the catalyst for her fall into a Mary Magdalene-like existence. Magdalen's search for what to be called is also a search for a calling. This paper explores how vocation in Collins's No Name not only determines how one lives, but who one becomes and discusses the relationship between naming and being in Victorian England.

4:15 – 5:45 p.m. Business Meeting

6:30 p.m. Social Hour and Banquet – Speaker Herbert Barry III

MONDAY, 29 DECEMBER 2003

8:00 – 8:45 a.m. ANS Session #4 SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS

(Informal discussion groups)

Literary Names

Personal Names

Place Names

9:00 – 10:45 a.m. ANS Session #5 NAMES IN CULTURE

Chair: Tom Gasque, Professor of English Emeritus, University of South Dakota,

Vermillion, South Dakota

“From Blind Alleys to Blind Trusts: How Naming Tells Us What Blindness Really Is” (Julia Miele Rodas, City University of New York, New York)

Although custom invites us to think of blindness as a medical condition defined within physiological parameters, cultural notions of blindness (and our consequent reaction to and shaping of blind lives) are in large part derived from and reflected by the conventions we employ when naming certain places, performances, or behaviors as "blind." This paper examines the ways we name the "blind" object (e.g., "blind gut," "blind arch"), or the "blind" experience (e.g., "blind rage," "blind luck," "blind justice") and suggests that these names serve a dual function: They are descriptive of our collective uncertainty about blindness; and they simultaneously function as a means of regulating and codifying the meaning of blindness as it arises in individual human subjects.

“Use of Arabic Names as a Reflection of Social Divisions and Class

Conflicts in "Ramza" and "Le Coffret Hindou" Sonia Ghattas-Soliman,

(University of California, San Diego, California)

Out-el-Kouloub is a XXth century novelist whose works center on the social status of the Egyptian of the pre1952 revolution. The complexity of the society of that given period serves as a background for the novelist's illustration of social divisions and class conflicts.

Through the introduction of cultural models and codes, Out-el-Kouloub emphasizes the idea that the masses cannot acquire the qualities and the prestige, aristocrats have by privilege of birth and class. This conflict is revealed in terms of culture and language, since both of them are products of social conditions. In addition, Out-el-Kouloub resorts to Arabic surnames. Carefully chosen, these names shed light on the personality, the behavior and the mentality of each individual while it unveils his ideology, and his social status. Furthermore, each name reflects the symbolism, the ridicule, the selfishness, or the uniqueness of the character as underlined by Out-el-Kouloub.