Author: Jennifer Daly
RTÉ’s The History Show recently broadcast a piece on the social and political impacts of Ronald Reagan’s visit to Ireland in 1984. The documentary was compiled by Jackie Fox, a journalist at RTÉ, who submitted it for her thesis as part of the MA in American Studies at the Clinton Institute. You can listen to the extended podcast here.
The IAAS is delighted to announce the winner of the 2016 Dartmouth Summer Institute Scholarship
The Clinton Institute for American Studies at University College Dublin established a scholarship this year to send one postgraduate student from the island of Ireland to the Futures of American Studies Summer Institute at Dartmouth College this June. Applicants had to be registered members of the IAAS in order to apply for the scholarship which covers return flights to Boston, transfers to Dartmouth, and the full registration fee for the week.
After deliberating on a remarkably strong field of applicants, it was eventually decided to award the scholarship to Katrina Kelly of Queen’s University Belfast. Katrina is a PhD student in the School of English and her project explores how post-9/11 fiction narrates and interrogates the exercise of US power within and outside its borders, in response to threats and crises which compromise national security. The IAAS and the Clinton Institute congratulates Katrina on this award and wishes her every success in Dartmouth this summer.
Philip McGowan takes a look back at IBAAS16
The last time BAAS and the IAAS held a joint conference, the vast majority of this year’s delegates at IBAAS16 were either undergraduates, schoolchildren or, quite probably, in day care. Stranmillis College had been the venue a quarter of a century ago: this time, Queen’s University Belfast stepped up to the plate to do the honours.
And what honours they would turn out to be. For three days and nights, the two associations cemented alliances and friendships forged over recent years of renewed co-operation between members, evidenced mainly in collaborations between our postgraduate and early career communities.
In the build-up to the conference, and for the days immediately following it, Twitter was ablaze with the #IBAAS16 hashtag as delegates documented their travels from across Ireland, Britain, Europe, the US, Asia and Australia. With the opening panels beginning at 11.00am on the Thursday, IBAAS16 rearranged the usual order of things at BAAS and IAAS conferences to fit in its 95 panels and 300 speakers. Sponsored by the Eccles Centre, Professor John Howard of King’s College London delivered his plenary on the American nuclear cover-up of the Palomares incident in Spain in 1966 ensuring the first day concluded with collective gasps and a general sense of disbelief that – who’d have believed it? – official branches of the American government had conspired with Franco’s administration to conceal the full extent of a B-52 refuelling accident above Spain’s Mediterranean coast.
Following John’s brilliant lecture, delegates made their way to Belfast City Hall where the opening reception (hosted by Belfast City Council) was addressed by the US Consul General in Belfast, Daniel Lawton, who recalled America’s particular relation with the city of Belfast and reminded those present that it was George Washington who had granted Consular status to the city 220 years ago in 1796.
Friday brought sunshine to BT7 and yet more international delegates who crowded the Whitla Hall as well as Queen’s recently refurbished Graduate School and the Peter Froggatt Centre for more coffee breaks, lauded lunches and the most diverse set of panels ever assembled at either an annual BAAS or IAAS conference. Before the launch reception for BAAS 2017 hosted by Canterbury Christchurch University in Queen’s Great Hall, Professor Deborah Willis of NYU Tisch School of the Arts amazed the assembled delegates with a photographic history of social movements in the US from Emancipation to Black Live Matter. The range of images shown during her Journal of American Studies talk was extraordinary and the conversation during that evening’s reception was dominated by what Professor Willis had managed to present to the conference in just about sixty minutes.
For those who attended on the Saturday, all four seasons made their appearance with bright morning sunlight giving way in the afternoon to rolls of thunder, coupled with falls of snow and hail. None of this deterred the IBAAS delegates intent on stocking up on their fix of American Studies panels and roundtables ahead of the closing events of this Belfast conference. In a slight alteration to the usual IAAS annual plenary, the Alan Graham Memorial Lecture, Richard Ford read from his work at Titanic Belfast: his hour-long reading and question-and-answer session was then followed by the Gala Dinner. Having attended Professor Willis’s talk, Richard elected to change his chosen reading: instead of presenting new material, he read the opening half of ‘Everything Could Be Worse’ from Let Me Be Frank With You to highlight the varied and nuanced issues alive in the discussion of race in the United States today, and to ask what is the novelist’s role within this hugely contentious matter and how they can deploy the valencies within language to be productively provocative. 200 people crowded into the Andrews Gallery at Titanic Belfast: on the walls around them the first exhibition in the UK or Ireland by Guggenheim Fellowship awardee Larry Fink (he shares this notable honour with both Deborah Willis and Richard Ford) was on display alongside photographs by Richard Wade and Jo Longhurst.
The Gala Dinner was served in the Titanic Suite, replete with authentic replica Titanic staircase, and venue for the awarding of the annual BAAS and IAAS awards by outgoing chairs Sue Currell and Philip McGowan. Of particular note here was Ian Bell’s receiving of the BAAS Fellowship to mark his decades’ long dedication to the American Studies community in the UK. The official proceedings concluded with a toast to the memory of long-standing IAAS stalwart, former Chair, Secretary and Treasurer as well as former EAAS Treasurer, Tony Emmerson, who passed away in December 2014 but who had been eagerly anticipating what he rightly predicted would be a momentous event in the history of both associations.
Philip McGowan, Senior Lecturer in American Literature at Queen’s University Belfast, was the main organiser of the IBAAS16 conference which also marked the end of his five-year term as Chair of the IAAS. His research examines nineteenth- and twentieth-century US poetry, fiction and film; he is also interested in America’s history with alcohol and addiction.
CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS
TO A THEMATIC ISSUE TO BE PUBLISHED IN E-REA (Spring 2017)
(Webjournal of Aix-Marseille University’s English and American Studies Unit, LERMA)
“A Death of One’s Own”?
Narratives of the (Un)Self :
American Autothanatographers, 17-21st centuries
Since the 1980s-1990s, the terms “autopathography” and “autothanatography” have increasingly been used by the theorists of autobiography. Defined by Thomas Couser as “life writing that focuses on the single experience of critical illness” (“Introduction: The Embodied Self”, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, vol.6, no 1, Spring 1991, 1), autopathography often— but not always—envisions death. The aporic term autothanatography, the writing of one’s own death, has provided a useful framework for the theorists interested in the relationships between writing, the self and death. Much of the theoretical background of autothanatography can be attributed to French thinkers (Jacques Derrida who spoke about his “testamentary writing”, Louis Marin or again Maurice Blanchot, the very embodiement of the modern myth of the writer, according to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe who described Blanchot’s both existence and writing as “posthumous” …) but recent works on autothanatography have also drawn inspiration from other European or American writers such as Paul de Man, Jeremy Tambling, Laura Marcus, Linda Anderson, Susan Sontag, Judith Butler or Felicity Nussbaum. Still, a brief overview of recent autothanatographical studies seems to indicate that American writings have not been as thoroughly or systematically explored as European ones.
The purpose of this volume is to address this void by questioning the evolution, the practices and the perspectives of American autothanatographers ever since the 17th century. While not systematically disconnecting death from disease, we will consider how one’s own death shapes the author’s writing project, turning it into a deathward project actually emerging “from beyond the grave”. The focus, therefore, will not necessarily be placed on the process of dying (as it is in autopathographies), but on death itself as at once the starting point and the result of the writing process. In a 1978 article entitled “The Shape of Death in American Autobiography,” Thomas Couser pointed out that “the form and content of the narratives are often significantly shaped by the writer’s preoccupation with death. A surprising number of our major autobiographers anticipate or offer a substitute for their own deaths; some even point beyond it, offering intimations of their own immortality” (“The Shape of Death in American Autobiography”, The Hudson Review, Vol.31, n.1, Spring 1978, 53). While such preoccupation with death is likely to be a common feature among autobiographers in general, this volume will seek to delineate and explore the cultural, religious, racial and gender parameters that could contribute to the specificities of American autothanatography. Because of this approach, the historical timeframe is deliberately broad, reaching back to the 17thcentury, when religion pervaded autobiographical writings, up to the early 21st century. Also, because the boundaries between reality and fiction are by no means clear-cut in the genre of autobiography (and perhaps even less so with autothanatography), contributions examining autofiction will be welcome. Finally, we wish to envision a large spectrum of autothanatographical expressions, including textual genres such as diaries, memoirs, and autofictional works but also iconographic or visual productions dealing with the author’s own death (comics, photography, self portraits, art works…).
While the essays are expected to explore American autothanatographical practices, they must also endeavor to anchor those practices in—or detach them from—the theoretical discourses shaping autothanatography. Ultimately, the volume will question whether the individual act of writing about/from/against one’s death has the power to (de)construct “a death of one’s own” (Rilke), and whether such writings can collectively constitute a specifically American literary phenomenon.
Articles may examine:
-Special historical moments liable to (dis)connect the individual from/to a sense of national/collective identity
-Issues of race/class/gender/religion inasmuch as they may impact the way in which death affects autobiographical practice
-How cultural and medical discourses on death shape individual representations of one’s own death
-The literary, poetic and/or pictorial devices that allow a writer or artist to represent his/her own dying or death
-Double-bottom texts in which the exploration and narrative of the death of the other (thanatography) hide an autothanatographical project
-The notion of mortiferous writing, its modes of existence and implications
Articles in English should be sent to claire.sorin@univ-amu.fr and sophie.vallas@univ-amu.fr for October 1, 2016.
Please use E-rea’s stylesheet (http://erea.revues.org/2153). If you decide to submit a contribution, please let us know by sending us a message with a brief description of your project byJune 30, 2016.
Civil Rights Documentary Cinema and the 1960s: Transatlantic Conversations on History, Race and Rights
The British Academy, London
24-26 May 2016
This conference – held in memory of American social activist, politician and leader in the civil rights movement Julian Bond (1940-2015) – brings together documentary filmmakers, activists, and film, history and media scholars. Its focus is films based in civil rights history and inspired by it. It will promote a trans-Atlantic exchange of ideas around film production, activist subjects, and historical research in the making of civil rights cinema, civil rights history and cultural memory. It examines race and rights – activism, massive resistance, film and visual cultures – to intervene creatively in the history of the 1960s and in the historiography of the civil rights movement.
The convenors are:
Prof. Sharon Monteith, Co-Director of the Centre for Research in race and Rights, University of Nottingham; Dr George Lewis, University of Leicester; Prof Nahem Yousaf, Nottingham Trent University; Dr Helen Laville, University of Birmingham
Speakers and filmmakers include:
John Akomfrah OBE, Smoking Dogs Films
Dr Reece Auguiste, University of Colorado, US
Eduardo Montes-Bradley, writer and director with Heritage Films Project at the University of Virginia, US
Professor Clayborne Carson, Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, US
Professor Jon Else, documentary filmmaker and Professor of Journalism, UC Berkley, US
Professor Peter Ling, University of Nottingham, UK
Professor Allison Graham, documentary filmmaker and historian, University of Memphis, US
Matthew Graves, University of Mississippi, US
Ms Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, Freedom Rider and former member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
David Shulman, documentary filmmaker, US and UK
Professor Stephen Tuck, University of Oxford, UK
Professor Clive Webb, University of Sussex, UK
Films screened will include selections from the ground-breaking 14-hour documentary series Eyes on the Prize (1987) and full screenings of At the River I Stand, (1993), Rebels: James Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss (2012), The March (2013), An Ordinary Hero: The True Story of Joan Trumpauer Mulholland (2013), Ballots and Bullets in Mississippi (aka Dirt and Deeds in Mississippi, 2015)
To view the programme and to register for the conference please visit the British Academy event page here.
In conjunction with the conference, there is will also be a free evening screening of Julian Bond: Reflections from the Frontlines of the Civil Rights Movement and a conversation with its director Eduardo Montes-Bradley on Tuesday 24th May. Please register for this separately at the British Academy event page here.
This conference is co-sponsored by the Centre for Research in Race and Rights, the University of Nottingham, Nottingham Trent University, the University of Leicester and the University of Birmingham.
Convenors: Gilles Chamerois (Université de Brest) and Bénédicte Chorier-Fryd (Université de Poitiers)
The 2017 International Pynchon Week will be held on the French Atlantic coast in the old harbor of La Rochelle, from which a number of Europeans set sail for the New World. The conference will be hosted by the Musée du Nouveau Monde, among its collection of Allegories of America. The conveners hope this liminal space on the margins of Europe will inspire Pynchon scholars to sail out towards yet unexplored territories, following some of the leads below or picking up any related or unrelated Pynchonian line.
Literary new worlds
Pynchon’s early fiction was published under the auspices of “new worlds:” “Low-Lands” was issued by New World Writing, a paperback magazine (volume 17, 1960); speculative fiction writer Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds magazine ran “Entropy” in 1969. How “new” were and still are Pynchon’s fictional worlds? How do old and new interweave in the fabric of his texts – intertextuality, syntactic and lexical archaisms, variation and invention? Is Pynchon a belated modernist, a post-modernist, or a post-post-modernist? Is he forever striding in-between worlds?
A New World inhabited by the Old
Pynchon’s novels cast half-nostalgic, half-ironic glances back at America’s history – from the most remote to the most recent – and both conjure up and challenge visions of the New World as an earthly paradise. Is the new, revolutionary world of Mason & Dixon ‘the elder World turned Upside Down’ (M&D 263)? Or is it reclaimed by melancholy as its ‘Borderlands’ are gradually included into ‘the bare mortal World that is our home, and our despair’ (M&D 345)? And to what extent is the Puritan heritage of its founders, so pervasive in the earlier works, still at work in Pynchon’s most recent America, in Gordita Beach or post-9/11 Manhattan?
Phantoms from the old world haunt America, just as its songs and music haunt Pynchon’s texts; to wit, the resilience in America’s most native expressions of the oldest European musical modes, the songs of Europe carried across to the bars and stages of the New World and the modern avatars of the ancient mixolydian mode – the most bluesy / jazzy /funky mode, a sound made flesh in the person of Fergus Mixolydian in chapter 2 of V. What distant echoes from the old world can still be heard through the “surf music” beating in Mason & Dixon or in the Californian trilogy?
America Revisiting the Old World
Pynchon’s fictions also foray with characteristic ubiquity – bilocation applying both to characters and texts – into European history, from the Mediterranean’s most ancient shores (V.) to the waste lands of WWII (Gravity’s Rainbow). The Old World is an archival trove for American figures wandering in search of elusive roots, roaming free regardless of historical and geographical boundaries (Benny Profane, Tyrone Slothrop, but also Against the Day’s Chums of Chance). Can it be argued that Pynchon’s writings, from the very beginning (starting with “Under the Rose”), have been composing an alternative, de-centered narrative of European history, a series of Baedeker guides gone rogue?
Fantasized new worlds
At their most utopian or dystopian, balancing as they do between social, revolutionary or anarchist forms of idealism and post-modern nihilism, the novels of Thomas Pynchon offer pictures of “America as it might be in visions America’s wardens could not tolerate” (ATD, 51). Do parallel worlds – other worlds ‘humming along out there’ (Slow Learner) – underworlds, the ghostly presence of Thanatoids and other Preterites offer alternatives, if but fleetingly, to an impossible “New” World? Under the cover of novelty, is scientific and technological progress the mere re-combination of the old? Is the virtual Deep Web of Bleeding Edge a new world, or the continuation of the old by other means?
Following the democratic tradition of IPW, the whole conference will be held in plenary mode. Individual contributions as well as full-panel proposals will be welcome. For individual papers, please send 500-word abstracts for twenty-minute presentations; for full panels bringing three or more papers under one common heading, please provide an overall statement of the panel’s aims as well as the contributors’ abstracts (1000 to 1500 words in all). The notification of acceptance for both individual paper submissions and panel/roundtable submissions will go out by mid to late November.
Please send your proposals to ipw2017larochelle@gmail.com by September 30, 2016.
Call for Chapters: Edited Collection on the writing of Richard Yates
** This is the second call for chapters to be included in a collection on the writing of Richard Yates **
Richard Yates, author of the cult classic Revolutionary Road, has been described as America’s least-known great writer. Spoken of in revered terms by other writers such as Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Ford, Yates has a reputation as a writer’s writer. However, during his lifetime his books went in and out of print with alarming regularity, and he never experienced sustained success. The recent reissue of all of his books by Vintage and the release of a major movie adaptation of Revolutionary Road has sparked a resurgence of interest in Yates’s work both with the general public and within academia. With the approach of the 90th anniversary of his birth in 2016 the need for a new volume of essays on this particular writer is pressing. Proposals for chapters to be included in this collection are now requested. Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to:
NOTE: Proposals on Yates’s short stories in particular, and his lesser-known longer fiction, will be given preference.
Submission guidelines:
Proposals of no more than 350 words should be submitted by 15th April 2016. Please also include a short biography (maximum of 300 words). This collection has attracted firm interest from a publisher and it is expected that the full manuscript will be submitted in late 2016. All chapters will be subject to a blind peer review process. Contributors may also be asked to act as reviewers for this collection. Please submit proposals as word documents to dalyj5@tcd.ie using the subject line ‘Richard Yates Collection’. Full details and submission guidelines will be provided to contributors on acceptance of proposals. Any queries can be sent to the editor, Jennifer Daly: dalyj5@tcd.ie
The IAAS is delighted to announce the winner of the first Adam Matthew Digital Essay Prize
This essay competition was established in 2015 for late-stage PhD candidates, early career researchers, and independent scholars in the field of North American studies. Entries had to be related to an area covered by Adam Matthew’s North American Collections. The winning essay is awarded £500 and a year’s free access to the Adam Matthew collection of their choice.
The Prizes Sub-Committee of the IAAS deliberated on a strong field of entrants, with Carmel Lambert of NUI Galway eventually deemed to be the winner. Her essay, ”The Love of Liberty Brought Us Here’: Writing American Identity in Liberia, 1830-1850′, was judged to be fluidly written and strongly argued. The essay was well researched, and delivered a nuanced analysis of the colonising process.
The IAAS congratulates Carmel on her achievement, and also extends its thanks to Adam Matthew for their very generous sponsorship of this prize.
The IAAS is delighted to announce the recipients of the first IAAS EAAS Biennial Conference bursaries.
The bursary was established to assist postgraduate students with attendance at the biennial conference of the European Association for American Studies. The 2016 conference will take place in Constanta, Romania from April 22 – 25.
This year’s recipients are Eve Cobain of Trinity College Dublin, and Hilary McLaughlin-Stonham of the University of Ulster. Eve’s paper is entitled “Berryman’s Blues” and will be part of a panel on Music, Drugs, Subcultures and Politics. Hilary’s paper, “Streetcars and Segregation,” will be part of a panel on Slave Identities and Resistance in 19th Century America.
We wish them both the best of luck with their papers and look forward to their conference reports upon their return!
It started as a throwaway comment, but has now turned into something very real. The logo created by Catherine Gander for IBAAS16 is too good not to put on a mug so here it is! We will be taking orders and payments for mugs though the website until April 1st, and you can collect them in Belfast during the conference. Proceeds generated from the sale of the mugs will be donated to the Macular Society in honour of our late colleague Tony Emmerson. Proceed to checkout, show us how generous you are, and collect a fancy mug to commemorate your time at IBAAS16!