XXXIV Aedean Conference (Almería 2010)
PANEL: US STUDIES (Coordinator: Patricia Fra)
SESSION 1
Xers Tell their Story: Growing Up Generation X in Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero (1985)
Alba Adell Carmona (University Autonoma Barcelona)
Inside the Locked Room: the Concept of Space and Author in Paul Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium
María Laura Arce Álvarez (University Autonoma Madrid)
The Uses of Trauma: Revisiting the Past in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy
Patricia San José Rico (University of Valencia)
SESSION 2 (ROUND TABLE)
‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’: Rewriting History in Contemporary American Television Series
Marta Bosch Vilarruvias (University of Barcelona)
Participants: Marta Bosch (Chair), Mercè Cuenca, M. Isabel Seguro (University of Barcelona)
SESSION 3 (ROUND TABLE)
‘If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it’: Ecocentered Images of the Mountain in Recent American Literature
Juan Ignacio Oliva Cruz (University of La Laguna)
Participants: (GIECO/Instituto Franklin/University of Alcala) Juan Ignacio Oliva (Chair) (University of La Laguna), Carmen Flys Junquera (University of Alcala), Esther Rey Torrijos (University Complutense Madrid), David Río Raigadas (University Pais Vasco)
SESSION 4
The Holocaust-Memoir Culture in the United States: A Necessary Work of Reparative Justice
María Jesús Fernández Gil (University of Salamanca)
The Atomic Bomb's Unsung Victims in Leslie Marmon Silko's "Lullaby"
Joanne Murray Rivas (University of Malaga)
Paper, Silver, Gold; or, Edgar Allan Poe and the Question of America’s Money
Heinz Tschachler (University Klagenfurt)
US STUDIES
ABSTRACTS
Xers Tell their Story: Growing Up Generation X in Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero (1985)
Alba Adell Carmona (University Autonoma Barcelona)
With the coming of age of those young Americans born in the 1960s and 1970s sociologists began to study them in an attempt to classify them within the vast American population. Reviled as apathetic, cynical and immature, members of the so-called “Generation X” made their stand against the boomer-dominated media and decided to make their own contribution to the debate in an attempt to offer their own perspective on the topic. In literature, young American fiction writers like Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz and Bret Easton Ellis, Gen X members themselves, emerged in the 1980s to tell their own story, to write about what they knew, and achieved a notable success among a youthful readership neglected by the publishing industry. Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero (1985) found the opposition of the conservative media, which censured it as scandalous and immoral, but managed to reach a wide audience of young Americans who found in Ellis’s novel a reflection of their own growing up experience in late twentieth- century America. Ellis offers a fresh, daring perspective of the experience of coming of age in a time when mass culture and consumerism leave no room for individuality.
Keywords: Generation X, Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero, Coming-of-Age Novel, Adolescence,1980s
Inside The Locked room: the concept of Space and Author in Paul Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium
María Laura Arce Álvarez (University Autonoma Madrid)
Paul Auster ́s Travels in the Scriptorium is a novel that deals with the idea of space but concretely, and from the perspective of Maurice Blanchot́s theory of literature, it can be interpreted as an illustration of the space of fiction. Auster creates a writer to become the protagonist of his novel and makes him interact with the characters he has created in a dialogue in which the writer is not outside the space of literature but inside, living the fate he has decided for his characters.
The Uses of Trauma: Revisiting the Past in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy
Patricia San José Rico (University of Valencia)
Ever since Sigmund Freud inaugurated the genre of trauma studies in 1920 with the publication of his work Beyond the Pleasure Principle, many scholars have turned their attention to the psychological consequences that either one or a series of traumatic events can have in the minds of the survivors. Those consequences can be equally applicable to the cases in which the traumatic experience(s) have been suffered not just by one individual but by the whole community, as in the case of the Jewish Holocaust or the African-American issue of slavery and its aftermath. However, in both instances we are talking about traumatic experiences that happened many years ago; that is, historical traumas, but that are still suffered today even by those not directly affected by them. This can be explained by the issue of inheritance and inter-generational trauma pointed at by several scholars such as Roger Luckhurst or Dominick LaCapra, by which a certain trauma can be transmitted from direct survivors to their descendants. Some others, such as Kai Erikson, have highlighted the characteristic aspect that trauma has as a marker of identity and cohesion of the group. It is for this reason that recreating the traumatic past in literature like Toni Morrison does, could be beneficial for the haunted community insomuch as those writings could help recreate and thus give voice to the trauma so that the process of healing can start. This dissertation centers in the representation of trauma and its symptoms in the main characters of Toni Morrison's last novel A Mercy and will point towards a possible reading of the novel as a therapeutical work for the entire African-American community.
Keywords: Trauma, Toni Morrison, African-American, Literature.
‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’: Rewriting History in Contemporary American Television Series
Marta Bosch Vilarruvias (University of Barcelona)
Participants: Marta Bosch (Chair), Mercè Cuenca, M. Isabel Seguro (University of Barcelona)
George Santayana stated in The Life of Reason (1905) that "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" (284). Contemporary television series produced in the USA are currently conducting an effort to remember. Different historical times are being revisited from a contemporary perspective both through series set in the past, and series set in 21st-century America which ponder on the reasons for Islamic terrorism. Our round table will delve into the complexities of the discourses at play in different contemporary television series set both in the distant and recent past, such as The Tudors (Showtime, 2007-present) and Mad Men (AMC, 2007-present), and in the present, such as Lie to Me (Fox, 2009-present), 24 (Fox, 2001-present), or South Park (Comedy Central, 1997-present). What these audiovisual texts have in common is their relation to past historical traumas: the Tudor period, the Cold War era, and September 11, 2001. We will explore the discourses that are being appropriated and rewritten, and will point out the relevance of these discourses in Western contemporary society, and specifically in the USA. We will try to elucidate how the past is used to comment on the present: The Tudors will be analyzed in relation to its current political relevance, gender relations and sexuality will be examined in Mad Men, and the analysis of the series related to 9/11 will focus on racial issues. We aim at seeing how History has been a result of the reproduction of power structures, and how it is reconstructed from a contemporary perspective shedding light on new aspects. To do so, we will try to answer the following questions: To what extent is History a fictional discourse? How is the rewriting of history from a contemporary perspective productive? Is it a necessary exercise? To what extent do these rewritings give a voice to those who did not have one during their historical time? And, more to the point, why have these series become such a huge success?
Keywords: representation, historiography, gender studies, racial studies, cultural studies
‘If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it’: Ecocentered Images of the Mountain in Recent American Literature
Juan Ignacio Oliva Cruz (University of La Laguna)
Participants: (GIECO/Instituto Franklin/University of Alcala) Juan Ignacio Oliva (Chair) (University of La Laguna), Carmen Flys Junquera (University of Alcala), Esther Rey Torrijos (University Complutense Madrid), David Río Raigadas (University Pais Vasco)
The image of the mountain as the height of achievement, the dominating viewpoint and the position of glory is common both in colloquial language and in mythical and literary metaphors –as the quote in the title of this panel, stated by Toni Morrison, appropriately mentions. However, poet and critic Melvin Dixon, claimed that in the African American imagery, the mountaintop also became the “image of triumph of space, of a height of consciousness” which immediately evoked “not only the promise but also the performance of freedom.” Therefore, this roundtable will focus on those real and figurative mountaintops which not only represent the traditional associations, but also the performance of freedom, self-mastery, spiritual and personal fulfilment and the ability to transcend, take the liberating flight. The examples put forward will be not only of African American literature, but that of other ethnic literatures as well. South Asian North American literature, for instance, links the mountainous Himalayan range with images of glaciers and rivers which long run to the sea. When, in 1985, writer Uma Parameswaran wrote her famous essay “Ganga in the Assiniboine” she was stating terms of comparison in reference to nature, and more specifically, to the water element represented by the flow of two important rivers: the Ganges (2510 km long, precisely born in the Himalayas) and the Canadian Assiniboine (a prairie river), contrasting therefore the large-scale cultural and metaphorical referents to their countries with their altitude and origin. Mountains have been largely connected to literary symbolism; most of them refer to the sublime and the inaccessible, to the divine Olympus and the skyscraper, or BabelTower, as the zenith of mankind’s lack of communication. In addition, mountains can be deconstructed and reconstructed by human ideology, can be established as physical borderlands, without having into account their own natural dignity and eloquence, that is, their peculiar aspect, strength and dominion of the territory. Thus, through the analysis of several literary examples, taken from the poetry of the ethnic diaspora to North America, ecocritical concepts such as topophilia and the appropriation of landscape will be taken into consideration. In contrast to the images of the mountain as the quintessence of the sublime or the utmost symbol of evil, there is a further image of the mountain as symbolic shelter, as natural habitat of endangered animal species. Although more realistic in approach, it does not lack literary force, as Dian Fossey’s Gorillas in the Mist (1983) and Jane Goodhall’s Reason for Hope (1999) show. These subtle, fascinating autobiographical works are also detailed field studies of the life conditions of the mountain gorillas of the Park Des Virungas (Kenya) and the chimpanzees of the Gombe plateau (Tanzania), the first of which achieved wide international success after the release of the film with the same title. Both Fossey and Goodhall describe their fight to stop intensive poaching and deforestation in these regions. Similarly, Kenyan leader Wangari Maathai, founder of the “Green Belt” movement in 1977, aimed to combat deforestation and provided livelihood for the women villagers of Kenya who were involved in the planting of trees to better care for the environment and for their children’s future. Finally, contemporary representations of the mountains in western American literature will also be explored in this roundtable, attention being focused on recent fictional and non-fictional portraits of the Yucca Mountain Project, a symbol of the environmental degradation of the New West. In fact, the 1987 federal project to build a nuclear waste repository deep underground at Yucca Mountain, a sacred mountain of the Southern Paiute and Western Shoshone tribes located a hundred miles northwest of Las Vegas, epitomizes the complexity and diversity of the contemporary West through a series of overlapping interests and perspectives: progress, nuclear power, federal government, local government, Native American claims to a sacred land, conservationism, military priorities, tourist investments... Some recent westerns authors, such as Frank Bergon, James Conrad, and John D’Agata, have used the Yucca Mountain Project to expose the recurrent American view of Nevada as a wasteland, as an area deprived of people or wildlife and therefore especially suitable as a waste dump. These authors depart from archetypal views of these areas as empty and marginal territories, often created by authors who “Orientalized” these spaces giving birth to misleading and artificial views of the arid West. Actually, the Yucca Mountain Project becomes a microcosm of the way many Americans treat Nevada and the West, in general, a territory often regarded as an empty national sacrifice zone rather than as a place with a peculiar and valuable landscape. The dumping ground also embodies an environmentally abused West where nature is no longer able to absorb the waste caused by human beings’ hectic commitment to progress.
Keywords: Ecocriticism, Landscape & Identity, Otherness, Images of the Mountain.
The Holocaust-Memoir Culture in the United States: A Necessary Work of Reparative Justice
María Jesús Fernández Gil (University of Salamanca)
From the 1970s onwards, and moved by the culture of confession that infuses our contemporary life, there has been a good number of trauma victims recounting the particulars of self-shattering events. In fact, stories narrating cases of child abuse, rape or war have become popular among the general public. Special attention should be granted to autobiographical writings by survivors of the Holocaust. Insofar as this is an occurrence that brought with it an irreparable rupture, it is one that looms large in the consciousness of our contemporary world. Society, indeed, cannot escape reflecting on the complexities brought about by such a disaster, which is the reason why there has lately been an outpouring of memoir literature about the Nazi genocide. The spate of publications about the Holocaust that have appeared in the last decades provides a timely context to analyse the characteristics of this form. Basing myself on Susan R. Suleiman’s study on Holocaust memoirs published in Hungary, I undertake to unveil the similarities that these works bear with the ones that have been published in the United States, for which I shall study Aaron Elster’s Still See Her Haunting Eyes. Attention shall be focused on the fact that these memoirs narrate an experience which—minor differences aside—is more or less identical to that of the rest of Holocaust testimonies. Starting from the assumption that this is a repetitive form, I consider whether or not there are reasons that justify efforts to preserve the story of absolutely each of the victims of this event, coming to the conclusion that this is a most necessary tool because it secures justice for past wrongdoings.
Keywords: Holocaust; memoir; trauma; reparative justice; Aaron Elster
The Atomic Bomb's Unsung Victims in Leslie Marmon Silko's "Lullaby"
Joanne Murray Rivas (University of Malaga)
In “Lullaby” Silko raises the question of a political conspiracy to cover up illness amongst the Native American people living in the Cebolleta Creek area of the United States. This essay questions whether the people were suffering from tuberculosis (TB) or from exposure to radiation due to the atomic bomb testing at the Trinity Site situated only 150 kilometres away coupled with the uranium mining, which occurred on reservation land. This essay gives three main arguments to support its claim. Firstly, that the author, Leslie Marmon Silko, was aware of the controversy surrounding the effects of nuclear testing on the Native American reservation population as the topic was common in a number of her works. Norma C Wilson stated that ‘nuclear destruction is a central concern in Ceremony’, Silko’s first novel. As both stories have a military theme and occur in the same geographical location there is a strong likelihood that the illness Ayah’s mother dies from in “lullaby” is radioactive exposure and not TB. Secondly, radioactive exposure causes many different forms of cancer and other diseases, including lung cancer which would cause a person to spit up blood. The only information we are given about Ayah’s grandmother is that she was ‘spitting blood’. Thirdly, another effect of contamination is newborn fatality, which is also mentioned in the story. A central theme in “lullaby” is the way Ayah’s children are taken from her by ‘men in army uniforms’ and a doctor she recognises from the local clinic. If this essay’s claims are accurate, it could be argued that the American government was removing the children from a hazardous area before they started suffering from the radiation exposure too, thus covering up a national scandal.
Keywords: Radioactive exposure, uranium mining, cancer, Silko, Lullaby.
Paper, Silver, Gold; or, Edgar Allan Poe and the Question of America’s Money
Heinz Tschachler (University Klagenfurt)
The year 2009 marked the bicentennial of the births both of Edgar Allan Poe and of Abraham Lincoln. A case could thus be made that Poe not only cast a long shadow but is also in the shadow of this savior of the Union. Lincoln saved the Union not just militarily but also economically, through an economic nationalism fueled by non-redeemable paper money. The introduction of this type of money ended a period of uncertainty that had been of great concern to Poe, motivating one of his most remarkable stories, “The Gold-Bug.” The tale was published in the aftermath of the panic of 1837, which had been occasioned at the same time by reckless business practices and by the unfortunate monetary policies of a succession of chief executives. The crisis also precipitated bitter debates about paper and coined money, pitching the “paper money men” (as the supporters of paper money were called) against the “gold bugs” (as the supporters of a specie-based currency were called). By the time Poe’s tale was published, the controversy was raging. A reading of “The Gold-Bug” thus unfolds the broader historical experience of paper money in America. The specific concern of this paper will be with Poe’s tale highlighting possibilities of paper money – as opposed to gold or silver money– that had been and would continue to be of importance to American history and culture. Poe’s imaginative exploration of paper money constitutes this tormented genius as a quintessentially American writer, in contrast to those –from Emerson to historians like Charles Bullock – who grounded property in land and precious metal, in continuation of the English conservative tradition from Pope to Burke and beyond.