PAMLA 2010 - Honolulu

How do Janie's encounters with legal institutions focus the text's notions of race, sexuality, social identity, and black femininity? How do alternative modes of language and narration, particularly violence, respond to legal and social marginalization and assert Janie's autonomy as lover and woman?

While Truong and Le’s works build on critical issues from the Asian American cultural debate of the 1990’s, they ultimately question, and effectively explode, the very boundaries that the field established: particularly those associated with authenticity and ethnic authorship.

As stated in his autobiography, Williams is decidedly non-white. His cultural, racial, and even linguistic negotiations can be seen in the context of play, conscious compromise, and even unconscious confusion evident in his autobiography as well as in his poems, “Adam” and “Eve.”

The mini-epic Shield of Heracles is a failed attempt at humor and sensationalism, defeated by its Pseudo-Hesiodic author’s tentative classicism. Nevertheless it reflects venerable traditions of epic parody and preserves interesting, possibly tendentious local variants of heroic and divine myth.

My paper discusses the topic of integration of African immigrants in Italian society through Comencini’s film White and Black (2008) and Mazzacurati’s film The Right Distance (2007).

Looking at Native American multiracials, this paper will attempt to trace a workable theory of multiraciality in which the particularities of micro-political, material, and historical moments of racial and cultural mixing are recognized.

My Year of Meats combines road-story and muckraking journalism. In it, a film crew crosses the U.S. looking for “authentic” food and “wholesome” housewives. I explore the novel's structural parallels to the local/global economy and the modern context of food consumption and production.

I am analyzing how Laurent Cantet explores the limits of the "pensée unique" in contemporary French society. In his film The Class, he questions the vertical and elitist model in the school system and substitutes it with a horizontal model that represents all perepctives in the nation.

This variationist quantitative study aims at explaining the alternation between Resumptive Pronouns (RPs) and Prepositional Phrase (PP) Chopping in Spanish oblique Relative Clauses. The results show that RPs are favored by animate antecedents, whereas PP-chopping is favored by inanimate antecedents.

This paper explores the Calvinist and immaterialist elements in four of William Godwin’s (1756-1836) novels: Caleb Williams, St Leon, Fleetwood and Mandeville. These novels illustrate Godwin’s growing conviction that immaterialism has deleterious consequences for social solidarity.

My presentation involves the process of mining personal recollectionsto create historical documents. I will use interviews conducted with Japanese Americans from Hawaii who were incarcerated during World War II as case studies.

This paper examines the way Tim O’Brien’s novel models the modes of writing, drafting and revising. With its argued positions, profiled persons, and explained concepts, O’Brien’s vignette novel offers students a literary example of the composition process in action.

This paper argues that the characteristics of a rogue woman--a sentimental heroine whose beauty is enhanced by her passionate, mischievous, or adventurous behavior--were crucial to the articulation of nineteenth-century feminine identity in terms of the nation and its empire.

This study explores Castro's novel in relation to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's theories on the male homosocial continuum. I argue that the Duque's preence brings on a state of homosexual panic for the bachelor Albuerniga, forcing him to negotiate his way along the male homosocial continuum towards heterosexuality.

Non-verbal cues in Carlos Bulosan's The Laughter of My Father evoke the difficulties of being Filipino in a foreign land, of desiring to simultaneously live within the American framework as well as critique the colonial activities taking place in the Philippines.

The annoying mannerisms displayed by various characters in poems 12, 22, 39 and 84 are not accidents of birth or habit; these people are attempting to show off their good looks, wit or talent. Catullus thus demonstrates his characters' willful self-delusion, but he also universalizes the problem.

If the violence of hegemony is linguistic as well as material, the form of the critic’s response matters. This paper argues that Wittgenstein and Spivak provide two productively different and complementary rhetorics for challenging epistemic violence.

Learning to write in diverse rhetorical situations is especially important for students in the university where they are expected to enter various ongoing disciplinary conversations. Scaffolding students’ acquisition of literate practices requires metacognition about processes and genres.

Comparing Swift and Mandeville as literary writers offers a representative sample of opposing responses to emergent interpretative practices in 1710/1711. This paper argues for Mandeville’s literariness and suggests how each writer is representative of his respective religious and political cadre.

The paper will analyze Lars von Trier’s different approaches on hypnotism in its relation with identity transfer, possession and cinema. The analyses will use the work of Freud (transfer), Mesmer and Charcot (possession) and Bellour (hypnosis and cinema).

This essay identifies a strain of male gothic writing that created a queer worldview by strategically appropriating the transgender body. I theorize transtextuality as a narrative strategy whereby authors transitioned characters from one sex to another to “safely” evoke same-sex desire in Beckford, Lewis, and Byron.

I will explore the kind of nostalgia that enables us to bring about the new. Such nostalgia is different from the sentimental longing for a past event or a far away home. A name that Plato gave to its journey is recollection—the remembering of that which did not occur. Or, more precisely, that did not occur yet.

Using the case of Duarte de León and his children, this paper analyzes how the Inquisition divided families in colonial Mexico by exploiting differences in the crypto-Jewish identity that otherwise unified them.

There is something remarkable in the fact that the most notable Chicana literary voices find their written expression in a variety of genres. This paper explores the works of Chicana authors who work across genre, arguing that cross-genre work is a critical methodology of Chicana discourse.

I examine tourism as a vehicle in indigenous contexts whereby landscapes and being-in-place convey indigenous cultural identity. This paper will consider tourism and landscape, place, and cultural identity issues from an indigenous and geographical view.

I examine how Sketches of Spanish Colonial Life in Panama 1572-1821, written by “Lady Mallet,” re-counts the domestic lives of an aristocratic family in Panama, focusing on elements such as fashion and dinner party customs in highly nostalgic and idealized language.

How does fiction critically reformulate historical discourses? How does it bring postcolonial memory to bear on national history? How does it consecrate a site of memory to moments and experiences that public history has suppressed?

This paper argues that the structure of the novel mirrors Roβmann’s personal evolution. While the protagonist’s identity remains fractured and chaotic, it nonetheless achieves an individual freedom that is imaginable only through the transcendence of national and cultural borders.

To publish her Rymes, Renaissance poet Pernette DuGuillet had three challenges: to overcome social restrictions prohibiting women from participating in public rhetoric; to create a female voice within male-dominant literary models; and to escape her role as passive beloved in the work of fellow poet, Maurice Scève.

There exists in the Odes a system of sea imagery that is inextricably linked to madness and emotional instability. The love triangle between man, woman and crowd in Horace’s Odes is set against and built upon the very Roman poetic tradition of stormy, unstable sea-crowd metaphors.

Through a close analysis of select passages in Georg Forster's travelogue from Cook's first and second visit to Tahiti in 1773 and 1774, I will discuss specific parameters of the discourse on mountaineering in the Pacific.

Through an examination of Zitkala-Ša's work, this study contextualizes the complex history of Red English; a dialect widely spoken across indigenous North America, and inextricably linked to notions of tribal identity, community, and authenticity.

Gender, as a modern construction, constricts our reading of ancient texts and the social or political statements therein. In considering Beowulf, this paper addresses the role of women as authoritative voices both within and beyond the poem.

"Fake" news has a valid place in the composition classrooms. Parody teaches critical thinking and demonstrates how to use words to challenge and question, enabling our students to see the impact their writing can have on the world around them.

The lecture aims to investigate the New-New Italian Cinema of the 90s and the 2000s from many points of view.

This study analyzes the gender differences in the use of verbal irony in conversation. The discoursive analysis shows that while men use irony to be more aggressive and to show that they are in power, women use it to show solidarity with the other members of the group.

Dans ses lettres, Saliès laisse le portrait d’une femme équilibrée, éduquée, méditative, et généralement heureuse. Mais ce bonheur n’est pas un hasard. Dans son « projet pour une nouvelle secte de philosophes en faveur des dames » qu’elle élucide dans une de ses lettres, Saliès donne les principes pour trouver « la vie agréable, honnête et commode ».

Isabella Gardner (1915-1981) was a woman poet in a man’s world. Internalizing many of the values of her time, she was not considered competition by her established male peers.

In the last two decades, Armenian-American literature has evolved to include explicit references to the Armenian Genocide of 1915. This paper will argue that these references serve to coalesce the worldwide Armenian community’s sense of national identity.

Critics wishing to argue for Austen’s inclusion within Romanticism tend to find Austen’s religion a problem; I argue to the contrary that it is in her religious attitudes that we discover the Romantic Austen.

When history comes to be told, thought of, or even imagined, it always confronts fictionalization, even more when this history deals with the split of a “national self” through a civil war.

H.D.’s memoirs, letters, and poetry illuminate shifts in elegiac literature by women during the Modernist era. Significantly influenced by Freud, her writings are literary markers of the kinds of changes that occurred in our Western culture’s relationship with grief and grieving.

After briefly describing the developing comics scene in Austria, I will discuss how the graphic novel Miller & Pynchon (2009) by Austrian comic artist Leopold Maurer explores the tension between narrative and non-narrative elements of graphic narratives by conceptualizing this tension as a spatial no-man’s land.

Susan Schultz professes American poetry and creative writing at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa. She is author of several volumes of poetry, most recently Dementia Blog, a book of essays, A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, as well as two edited collections.

I discuss critical reading practices in Chester Himes’ If He Hollers (1945) through the lens of Du Bois’s double consciousness. To ensure survival, Himes’ characters read both protest novels and white culture, and perform racial roles (or refuse to).

While critics often question the Man of Law’s assessments, few doubt his comments about the Sowdanesse. My female students in Kuwait challenge his view of her. Through their close reading of the text and teachings from the Qur’an, they suggest that she, like Judith, defends her faith with steel.

I will read poetry from my two books as well as newer published and unpublished poems

This paper will explore representations of Islam in contemporary popular literature, in order to ask whether recent images of Islam have moved beyond Orientalism. Does a questioning of binary thinking alone constitute progress, or is Islam becoming a new Western commodity?

This paper argues that Slumdog Millionaire presents an essentialized production of the genre of ‘masala’ Bollywood films that fetishizes Indian commercial cinema. It presents a monolithic view of Bollywood and valorizes masala films as synonymous with Indian cinema.

This paper is part teaching case study, part literary analysis. It examines how L. Frank Baum’s rebellious, adventurous, desiring heroine challenges students’ conceptions of nostalgia as a longing for an idealized past.

Unlike Dante’s addresses to the reader in the Comedy, Boccaccio’s authorial interventions in the Decameron have rarely been considered collectively, but this paper argues that these interventions constitute an equally decisive chapter in the development of Italian literary culture.

"Amae", or emotional attachment involving dependence, can be a useful concept in reading religious poetry. I will analyse Satan's monologue in Paradise Lost, Book 4, using this notion, to prove that his moral descent results paradoxically from his rejection of "amae".

An investigation of the spoken discourses encountered by Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jack London in the South Pacific and how sailor talk, cannibal talk, and missionary talk shaped the action, understanding, and language of their novels.

Femme de lettres du XIXe siècle, plus connue pour ses relations extraconjugales, notamment avec Flaubert, Louise Colet a produit une œuvre multiforme à forte résonance autobiographique. Son inspiration reflète des idées féministes, que l’on retrouve dans sa correspondance privée.

This paper will examine how the 19th-century song "Home, Sweet Home" both formed and performed middle-class sentimentalism about "home" as idealized domestic space. It argues that the song's enduring popularity reflects American anxieties about mobility and rootlessness.

This paper situates Bishop’s "In the Waiting Room" in the context of World War I and the poet's queasy transition from Nova Scotia to America. Troubling the facts, it re-historicizes a poem of borderline experience typically read as introspective.

This paper examines Eugenio de Salazar’s use of nautical metaphors in his epic-length poem Navegación del alma (circa 1600), and considers the reasons for which he may have chosen the theme of maritime travel as a suitable allegory for Man’s life on earth.

In order to speculate on the ways in which sight, sound, and story are carried and dispersed in slave narratives and how these dispersions create a diasporic narrative reliant on ghosts, (re)memory, and individualism as foot print, this paper will unpack the uses of Brand’s palimpsest in Moon.

My paper will consider whether women’s life narratives might serve as a productive site of inquiry for world historians seeking to integrate women’s history more fully into the field.

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In the Verrine Orations, Cicero played on the Romans’ visceral reaction to piracy as the opposite of Romanness in order to convict the Roman governor of Sicily under the statute de rebus repetundis; he also promoted his own view of what Romanness should be.

Island crime stories illuminate detective thematics such as boundary, surveillance, and instrumentalism. With recourse to pretexts ranging from Shakespeare’s The Tempest to Biggers’s The House Without A Key, I analyze Hawaii Five-0, a police series that represents the apex of insular detection.

This paper examines medical treatises and witchcraft trials alongside an exploration of The Witch of Edmonton, arguing that witches--as well as their crimes--were cultural constructions shaped by the early modern fear of poverty and post-menopause.

The femme fatale of the post-war film noir period projects a new type of sexuality and gender role that has otherwise not been provided by previous films. This will be examined through Rita Hayworth’s performance in two classic film noir films in the late 40s, Gilda (1946) and The Lady From Shanghai (1948).

Modern scholarship derives Demogorgon from Plato’s demiurge or identifies similarities with Paul’s “Unknown God.” Both types of divinity are alien to the Greco-Roman pantheon and converged as a unique, unknown or unknowable, unspeakable or nameless, formless or invisible, powerful divinity.

Queen of polite conversation, Madame de Sévigné is traditionally remembered as the quintessential expression of maternal love because of her dedication to her daughter. This paper investigates Madame de Sévigné’s gastronomic expertise and how she uses gastronomy to enhance her relationship with her daughter.

This paper explores dada Jewish comic Andy Kaufman's cultural ventriloquism, contrasting it with that of earlier Jewish cultural ventriloquists such as Al Jolson, and exploring the very Jewishness of Kaufman’s cultural appropriations and effacing of his Jewishness.

The text's protagonist stages her femininity in deliberate ways. The pure performance of identity is both liberating and the product of a repression of history. The text offers a unique perspective on the nexus of gender construction, performativity, and the burdens of history in post-war Austria.

Focusing on polylingualism in Amin Maalouf’s novel Léon l’Africain(1986), this paper examines how postcolonial interpretations of al-Andalus (Medieval Iberia) resist notions of nationalism involving the codification of national languages, territorial (re)conquest and mutually exclusive identity labels.

This paper proposes to examine the suggestive conjunction in the narratives of deported Communards of radical leftist political thought and the representation of New Caledonia’s colonial subjects, the Kanaks.

Chin’s poems reveal the conflicting desires that the promise of “Gold Mountain” initiates. Poems such as “A Chinaman’s Chance,” “Blues on Yellow,” and “That Half Is Almost Gone” represent the body as a critical element in assimilation or resistance.

Students journey on a cyber adventure using Blogs, Glogs, Video, Music, Bank Accounts , Puzzles, Maps, Slide Shows and Mystery Drop Boxes, (and more ) using a world language

The Mississippi River town of Hannibal, Missouri clings to the romanticized notion that it is “America’s Hometown.” It has created for itself an extremely profitable tourism business that is, at its root, a disturbingly distorted and completely false representation of Twain’s characters, texts, and boyhood hometown.

Catharine Sedgwick’s sketch “Leisure-Hours at Saratoga” bares the virtues of democratic society while replying to Harriet Martineau’s criticism of America. Examining “Leisure-Hours” as part of a transatlantic dialogue, the paper explores how Sedgwick imagines American society to British audiences.

This paper will explore myths, metaphors, and metamorphoses of the Medusa from antiquity to the present day and present the Gorgon as concept and powerful image of fascination in literature and culture.

This paper will consider representations of Hong Kong in David T.K. Wong’s Hong Kong Stories (1996); making use in part of student surveys, it will compare readings of stories at the time of the collection’s publication with those of today, fourteen-years later.

Perceiving the world makes the body the concrete interface through which one enters in contacts with his environment, thanks to a whole network of sensations converging towards two synesthesias the communication willl approach under phenomenologist and semiotic considerations.

Through her linguistic and culinary acuity, Ella Enchanted reconfigures the social structures of some earlier “Cinderella” stories. “Magic” foods and words both threaten and sustain Ella through periods of deprivation and predation that she endures en route to her happy ending as “Court Linguist and Cook’s Helper.”

The dessert course comes late to French gastronomy, but it carries a heavy cultural load. This paper seeks to investigate the naming of iconic French desserts and to explore the cultural construction inherent in the creation and dissemination of their histories and myths.

In contrasto con il mito tradizionale dell’Italia “belpaese”, la letteratura italiana del Novecento e’ caratterizzata dalla forte presenza, mai riconosciuta, del suicidio. Essa dimostra come la societa’ italiana non possa e non debba essere considerata modello del “bel vivere”.

The border between The United States and Mexico has become an emblematic space of struggle and hope. In this presentation we will accompany film and literature characters in their journey and will reflect on the different layers of meaning of the frontier.

Thomas Mann enlisted current scientific (physicochemical, marine-biological, astrophysical, and medical) discourse in Doctor Faustus. Reconfiguring the Faust myth as a biography written by a classics professor and humanist, Mann problematizes and ironizes both humanism and scientism.

This paper studies the evolution of the thought of director Stephen Spielberg on war by contrasting parallel images in two of his films, 1941 (1979) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). Spielberg, once he had power to shape decisions, evolved a similar worldview to that of the earlier generation that he once opposed.

In his latest film, Haneke provokes his audience once more to reflect on the roots of human violence. Taking into account the historical context of the film and the Foucauldian power dynamics in Discipline and Punish, I argue that The White Ribbon is above all about the failure of education and care.

Cataluna is known for her hard-hitting weekly news column in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, as well as for her award-winning plays, Da Mayah, You Somebody, Aloha Friday, and others. Doreen's Sofa uses over-the-top humor with satirical undertones for social commentary.

Allen Ginsberg dared the ideological state apparatus to act against him. His defiance bore an uncanny resemblance to John Foster Dulles’s foreign policy of “deterrence,” yet it did so in pursuit of a dissident culture rather than hegemony.

A look at the origins of the Oberon character in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream in both continental romance, particularly Huon de Bordeaux, and a play by Robert Greene. Consideration of these neglected sources yields new insights into Oberon and his companion Puck.

Using Bonnie Smith’s study The Gender of History, I investigate translating practices as both amateur and gendered, concentrating on the German translator Henriette Schubart, whose correspondence and works demonstrate a gendered environment that fostered productivity yet also caused chastisement and poverty.

Morally reconstructive periods underwater, accompanied by temporary de-evolution, supernatural supervision, and the eventual reward of temporal power, recur in literature written for and about children. The figure of the morally ambivalent boy is particularly subject to such watery lessons.

The narrator, an actress and insomniac, learns the true nature of sleep when she is cast in a production of Sleeping Beauty.

I engage the poetics and politics of deep time scales in environmental literatures, looking at how contemporary New Zealand writers sketch the long swathes of time through which environments have journeyed, and how they bring past life worlds to bear on their readings of the present and expectations of the future.

I examine representations of simultaneity in the timescape of Paradise Lost, arguing that the availability of each moment for narrative revision—necessary for the narration of simultaneous events—performed important work for Milton in the context of an abandoned revolution.

The paper examines Roman Polanski’s 2005 adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, focusing on how the presence of two authors is registered in the production and reception of the film, and thus explores the issue of authorship in literary film adaptation.

In this paper I explore gender relationships in Arthur Schnitzler's Reigen by examining specific themes relating to sexuality such as power and the repressive moral code within the context of Nietzsche’s theories on the will to power and human instinct.

What happens when oral traditions making the transition into literature are divested of their historical-social-religious context in translation and classified as legend, myth, or folklore? This paper uses the tradition of Punaʻaikoaʻe to open a discourse engendered by these questions.

Since Plato, aesthetics has operated as a primarily philosophical doctrine that takes “art” as its object. I propose a way to think art and literature by means of the works of art themselves. Further, I suggest that the very philosophy that claims to “know” art is itself a work of art.

Antoine de la Sale’s Belle Dame flouts social expectations, saying “no” to remarriage, to lovers, and to the shifting balance of power in her relationship with the knight she educates and advances. In light of this series of refusals, Saintré’s vengeful shaming of his lady appears a hollow victory.

This paper examines Gower’s imagining of English community in the Vox Clamantis. Gower, I argue, appropriates the logic of medieval T-O maps, abjecting the 1381 rebels to constitute a communitarian ideal that is unsettled by the persistence of the abject.

This paper explores Don DeLillo’s characterization of Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra--specifically, the way Oswald’s self-alienation troubles postmodern theories of narrative that conflate fictional and referential discourse.

This paper analyzes the use of Manichean binaries of self-other, civilized-native, us-them with a focus to Anurag Mathur’s The Inscrutable Americans. Although the novel’s protagonist, Gopal attempts to “write back” by subverting the ‘normative’ West, he fails in the end due to his positionality.

In her 2009 film, Pumzi (Breath), the Kenyan filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu illustrates the ways in which environmental devastation can lead to totalitarian control. The film also demonstrates the ways in which access to knowledge under that regime is both difficult and necessary.

This paper argues that the psychoanalytic theories of Lacan (especially his developmental triad of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real) are embodied in the figure of Fred Murdock, protagonist of Borges’s story “El etnógrafo.”

I examine how Woolf conceptualized the crowd as prior to and constitutive of the individual, why her figurations of the crowd in texts such as Mrs. Dalloway rethink subjectivity, and whether they offer space to marginalized collectivities within imagined communities.

Il presente intervento verte su note e considerazioni a seguito di un'intervista al regista Paolo Virzi'.

‘The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,’ Poe’s only novel-length fiction, appears to expel all things female, yet I argue for the pervasiveness of what I have termed the ‘seafaring feminine,’ culminating in a new reading of the much-debated ending.

This paper aims at identifying the strategies of territorialisation/deterritorialization of French Enlightenment and Tahiti's cultural and social codes in Louis-Antoine de Bougainville's Voyage autour du Monde (1771) and Denis Diderot's Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1772).

In Nicole Brossard’s writing, corporeally invested rhetoric is second only to breathing. I offer an examination of the ethical implications of studying bodies which have been translated and retranslated by the minds/bodies of those who are other to Brossard.

This essay claims that Ishiguro’s novel, Never Let Me Go, equates urban space with heteronormative bodies and rural space with nonheteronormative bodies, representing the queer experience, and argues that the novel uses queer bodies to explore modes of production that produce goods and (re)produce heteronormativity.

En este documental, jóvenes uruguayos, definidos como marginados culturales, acceden a la autorepresentación provistos de una cámara que registra su existencia. En mi análisis exploro los límites y los logros de un proyecto que apuesta a comunicar subalternidad.

This paper critiques Disney’s depiction of Native Hawaiians and Hawaiian culture as portrayed in Lilo and Stitch from an indigenous perspective, focusing on misrepresentations of important Hawaiian cultural values such as 'ohana (family), identity, and relationship to 'äina (land).

This paper proposes an Eatdirtzian Geosophical discourse as a means for accessing geographic knowledges within narratives. It focuses on establishing a space for Eatdirtzian Geosophy by reconsidering epistemological and disciplinary concerns in Geography; and its usefulness in literary criticism.

I plan to explore what remains concealed in the post-Wittgensteinian philosophical world of Continental philosophy by thinkers who remained infamously silent about their relationship to National Socialism, and who seem attracted to the silences of esoteric literature.

This paper focuses on how violence is depicted in South Pacific Literature and how it functions, by exploring the ideas suggested in Keri Hulme’s The Bone People and Alan Duff’s Once Were Warriors.

The buried subject of “Howl” is Ginsberg’s mentally ill mother, Naomi Ginsberg, and the decision to authorize her lobotomy. In “Kaddish,” Ginsberg tells his mother’s story, explores the maternal body, and locates his poetic origins within his mother’s paranoid mind.

A Sansei military wife, cancer survivor, and adoptive mother, with teaching experience in local at-risk public schools, she is now an Assistant Professor at Kapiolani Community College. National award-winning author Ian MacMillan says one of her stories is "the single best piece on cancer I have ever read."

19th Century British travel writing of Iceland reveals a stark contrast between romantic visions of Saga heroes and the reality of a colonized nation under Danish rule. Iceland thus emerges as a familiar yet troubling vista.

In the absence of the rebellious plebs, particularly in acts two and four, the presence of the servant child, Lucius, keeps the audience mindful of the moral and political duties owed to the most vulnerable members of the commonwealth.

This paper proposes a reading of Italian mystery movies of the 1970s and an analysis of the spaces represented in them in the light of contrasting theories on everyday life and on the "state of exception."

This paper discusses Walter Benjamin's theory of language as it relates to his literary criticism of such authors as Baudelaire, Kafka and Proust.

This paper analyzes the films Y tu mamá también and Diarios de motocicleta in light of the Latin American Bildungsroman. The films include an adaptation of a memoir and showcase the role of travel in the formation of the self, as well as the relationship within and between narrative and film genres.

Looking at a microcosm of Orange County, the influence of food has become a parallel for local attitudes towards immigration. The success of Hispanic and Muslim communities in West Anaheim has created a unique and flourishing food culture, which has the ability to impact the national debate.

In this presentation, I look at how the women characters live within, i.e. adapt to their respective milieus, in the writings of very diverse women authors (e.g., von Arnim, Wildermuth, Christen, von Ebner-Eschenbach, Dohm, Lewald, and Viebig) during the nineteenth century in German-speaking lands.

In this paper I address ways in which accounts of aesthetic perception based on processing fluency can illuminate aspects of aesthetic judgment described by verbal artists, exploring the association of beauty with truth, beauty’s phenomenology of novelty, and the forms of pleasure associated with literary metaphor.

This paper provides a Deleuzean perspective on the interrelations between Ammons’ poetry and American capitalism.

The structure of Rohinton Mistry's Such a Long Journey casts the novel as a re-telling of the Shānāmah, both preventing the equation of textual representation and reality and demonstrating how re-telling functions to preserve a non-essentialist cultural identity.

Within the context of political conflict and societal alienation, Bob Dylan’s works (and the second wave folk revival in general) call for a collective consciousness of spirit, the sense of a collective future that demands an individual moral choice.

Södergran’s response to the Russian Revolution and the Finnish Civil War is examined in selected poems which describe destruction and nationalism as the Russian Empire slips away and new Finnish and Russian states arise.

This paper will examine the contemporary African American science fiction of Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) and Steven Barnes’ Lion’s Blood (2002) which historically reconstructs or re-imagines the African American cultural experience to understand the modern condition of racial and gender power dynamics.

The narratological transformation in the Zuozhuan of the living into the dead and vice versa is a device used to present the moral quality of the portrayed characters.

This paper examines the ways in which landscapes are represented in three important 19th century Latin American narratives as conveyors of meaning about relationships of dominance and subjugation.