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?

Scheurmann’s travel writing and novels derive from his pre-World War I stay in German Samoa. His texts focus on pauperized Germans located at the margins of the German colonial state. These pauperized Germans expose and question the colonialist practices of German settlers and administrators.

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.

Equiano constructs his journey to physical emancipation so as to undercut narrative elements which privilege hard work and education as the keys to success. The emphasis on divine grace apart from human works indicates a stronger call for immediate and total abolition than commonly perceived.

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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