PAMLA 2010 - Honolulu

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.

This presentation situates the detective fiction of Chester Himes in the context of the inner-city riots of the 1960s and the contemporaneous sociological studies of so-called “black underclass” cultural pathology.

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.

Co-presenting with Neidy Ayala.

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.

Adams's sojourn in Tahiti resulted in his book commonly known as Tahiti (1893/1901) where he traces out the fall of the Teva clan, a fall that resonated with him due to his family's fall from power.

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.

This paper applies avatar studies, critical action theories, and rhetorics of conversion to SF/fantasy narratives of endo- or exoskelatal prosthetics, arguing that Cameron's Avatar (2009) presents a techno-conversion narrative suggesting changes in the coordination of corporeal experience in technocratic capital.

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.

I apply Freud’s analysis from Civilization and Its Discontents to Steve Lopez’s column in The Los Angeles Times and the book and film The Soloist in order to expose how when read together the the texts contradict notions of normalcy.

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.

This paper argues that literary critics should engage with metaethical views about the nature of moral language to gain insight into what is "ethical" about "ethical criticism," especially by adopting a virtue-theoretic approach that emphasizes the centrality of "character" in literary judgment.

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.”

In this paper, I argue that Virginia Woolf’s novelistic treatment of the concept of death and her lifelong philosophical preoccupation with textual mourning betray a ‘Derridean’ approach to ‘loss’ some seventy years before the French philosopher started to talk about this topic.

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.

Paul Tillich's early (1920s) writings see the urban ideal in terms of it’s possible downfall, while Stig Dagerman's travelogue of post-war Germany reads the ruins of war-torn urban space as symbols of positive possibility. This paper juxtaposes these opposing approaches as symmetrical arguments for utopian thought.

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.