Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association

In 2006, the University of Arizona Press published Because I Don’t Have Wings: Stories of Mexican Immigrant Life, a collection of essays in which Philip Garrison discusses the problematic issue of the Mexican immigrant life in the United States, and more particularly in the Pacific Northwest.  His familiarity with the roots – both historical and socio-political - of this issue animate the text. This book, his fourth, received excellent reviews.  Rubén Martínez, author of Crossing Over, wrote:
 
            In these exquisite essays, somewhere between lyrics and odes--Philip
            Garrison maps out the new borderlands. . .Weaving together both
            testimonio and text, history and his own experience, Because
             I Don’t Have Wings leads both Mexicano and Americano towards
            an encounter neither counted upon. . . Garrison is a mestizo’s mestizo,
            a literary coyote who smuggles us across not just one but many lines.
 
In 2007, Nathalie Kasselis-Smith and Stella Moreno Monroy, both professors of Spanish language and literature at Central Washington University, undertook the translation of the book into Spanish, as they believed it deserved a larger audience, among both United States Latinos now in the process of exploring their identity and readers across the diverse Hispanic/Latino world.  They also believed in the book’s value as a text for courses in Latino literature, Sociology, Cultural Anthropology and Latino history, in high school and in Higher Education Institutions, in the United States as well as in the Hispanic/Latino World.  
 
Professors Kasselis-Smith and Moreno liked the timely themes of the essays as much as the entrañables personajes who travel in his writing. What caught their attention was the pride and the pathos of the characters, people who humbly, and eloquently, depict the fiesta y tragedia of immigrant life in the United States as well as, in some cases, of their return to their homeland. It was not easy to capture the irony of the English text, the nuances - both linguistically and stylistically – of the narrator and the characters. Through their mannerisms and colloquialisms, one can hear Mexican immigrants express both their hopes and their fatalism.  The author Philip Garrison, at all times accessible, helped the translators to best isolate the book’s central image: that of the astute coyote.
 
Excerpts of the translation appeared in literary journals such as Ventana Abierta: Revista Latina de Literatura, Arte y Cultura, publication of the University of California, Santa Barbara (2007, 2008, 2009), Shadows and Echoes, a literary journal of the Pacific Lutheran University (2007) and Aurora Boreal, a Danish publication on Hispanic Literature, Art and Culture (2008).  
        
In 2008, the Secretariat of Culture of Michoacán, México -- through its Department of Documentation for the Arts and Research -- offered to publish the manuscript as part of the “Serie Migrantes”.  Its distribution to several thousand michoacanos marks an important cultural event, a landmark in the relationship developing between Central Washington University and that state.  In February 2010, Porque me faltan alas: Historias de la vida del inmigrante mexicano was officially presented at the International Book Fair, at El Palacio de Minería in México City.
 
On the publication of his book in Spanish, Garrison said: “As a writer, I am delighted - as well as fortunate! - to be the beneficiary of this collaboration between Professors Moreno and Kasselis-Smith.  All their perseverance made for a dazzling translation, a document I am truly proud to be associated with. 
 
If you are interested in the book, please contact professors Kasselis- Smith and Moreno in the United States or Lic. Ivonne Solano-Chavez in México.
 
Nathalie Kasselis-Smith, Ph.D.                       Stella Moreno Monroy, Ph.D
Associate Professor of Spanish                       Professor of Spanish
Department of Foreign Languages                             Department of Foreign Languages
Central Washington University                      Central Washington University
400 E. University Way,                                  400 E University Way
Ellensburg, WA. 98926                                  Ellensburg,WA. 98926
E-mail address: kasselin@cwu.edu                E-mail address: morenos@cwu.edu
Phone No: (509) 963-1218                             Phone No: (509) 963-3347
 
Lic. Ivonne Solano- Chávez
Coordinadora del centro de documentación e investigación de las artes
Secretaría de Cultura
Gobierno del estado de Michoacán
Phone numbers: 52/443-3228900 Ext. 141/ 142
isolano@michoacan.gob.mx
www.cultura.michoacan.gob.mex

English & Welsh Diaspora: Regional Cultures, Disparate Voices, Remembered Lives

April 13-16, 2011, Loughborough University

 Keynote and Plenary Speakers:

John Barrell, York University, Roger Ebbatson, Lancaster University, Nick Groom, Exeter University, Ronald Hutton, Bristol University, Bridget Keegan, Creighton University, Donna Landry, University of Kent, Ruth Robbins, Leeds Metropolitan University

Performers, musicians and artists provisionally booked:

JOHN KIRKPATRICK, HUGH LUPTON, CERI RHYS MATTHEWS, BILLY BRAGG, ELIZA CARTHY, CHRIS WOOD.

Others to be announced. In addition to conference panels, there will be music and related workshops.
While the histories of Scots and Irish rural and local culture are well documented, and Celtic tradition celebrated, less explored are the traditional ways of life of English and Welsh rural or local communities and identities in terms of diasporic event. ‘English & Welsh Diaspora’ aims to address all aspects of rural and regional experience, consciousness, and representation of displacement, dispossession, the transformation or destruction of communities, the idea of community, across a millennium of change and loss, from the Norman Invasion and the Harrowing of the North, the loss of Welsh and the decline of the language community in Wales, to more recent historical and cultural events, such as the closure of mines and factories, the gentrification of villages, and the closure of post offices. There will, in addition be the exploration of the historical transformation of the landscape, the relation of land to identity, regional as opposed to national identity, folklore, folk practices and oral tradition through song, dance, story-telling and forms of ritual and seasonal Practice.

Papers are welcome from all humanities disciplines, including, but not restricted to, English, History, Geography, Cultural Studies. Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:
Representations of agricultural labouring classes; regional narratives and representations; Brythonic traditions; George Eliot & the midlands; landscape and identity; traditional song; folklore and belief; seasonal ritual and practice, oral traditions; enclosure; myth and tradition; changing ways of life; John Clare; the English or Welsh village; Thomas Hardy; dispossession & displacement; the remains of Anglo-Saxon culture & language; riots, rebellion, & protest; agricultural & labouring class poetry; William Cobbett’s rural rides; cricket & rural life; local and communal subjectivities; ‘documentary literature’ from Woodforde to Blythe; mummers & Morris; de-Cymrisization; modern rural life; parish records & local history; disappearance of the Welsh language; the Poor law; cultural memory & oral tradition; charity & the poor; politics & policing; rural & regional dialect; parish life; gypsies, witches, poachers, highwaymen & other demonized groups; rural crafts.
 
Proposals of 200- 250 words are invited (deadline 30th September 2010)For further details, or to send a proposal, please contact Julian Wolfreys:(Diaspora@lboro.ac.uk)

Congratulations to Roswitha Burwick on the publication of her exciting new revisionary fairy tale collection:

Merry Sorrows (Un)Happy Endings: Fairy Tales For Our Times (Ed. Roswitha Burwick, et al.)

For hundreds of years, from fairy tale to fairy tale, storytellers have told and retold tales that address the dangers and joys of their lives. Many of the beloved classical fairy tales, however, have become outmoded and reflect denigrating patriarchal views.

Presenting a different—sometimes unexpected—perspective of these well–loved tales, editor Roswitha Burwick, et al. present Merry Sorrows (Un)Happy Endings.

Here, almost all the classical fairy tales—Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, The Frog Prince, The Little Mermaid, Cinderella, Rapunzel, and Sleeping Beauty—have been rewritten from different angles.

Sometimes upsetting the expectation of the reader, it turns the usual fairy tale upside down and inside out, interrogating the deeper meanings of the stories.  But they do not simply question the classical fairy tales; they also create their own intriguing plots.  Witches are not always wicked; parents are not always to be trusted; wolves do not always eat little girls; frogs are not always princes; princesses are not always comatose.

Merry Sorrows (Un)Happy Endings also mirrors the complexity of the human search for the meaning of life, coming of age, the path to the self.  Here, readers will be able to combine a close reading of the tales with a critical stance to discuss the sociopolitical, historical, and ideological subtexts of the stories and to expose the complex layering and modes of subversion buried in the texts. To order the book, or for more information, go to:  www.merrysorrows.com

Congratulations to PAMLA member Catherine Cucinella on the publication of her celebrated new book, Poetics of the Body: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Bishop, Marilyn Chin, and Marilyn Hacker (Palgrave, 2010).

Poetics of the Body examines representations of the body in the work of four important twentieth-century poets: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Bishop, Marilyn Chin, and Marilyn Hacker. Drawing on both past and present discussions regarding the place of the body in relation to Western philosophy, gender, sexuality, desire, creative production, and narrative, this study reveals how the poetic bodies in the poetry of these women negotiate the intersecting ideologies that attempt to regulate the body, its characteristics, and its behaviors. Ultimately, this dynamic bookconsiders what it means to possess a body.

“Cucinella’s intense book about bodily representation provides a new way of seeing the work of Millay, Bishop, Chin, and Hacker. Its synthetic theorizations, brilliant close readings, and final dialogue with Chin bring the study of the represented female body to a new plateau. An essential book.”—Steven Gould Axelrod, author of Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words and co-editor of The New Anthology of American Poetry, Volumes 1-3

“Poetics of the Body offers a first-rank conversation about the cultural politics of ‘the body’ in recent American women’s poetry. I predict that Cucinella’s readings of Millay, Bishop, Chin, and Hacker will place her solidly at the forefront of a new wave of feminist scholars who write about poetry. This work is essential for anyone interested in ‘the body’s’ often contentious relationship to gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class.”—Camille Roman, author of Elizabeth Bishop’s World War II-Cold War View and co-editor of The Women & Language Debate: A Sourcebook 

“Cucinella’s Poetics of the Body is a refreshing book. By listening attentively to the distinct story of the body that each of her four poets has to tell, Cucinella offers a compelling and diverse story of American women’s poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For Cucinella, a poem is not a mask for the poet to hide behind but a place to explore and perform the problems, fears, challenges, and pleasures of the body. In elegant, theoretically sophisticated readings that ground each poets’ work in place, time, and experience, a unique poetics of the body comes into focus—Edna St. Vincent Millay’s commodified body, Elizabeth Bishop’s ambiguous body, Marilyn Chin’s investigations of the body in the context of the Chinese American immigrant experience, and Marilyn Hacker’s complex intertwining of body and language. It is finally, though, the exuberance Cucinella conveys, the delight she takes in poetic craft, and the careful attention she pays to a poet’s body of work, that marks this book as worth reading.”—Bethany Hicok, author of Degrees of Freedom: American Women Poets and the Women’s College, 1905-1955

“Cucinella's book is smart, thorough, informative, and forward-thinking. It adds a great deal to current conversations about representation of the body in literature.”—Dr. Renee R. Curry, author of White Women Writing White: H.D., Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, and Whiteness

The editors of Gender and Space in Britain, 1660-1820 seek essays that identify, delineate, and explore new cartographies— geographic and metaphoric—of gender in literature authored by British women between 1660 and 1820.
 
This collection begins with the historical and theoretical recognition of the ways in which space both constitutes and represents identity. As Henri Lefebvre has pointed out, historically the temporal and spatial have been gendered masculine and feminine. At the same time, however, scholars such as Lefebvre, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu have demonstrated that the early modern period, specifically the eighteenth century, was a turning point in the redefinition of the geographical landscape and the social terrain of Western Europe. Transformations in foundational British structures including class, politics, economics, and print culture during the long eighteenth century reconfigured and created new concepts of both space and gender. What did these reconfigurations demand and what opportunities did they provide for men and for women? In particular, how do women (re)define, occupy, negotiate, inscribe and create new spaces, cross borders and construct both concrete and abstract new cartographies during this period in Britain?
 
Possible topics of exploration include but are not limited to:
 
*The City and/or the Countryside
*The Space(s) of the Nation or Beyond
*Space and Revolution
*Border Crossings, Exile and Migrations
*Professional Spaces
*Domestic Space(s)
*Sacred/Profane Places and Spaces
*Body Spaces
*Space and Genre (ex. satire, poetry, the novel, the Gothic, non-fictional prose)
 
Please send a 1-page abstract and a 2-page CV as a .doc or .docx attached to an email to mnarain@tcu.edu and to gevirtka@shu.edu by September 1, 2010.

Stanley Orr, professor of English at the University of Hawai'i, West O 'ahu, and longtime PAMLA member and current PAMLA Executive Committee member, has published a ground-breaking new work on American crime fiction and film:

Darkly Perfect World: Colonial Adventure, Postmodernism, and American Noir

Stanley Orr’s Darkly Perfect World offers a large-scale historical nar­rative about the way American crime fiction and film have changed throughout the twentieth century. Orr argues that films noirs and noir fictions dramatize Raymond Chandler’s pronouncement that “Even in death, a man has a right to his own identity.” Orr illumi­nates a noir ethos committed to “authenticating alienation”: sub­jectivity managed through radical polarization of Self and Other. Distinguishing a heretofore unrecognized context for American noir, Orr demonstrates that Chandler and Dashiell Hammett arrive at this subject within and against the colonial adventure genre. While the renegades of Joseph Conrad and Louis Becke project a figure vulnerable to shifts in cultural context, the noir protagonist exempli­fies alienated selfhood and often performs a “continental operation” against the slippages of the colonial adventurer. But even as Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, and other noir virtuosi persist with this revision of late Victorian adventure, Chester Himes, Dorothy Hughes, and John Okada experiment with hard-boiled alienation for a subver­sion of noir that resonates throughout literary postmodernism. In their respective avant-garde novels, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, and Paul Auster expose what K.W. Jeter terms the “darkly perfect world” of noir, thus giving rise to and enabling the con men and “connected guys” of contemporary films noirs such as Bryan Sing­er’s The Usual Suspects, David Fincher’s Seven, Christopher Nolan’s Memento, and Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.
 
“Darkly Perfect World is an accom­plished, engaging, and stimulating book. It offers an ambitious and in some ways quite original argument about an important strain of literary and cultural history. It will make a success­ful contribution to the fields of noir studies as well as postcolonial studies.” —Sean McCann, professor of English, Wesleyan University
 
“Stanley Orr gives us a ripping yarn of the hard-boiled detective's emergence from late imperial adventure, and backs it up with sterling scholarship. This book earns its authority with a towering command of primary materi­als, which it judiciously synthesizes and sharply theorizes. It is a book such as we rarely see. Darkly Perfect World is not just another set of smart opinions about the noir canon, rehashing the usual suspects, but a new perspective gained by reading what no one else has bothered to, and making it rel­evant.” —Martin Kevorkian, associate professor of English, The University of Texas at Austin

For more information about Darkly Perfect World, go to:  http://osupress.blogspot.com/2010/03/orr-darkly-perfect-world.html

Congratulations Stan!

PAMLA Member John Hill has published a new work on Beowulf:

The Narrative Pulse of Beowulf: Arrivals and Departures. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008).

Mark C. Amodio, Professor of English at Vassar College, writes of the book:  "John M. Hill has long been acknowledged as the leading student of what we may call the sociology of Anglo-Saxon England, and his new book is certain to solidify his standing as one of today's most important and astute readers of the social context out of which Beowulf emerged. The Narrative Pulse of Beowulf is infused with Hill's deep erudition but manages throughout to be extremely accessible. It offers a fresh and compelling way of reading the most widely known and studied work of medieval English literature. This is a welcome addition to Beowulf scholarship, and one that will attract a broad readership."

John's book, On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and Other Old English Poems, is forthcoming from the University of Toronto Press later this year.  Congratulations John.

PAMLA member Susan Morgan has two exciting announcements. First, her cultural biography, Bombay Anna: The Real Story and Remarkable Adventures of the King and I Governess (University of California Press, 2008), was selected by the American Library Association (ALA) for their list of "The Best of the Best from the University Presses" for 2009.

Additionally, a second, expanded and significantly revised, edition of Bombay Anna is being published by Silkworm Books in Thailand in January 2010. Congratulations Susan!

Longtime PAMLA member and former PAMLA president Gunter H. Hertling has published Hard Times: My Youth under National Socialism (and Beyond) 1935-1947. (Haag + Herchen: Frankfurt a.M., 2008; published in English).

Professor Emeritus G. H. Hertling was born in 1930 in Pasadena, California of German parents. Their last and final visit back to Germany from California proved fatal. Young American Gunter Hertling and his German mother could not return, whereas his father succeeded in repatriating to California alone.  Caught in Hitler’s "Grand German Empire of a Thousand Years" initially in airraid-riddled Hamburg and later in bombed-out Munich, Gunter attended a private, then state administered high school in Bavaria. Torn between identifying with National Socialism on the one hand as a member of the Hitler Youth and yet as a German-American with liberal-democratic ideals on the other, Hertling here vividly recalls the turbulent hard times during World War II: he fully remembers, reminisces about and relates to large portions of those historical and personal events that affected his formative years psychologically and emotionally. His central narrative is enriched by two subtexts—a series of historical and personal images. While this fascinating and important memoir has a German publisher, it is written in English.

PAMLA member Jeremiah B.C. Axelrod is proud to announce the recent publication of his book, Inventing Autopia: Dreams  and Visions of the Modern Metropolis in Jazz Age Los Angeles (2009), by the University of California Press. Inventing Autopia explores the profound relationship between imagination and place, visuality and legibility, showing how the clash of irreconcilable utopian visions and dreams resulted in the invention of an unforeseen new form of urbanism—sprawling, illegible, fractured—that would reshape not only Southern California but much of the nation in the years to come: http://inventingautopia.com

Stanford University Emeritus Professor of Humanities, Marjorie Perloff, says that "this book belongs on your shelf next to Reyner Banham and Mike Davis, but Axelrod is more learned than either... [it] is also immensely readable!"

University of California English Professor John Ganim adds, "Flat-out one of the most interesting books I've read in years. To say that a book about California might rank with Kevin Starr's Americans and the California Dream or Mike Davis' City of Quartz is dangerously high praise, but I think Axelrod's book may someday be in that league."