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The Organising Committee wishes to gratefully acknowledge the
assistance of Prof Claire Connolly and Ms Anne Fitzgerald of the
School of English, Ms Karen Coughlan of CACSSS, and Dr Alan
Gibbs, Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Chair of the IAAS.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
SCHEDULE
ABSTRACTS & ACADEMIC BIOS
Panel 1
3
5
5
Make America Again
Panel 2
6
America Under Surveillance
Panel 3
8
Make America Play Again
Panel 4
9
Mapping Masculinity
Panel 5
10
Boundaries of Choice
Panel 6
12
Whose Lives Matter?
Panel 7
13
Heteronormativity Threatened
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SCHEDULE
Registration
9:00 – 9:30
9:30 – 9:40
Conference Opening,
with remarks by Dr. Alan Gibbs, chair of the IAAS.
Panel 1
Make America Again
9:40 – 10:45
Chair: Eoin O'Callaghan
Loretta Goff, UCC, The Alienisation of the ‘American Dream’ in In America (2002) and Irish Jam (2006)
Sean Travers, UCC, ‘Who is the villain?: Perpetrator trauma and the role of the reader in American Aiction’
Clair Sheehan, UL, “My Country or Yours – Make America Aware Again”
Tea/Coffee
10:45 – 11:00
Panel 2
America Under Surveillance
11:00 – 12:05 Chair: Miranda Corcoran
Jaime Harrison, QUB, The Authorship of Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour: Reclaiming Subjectivity in an Era of Algorithmic Governmentality.
James Cronin, UCC, A Nation under Judgement: Congressman Frank Kowalski’s rhetorical deployment of Thomas Merton’s Prayer for Peace, 18 April 1962
William O'Neill, UL, Wikileaks and the Pentagon Papers: The Editorship and Historical SigniAicance of Leaked Material
Break
12:05 – 12:20
Panel 3 & 4 Make America Play Again
12:20 – 1:10
Chair: Rosemary Gallagher
Mapping Masculinity
Chair: Dara Downey
Catherine Casey, UCD, Tricksters Eva Burke, TCD, Nowhere to Go: and Traitors: the Con Game as a Masculinity, Mobility and the Death Drive in Trope of American Post-­‐War Culture Dorothy Hughes' In a Lonely Place
in Films of David Mamet
Lucy Cheseldine, TCD, Theatrical Leona Blair, QUB, Ever-­‐so-­‐mucho-­‐macho’: Society: Class, Race and Circus Tricks Gender Politics in Ana Castillo’s Peel My in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn
Love like an Onion and The Guardians.
1:10 – 2:25
Lunch
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Panel 5 & 6 Boundaries of Choice
2:25 – 3:15
Whose Lives Matter?
Chair: Ciaran Kavanagh
Chair: Caroline Schroeter
Jennifer Gouck, QUB, “They’re good boys really. This all just got out of hand.” Representing (American) Rape Culture and Trauma in Louise O’Neill’s Asking for It.
Sarah Cullen, TCD, “[K]eep at a distance from every murderous weapon, on occasions when rage is likely to take place of reason:” Charles Brockden Brown and the Second Amendment.
Sarah Ann Elizabeth McCreedy, UCC, ‘Rethinking decisions they’d already made’: New naturalism and Neoliberal identity in ZZ Packer’s Drinking Coffee Elsewhere
Patricia Malone, QUB, My Dream or Yours: Make America Grrreat Again: Riot Girl, Identity Politics and the ‘Great Feminist Sell Out’.
Break
3:15 – 3:30
Panel 7
Heteronormativity Threatened
3:30 – 4:25
Chair: Jenny Daly
Emily Bourke, TCD, "The Town is Dying": Ecosystems, Economy, and Ecohorror in Peter Benchley's Jaws Jordan Markey, NUIG, Conscientious Enthusiasm: The Reshaping of Identities on the American Home Front During the First World War
4:25 – 5:00
6:30
W.T.M Riches Prize Awarding & Closing Remarks
Conference Dinner,*
Curran's Resaturant, Adelaide St.
* Registration for the conference dinner is processed online. If you have not registered for the conference dinner but wish to attend, please alert a member of the organising committee as soon as possible, as there may still be limited seating available.
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ABSTRACTS & ACADEMIC BIOS
PANEL 1
MAKE AMERICA AGAIN
The Alienisation of the ‘American Dream’ in In America (2002) and Irish Jam (2006) Loretta Goff, University College Cork This paper links the “alien” experiences of the American immigrant and emigrant protagonists of In America and Irish Jam, interrogating the failure of the economically focussed “American Dream” addressed in these Ailms, along with their suggested reconceptualisation of it. An “alien” theme runs throughout In America, from the Irish Sullivan family’s status as “illegal aliens” in New York to radio and television voices we diegetically overhear discussing the existence of (space) aliens and the inclusion of numerous references to, and metaphorical uses of, E.T. (1982). Amidst this, as an immigrant narrative, the Ailm also includes direct interaction with the “American Dream” by both the parents and young children of the family, contrasting economic and social perceptions of it. Examples of this address various approaches to (and deAinitions of) success: hard work paying off versus gamble and risk, caring and helping versus threatening or demanding, and social inclusion versus difference. Though not directly referenced in Irish Jam, the idea of “being alien” is similarly present in this Ailm, embodied in the African-­‐American protagonist who comes to a small Irish village after winning a contest. He is initially cast as an Other, in a culture that is alien to him, before eventually Ainding himself at home there. As is the case in numerous other Ailms with American protagonists who ultimately move to Ireland, the suggestion made here is that he has traded in the capitalist “American Dream” for a more socially centred Irish one. Ultimately, the economic struggles and failures of the protagonists in both Ailms are cast aside in favour of the successful familial healing which results in each, implying that this is the real dream. Loretta Goff is an Irish Research Council PhD candidate in Film and Screen Media at the University College Cork where she is also a tutor in the School of English. Her research interests include Kilm and identity, representations of Irish-­‐America, and the exportation of culture through Kilm and new media. ‘Who is the villain?: Perpetrator trauma and the role of the reader in American Yiction’ Sean Travers, University College Cork The trauma narrative is a staple of American literature. From the Aiction of Kurt Vonnegut to Hollywood cinema, texts that centre on traumatic events and experiences have assumed a lasting role in American culture. However, according to dominant trauma theory, trauma confounds narrative knowledge, and texts should therefore aim to ‘transmit’ rather than represent directly the suffering of their protagonists. To make the reader ‘feel’ the symptoms of characters in the narrative then, traumatic events in American Aiction are usually represented through indirect and experimental aesthetic forms. However, while this aesthetic supposedly transmits to the reader symptoms of trauma victims, what critics overlook is how trauma Aiction may transmit to us symptoms of perpetrator trauma, that is, symptoms speciAic of characters that have committed wrongdoings or acts of violence such as feelings of culpability and guilt. This paper argues that a way texts can achieve this is through a particular evolution found in contemporary Aiction: since the emergence of postmodernity, an age of fragmentation, pluralism and subjective truth, the position of the reader has gradually evolved from passive recipient unquestioningly receiving the narrative, to a more active participant with varying degrees of control over the text. From American postmodern literature to contemporary Ailm, popular television series and video games, there has been a gradual increase in the level of ‘audience IAASPG16
participation’ in Aiction, with texts giving audiences increasing opportunities to interpret and engage with them, and thereby enabling us to shape their content and meaning. This paper explores how this shift in the reader’s position imparts on the reader a degree of responsibility for traumatic events that occur in trauma narratives and produces in us feelings of culpability and guilt, thereby positioning the reader as trauma perpetrators rather than trauma victims, and transforming us into the ‘villain’ of the narrative. My name is Sean Travers. I am a second year PhD student in the School of English in University College Cork (UCC). My PhD thesis, entitled ‘Innovative Representations of Trauma’, examines representations of trauma in popular culture and postmodern literature. My research interests include American literature, postmodernism, popular culture, trauma Kiction, reader-­‐response studies and narratology. “My Country or Yours – Make America Aware Again” Dr Clair A. Sheehan, University of Limerick “The thing that is interesting about living in another country is that it is difAicult to forget you’re American. The actions of the American Government won’t let you,” Don DeLillo reAlected in a 2005 interview (Harris 18). These words ring true for many Americans living abroad who love their country but Aind it difAicult to justify U.S. foreign policy. For those citizens, national-­‐consciousness, or even self-­‐awareness, can become almost instinctive thus creating a sense of “disconnect” from the homeland which virtually obliges expatriated Americans to critically view both their country’s “self-­‐
image and its image in the eyes of the world” (Kauffman 353). In many cases the sight seems less than perfect. These American imperfections are deeply imbedded into the fabric of Don DeLillo’s work. Through it he has explored the American experience by examining many of the nation’s interactions with the rest of the world. Indeed, no other contemporary American author has captured the reality of political America as adeptly as Don DeLillo. Using a DeLillo novel from each of the last four decades as an example, this paper will look critically at The Names (1983), Mao II (1991), Point Omega (2010) and his most recent work Zero K (2016). The study will then seek to trace the perceived need to “disconnect” from the actions of the American Government as it is experienced by DeLillo’s characters (Kauffman 353). It will argue that his temporarily move to Greece when writing The Names afforded DeLillo the opportunity to observe America with fresh eyes. This added awareness together with his innate insight, enhanced his ability to both anticipate and reveal the bounds of the American experience. Works Cited: • Harris, Robert R. “A Talk with Don DeLillo.” Conversations with Don DeLillo. Ed. Thomas DePietro. The University of Mississippi Press, 2005. 16-­‐20. Print. • Kauffman, Linda S. “The Wake of Terror: Don DeLillo’s ‘In the Ruins of the Future,’ ‘Baader-­‐
Meinhof,’ and Falling Man.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 54. 2 (2008): 353-­‐77. Print. Clair A. Sheehan completed her PhD at the University of Limerick. Her doctoral thesis focused on the impact the terrorist attacks of 9/11 have had on American literature, particularly how these attacks were revisited and rewritten by U.S. novelists, and under what ideological constrictions. Her research interests centre on American writers whose work engages with the political. Clair has been teaching on a variety of English literature modules at the University of Limerick. PANEL 2
AMERICA UNDER SURVEILLANCE
The Authorship of Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour: Reclaiming Subjectivity in an Era of Algorithmic Governmentality. Jaime Harrison, Queen’s University BelKiast !6
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Within days of meeting Edward Snowden in Hong Kong, journalist Glenn Greenwald published his Airst story revealing that the American government was collecting “the communication records of millions of US citizens […] indiscriminately and in bulk” (“NSA collecting”). The urgency of his reportage and continual engagement with Snowden’s revelations contrasts with the approach of Ailmmaker Laura Poitras, who despite meeting Snowden alongside Greenwald remained relatively silent until the release of her documentary Citizenfour (2014) seventeen months later. My paper considers how Poitras utilises the documentary form to inform her audience about government surveillance. The surveillance revealed by Snowden and depicted in Poitras’s Ailm intersects with Antoinette Rouvroy’s deAinition of “algorithmic governmentality”, which she criticises for operating on an individual’s proAile without “calling the subject to account for himself” (“The end(s)” 2). Rouvroy contrasts the loss of subjectivity within algorithmic governmentality with acts of self-­‐
authorship enabled by opposing systems, exempliAied by the judicial process which “provides a scene where subjects perform their authorship, with an authority to speak, to give account of themselves” (“The end(s)” 15). My paper argues that through a subversive merger of cinema vérité techniques and those derived from more traditional narrative Ailms, Citizenfour acts as a similar mode of self-­‐authorship which reclaims subjectivity and disrupts the roles assigned to Poitras’s subjects through an algorithmic system. Works Cited • Greenwald, Glenn.“NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily”. The Guardian. The Guardian, 6 June 2013. Web. 20 May 2016. • Poitras, Laura, dir. Citizenfour. Radius-­‐TWC, 2014. Film. • Rouvroy, Antoinette. “The end(s) of critique: data-­‐behaviourism vs. due-­‐process”. Pre-­‐publication version of chapter published in Privacy, Due Process and the Computational Turn: Philosophers of Law Meet Philosophers of Technology. Ed. Mirielle Hildebrandt and Ekatarina De Vries. Abingdon : Routledge, 2012. Web. 20 May 2016. Jaime recently completed a Master's in English Literary Studies at Queen's University Belfast. He received his BA in English Literature from The Open University in 2015 and BSc in Computer Science from Queen's in 2007. His MA thesis was concerned with representations of self-­‐consciousness in the work of David Foster Wallace. He hopes to continue onto PhD study to consider contemporary American literature's engagement with the issues emerging from the Big Data era. A Nation under Judgement: Congressman Frank Kowalski’s rhetorical deployment of Thomas Merton’s Prayer for Peace, 18 April 1962 James G. R. Cronin, University College Cork On Wednesday, 18 April 1962, the day before Congress broke for Easter recess, Frank Kowalski, Democratic representative for Connecticut, addressed the House of Representatives on the perils of the imminent resumption of American atmospheric nuclear testing through the rhetoric of a prayer for peace written by celebrity Catholic American writer Thomas Merton. Kowalski deployed the prayer to caution Washington elite policy-­‐makers to practice the wisdom of moderation in relation to resuming atmospheric weapons testing as a response to the resumption of atmospheric testing by the Soviet Union in September 1961. These events marked a precarious juncture in the evolution of superpower nuclear diplomacy during the Cold War between the Berlin crisis in 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Despite the Congressional prayer’s inclusion within the corpus of Merton’s social writings, it has received little critical commentary. This paper draws on archival sources at the Thomas Merton Center in Louisville, Kentucky and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, Massachusetts to discuss the commissioning of Merton’s prayer in the context of a revival of Hiroshima, Nagasaki survivor memory that had been rhetorically conscripted by 1962 to promote peace consciousness. The prayer’s impact will be assessed in the context of the Kennedy administration’s nuclear diplomacy on the day the prayer was read in Congress. Days of prayer have had a tradition of symbolic association with the public life of the nation since the American Revolution. This prayer was forged during a time of crisis and was rhetorically deployed with urgency. It conformed to the formula of American civil religion by infusing religious faith and national !7
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patriotism with political resonance. However, the prayer Kowalski read into the Congressional Record departed from this formula by exposing inherent contradictions between Washington’s war policies and its espoused values of America as a virtuous nation within the international political system. James G.R. Cronin, a part-­‐time doctoral history student under the supervision of Professor David Ryan, Head of the School of History at University College Cork. He was the recipient of an IAAS Postgraduate Research & Travel Bursary in May 2015. James's study focuses on the social criticism of American writer Thomas Merton (1915-­‐1968). James is concentrating on Merton's essays on war and peace speciKically written to mobilize American public opinion against the arms race in the year prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis during October 1962. He is especially interested in exploring how Merton employed independent media networks of production and distribution to circumvent the normalizing discourses circulated by the mass media throughout American society at the height of the Cold War (1947-­‐91). James has used the IAAS bursary to support his research at theThomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky. Wikileaks and the Pentagon Papers: The Editorship and Historical SigniYicance of Leaked Material. William O’Neill, University of Limerick This paper covers the value of modern leaked material and issues relating to secrecy, leaking and whistleblowing, with speciAic examples from the ten million documents that have been released by Wikileaks since 2010 and it compares the signiAicance of these documents with the release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Daniel Elsberg stated that Edward Snowden ‘is the greatest patriot whistleblower of our time, and he knows what I learned more than four decades ago: until the Espionage Act gets reformed, he can never come home safe and receive justice.’ Historians and political commentators have differing views on the value of the leaked material to researchers even though Snowden believes ‘after the debate over the publication of these cables has been forgotten, the documents themselves will remain a valuable archive for scholars and students of US foreign policy.’ This paper examines how the ‘valuable archive’ poses signiAicant challenges for researchers, and argues that the Wikileaks archive is not a neutral entity due to the controlled and timed releases of certain document collections. It will also examine the arguments around editorship at Wikileaks, and how it effects historians who are using this type of material in their research. William O’Neill is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Limerick, and his research focuses on US covert operations in Central America during the 1970s and 1980s. He completed his B.A. and M.A. in UL in 2013 and 2015, respectively. He is also the inaugural winner of the UL Department of History & Limerick Museum and Archives Scholarship Award. PANEL 3
MAKE AMERICA PLAY AGAIN
Tricksters and Traitors: the Con Game as a Trope of American Post-­‐War Culture in Films of David Mamet Catherine Casey, University College Dublin The con game is part of what Elizabeth Ann Hubbert calls the dark underside of the ‘American Way.’ She goes on to say that, American playwright and Ailm director David Mamet, ‘views American culture itself as a conAidence game and employs conAidence games in his work to engage in a complex of sustained critique of the myth of American exceptionalism and its outgrowth in the late twentieth century.’ The con game, which is basically the art of swindling people, is a recurring leitmotif of American culture and literature. !8
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Mamet’s work which for the past thirty years been a controversial and critically important force, has placed him at the forefront of American theatre and the Ailm industry. Linked to the master theme of illusion that typiAies his near predecessors Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, the con game, strongly associated with an urban setting, is a major theme in Mamet’s canonical Ailms. Using the theories of dark play as developed by Richard Schechner, this paper seeks to explore how the conAidence game as a trope of post-­‐World War II American culture works in Mamet’s Ailms, The Verdict (1982), House of Games (1987), and Oleanna (1994). I am an occasional lecturer and tutor in Performance Studies in the drama department in the School of English, Drama and Film U.C. D. with a specialist interest in American drama and gender. My phD thesis was on space in works of American director David Mamet. In 2015, I was fortunate to win a travel bursary by the IAAS to travel to the U.S. to conduct research. I am also a (creative) writer and have been published under my pseudonym, Leonie O’Hara. Theatrical Society: Class, Race and Circus Tricks in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn Lucy Cheseldine, Trinity College Dublin
In her book of the same title, Shelley Fisher Fishkin asks of Mark Twain’s most well-­‐known novel, “Was Huck Black?”. As she herself admits from the outset, of course the answer is no. But a closer look at certain moments in Twain’s text troubles this question, exposing the fault lines though which class and race are constructed and proliferated in American society. In this paper, I focus on Huck’s suggested position of liminality in certain spaces in the novel. These spaces and his movements within them, become openings through which to read performativity as the device that characterises hierarchical social frameworks. Falling between expectations of social behaviour, Huck deAies the limits of capitalism to destabilise both his position as a spectator and his own whiteness, showing the boundaries of class and racial construction through acts of doubling. Lacking a deAined role, he becomes Twain’s vessel for the continued acts of minstrelling that reveal the different ways in which whites and blacks use performance, and the ways in which these are manipulated in order to produce narrative covers. Through a series of close readings -­‐ Huck’s visit to the circus, the framing of his father’s death, and Jim’s emancipation at the end of the novel -­‐ I suggest that Twain as a writer, was also a master performer. He sought both to expose the corrupted means by which class and racial structures are established and to brand himself as an entertainer, with remarkable satirical skill, who plays endlessly in structuring his own comedy of errors. I (Lucy Cheseldine) am a recent graduate from Trinity College Dublin, with an M.Phil in “Literatures of the Americas”. I read my undergraduate degree in English Literature at the University of Glasgow, from which I graduated with a First Class honours. Past and current areas of interest in American Literature include masculinity in 1980s American plays, the poetry of Donald Hall, and Raymond Carver’s editorial relations. PANEL 4
MAPPING MASCULINITY
Nowhere to Go: Masculinity, Mobility and the Death Drive in Dorothy Hughes' In a Lonely Place Eva Burke, Trinity College Dublin This essay examines Dorothy Hughes’ 1947 noir crime novel In a Lonely Place in terms of the extent to which it simultaneously problematises and reinscribes the parameters of the urban landscape in !9
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relation to the white male protagonist. Hughes’ characters frequently negotiate the urban space via automobile or public transport; this private-­‐yet-­‐public interaction with the urban space characterises the fragile dichotomy on which paradigms of post-­‐war masculinity rested; this is a contained and shared mobility, facilitating a potentially troubling re-­‐gendering of public spaces even as it allows him to traverse the streets with greater ease. This democracy of movement and its link with female autonomy is emblematic of the modernist cityscape, according to Christoper Breu: “[the frustration of the white male] appears directed not only at women in public space but at a whole public culture in general that we associate with the modernist city, of which mass public transit and female mobility and autonomy are two crucial emblems.” Hughes’ novel works to explore this frustration and the pervasive violence it gives rise to through what may be read as a hierarchy of mobility; the shifting ideological topography of the American city compounds many of the anxieties around this perceived hierarchy. Having completed an MPhil in Popular Literature at Trinity College, Dublin, Eva Burke is in the Kirst year of her PhD at TCD, focusing on the history and popularity of ‘domestic noir’ Kiction. Her research interests include the gendered dynamics of victimhood in popular crime Kiction and depictions of the monstrous feminine in horror Kiction. ‘Ever-­‐so-­‐mucho-­‐macho’: Gender Politics in Ana Castillo’s Peel My Love like an Onion and The Guardians. Leona Blair, Queen’s University Belfast Drawing upon the author’s own politically charged brand of Chicana feminism, Xicanisma, I undertake a comparative analysis of two of her most recent novels to date: Peel My Love like an Onion (1999) and The Guardians (2007). Particularly focusing on representations of gender politics, I explore how the novels relate both to each other and to the feminist theorising articulated in Castillo’s collection of critical essays: Massacre of the Dreamers (1994). I analyse the various ways in which the novels expose and critique the prevalence of machismo in U.S. society while emphasising the inextricable relationship between gender, racial, and class discrimination for women of colour. In light of the contrasts between the novels’ representations of gender politics, I suggest that Castillo’s feminist thinking has not only evolved signiAicantly since the publication of her theoretical writings but in many ways remains in a state of Alux. I argue that The Guardians in particular marks a signiAicant shift in Castillo’s theorising as the new vision of masculinity it presents is not only in keeping with the proposals on male-­‐female solidarity outlined in Massacre of the Dreamers, but can be read as reAlective of recent developments within the feminist movement as well as social change in the U.S. on a broader scale. I completed my MA in Spanish in 2014 and I am currently in the third year of my PhD at Queen’s University, Belfast. My main research interests include contemporary literature by U.S. Latinas and intersectional feminist theory. More speciKically, my thesis analyses the Kictional and theoretical writings of Chicana writer, Ana Castillo, exploring the ways in which the author’s political theorising on Xicanisma informs her literary and artistic practices. PANEL 5
BOUNDARIES OF CHOICE
“They’re good boys really. This all just got out of hand.” Representing (American) Rape Culture and Trauma in Louise O’Neill’s Asking for It. Jennifer Gouck, Queen’s University Belfast Between 2012 and 2013, the so-­‐called ‘Steubenville Rape Case’ dominated the (American) media, placing an otherwise unremarkable town in Ohio in the world’s eye. On the night of 12th August 2012, !10
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a young girl, debilitated by alcohol, was raped by two boys on her school’s football team: Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond. The assault, of which the victim would later claim she had no memory, was recorded and distributed in both photographs and video via social media. In January 2014, Richmond was released from prison, while Mays was released in the January of the following year. This paper seeks to offer a Trans-­‐Atlantic reading of the ways in which the rape culture so evident in the Steubenville case is represented in Irish author Louise O’Neill’s 2015 novel, Asking for It. How, it will ask, does O’Neill map cultural debates from the United States onto twenty-­‐Airst century Ireland? To what extent does place have a role to play in the rape culture depicted here? Indeed, what is (American) rape culture, and can it truly be deAined? With these questions in mind, my main arguments will emphasise that O’Neill’s choice to focus on the trauma surrounding the rape of the protagonist, Emma, as well as on the culture which inAluenced her rape’s circumstances, works to simultaneously depict and deconstruct this complex socio-­‐political issue. Rape culture takes on extra signiAicance, I argue, due to the notoriety and increasing frequency of cases such as those in Steubenville, Maryville and, more recently, of Stanford swimmer Brock Turner. As such, the paper draws upon cultural, trauma, literary and visual scholars in order to explore the inherent resistances between these strands of theory and the apparent social progress O’Neill seeks to make, with varying levels of success, in her prize-­‐winning second novel. Jennifer has recently completed her MA at Queen’s University and will graduate in December. Her interests include American Young Adult Kiction, post-­‐9/11 Kiction, as well as representations of rape, trauma, and identity (whatever that may mean). She hopes to continue into PhD study, but God knows when that will be. ‘Rethinking decisions they’d already made’: New naturalism and Neoliberal identity in ZZ Packer’s Drinking Coffee Elsewhere Sarah McCreedy, University College Cork This paper will explore the inextricable relationship between the resurgence of American literary naturalism in 21st-­‐century American Aiction and the contemporary ‘neoliberal turn’ within society. I read ZZ Packer’s 2004 short story collection Drinking Coffee Elsewhere as a prime example of new naturalism. Whereas classic naturalism ‘questioned the very concept of free will’ (Campbell, 499), I contend that new naturalism does not doubt the existence of free will. Rather, agency is not a concept which always denotes positive connotations – quite the opposite. I map Jane Elliott’s theory of Suffering Agency onto new naturalism. I argue that under neoliberalism, whilst Packer’s characters’ ‘capacity for choice’ (Elliott’s term), is not crushed, the existence of free will only creates the illusion of freedom, precisely because these individuals make ‘agonised choices among unwelcome options’ (Elliott, 1). To exemplify, in ‘Geese’, Dina is presented with a host of unwelcome options: to live with a man who tried to kill her or become homeless, to prostitute herself or starve. As Rachel Greenwald Smith argues, ‘situations of apparent free choice always exist within a limited terrain’, for example, ‘organic bananas or free trade; natural gas or oil’ (78). Drinking Coffee Elsewhere distinctly imagines ‘limited terrain’ in the naturalist landscape of the mundane everyday. I consider how characters respond to these entrapping environments in different but destructive ways. I conclude by exploring the wider implications of the often irrational or desperate actions carried out by Packer’s characters. Smith adds that in neoliberal society, ‘emotions are increasingly understood as resources to develop and manage, rather than as instances of authentic experience that fall outside rational control’ (6). In Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, lying and running away might be categorised as authentic experiences. However, these actions conAlict with the neoliberal demand for self-­‐governance and are, in typically naturalistic fashion, not without consequence. Sarah McCreedy is Kirst year PhD student at University College Cork, supervised by Dr Alan Gibbs. Her project investigates a resurgence of American literary naturalism in 21st century American Kiction. She completed both her BA in English and MA in English Literary Studies at Queen's University Belfast, graduating from the latter in December 2015. !11
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PANEL 6
WHOSE LIVES MATTER?
“[K]eep at a distance from every murderous weapon, on occasions when rage is likely to take place of reason:” Charles Brockden Brown and the Second Amendment. Sarah Cullen, Trinity College Dublin This paper examines the portrayal of gun violence in the popular literature of Charles Brockden Brown (1771 – 1810). Brown was living in a turbulent time regarding gun ownership in America. The Second Amendment was drafted into the US Constitution in 1791 after years of debate regarding the right of American citizens to bear arms. Brown, as an American citizen (not to mention novelist, historian, and editor of news journals) living in Philadelphia, one of the Airst cities to ratify the amendment, would have experienced this debate Airst-­‐hand. His novels, which span the decade of the 1790s, address the ongoing questions of what the Second Amendment would mean for America. Throughout Brown’s work there are many instances of gun violence that resonate with modern shootings in the United States and beyond. By examining Brown’s depiction of gun violence I will demonstrate that the late eighteenth-­‐century was dealing with many of the same issues as the early twenty-­‐Airst century. The same themes of property, race, class, and surveillance, can be traced from Brown’s work to modern day atrocities such as the Oscar Pistorius trial and Ferguson shooting. In Brown’s works such as “Somnambulism: A Fragment,” Edgar Huntly, and Arthur Mervyn, pistols are frequently used by desperate and fearful individuals in the heat of the moment, leading to death and destruction. Gun violence is often used against minorities and unarmed individuals whose motives have been presupposed by trigger-­‐happy men (and occasionally women), and routinely escalates situations that may otherwise have been handled in a peaceable manner. By highlighting the similarities between gun violence in the eighteenth century and today, this paper will consider Brown’s own nuanced approach to gun control. It will further explore ways in which the modern day gun debate has its roots in the establishment of the United States itself. Sarah Cullen is a PhD candidate of American Literature in Trinity College Dublin under the supervision of Professor Stephen Matterson. Her research area is night studies in nineteenth-­‐century literature. She is a graduate of University College Dublin and was the recipient of several awards there including the Mary Colum Award and the UCD Postgraduate Scholarship. She also won the Irish Association for American Studies 2013 WTM Riches Essay Prize. My Dream or Yours: Make America Grrreat Again: Riot Girl, Identity Politics and the ‘Great Feminist Sell Out’. Patricia Malone, Queen’s University Belfast This paper is developed from one I delivered at the BAAS/IAAS joint conference, in which I looked at the rise of the female voice in the American punk rock memoir. In that paper, I used the conceptual starting point of ‘bedroom culture’, and the importance of ‘alternative cultural histories’, looking particularly at the intersection between standard accounts of the American punk and hardcore scene and those of the riot girl movement. In this paper, I want to trace the way in which the diffuse nature of the punk movement has been pared down and, to some degree, neutered, by the rise of identity politics and, in the case of the impact of riot girl, the rebranding of feminism as a desirable cultural commodity. Where my last paper celebrated the increasing visibility of women in the punk scene, in this paper I take issue with the attitude that visibility in itself is an end, particularly in a political sense. Looking at the rise of ‘pop feminism’, often rooted in the countercultural ‘scene’, and authors such as Roxanne Gay, Nina Power and Jessica Valenti, this paper seeks to explore the recuperative function of contemporary feminist discourse. Is it true that now, at a time when feminism is apparently more loudly shouted about than at any other cultural moment, much is sound and fury, signifying nothing? Or is this critique simply an attempt to dismiss voices of dissent? This paper !12
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seeks to explore the evolving relationship between the personal, the political and the punk in feminist discourse in America. I am a Kinal year PhD candidate at Queen's University Belfast. My thesis explores the transformation of happiness discourse under neoliberalism, and my research interests include the rise of informational/
affective economies, strategies of resistance in contemporary counterculture and the role of literature in enacting dissent. Previously, I have presented papers at BAAS/IAAS events on the complexities of counterculture in the work of Jennifer Egan and the rise of the female voice in the American punk rock memoir. PANEL 7
HETERONORMATIVITY THREATENED
"The Town is Dying": Ecosystems, Economy, and Ecohorror in Peter Benchley's Jaws Emily Bourke, Trinity College Dublin The 1960s and 1970s saw a burgeoning awareness of environmental issues in the United States, and the idea of ecological balance — and, indeed, the disruption thereof — became foundational to the new environmentalist movement. In Peter Benchley's 1974 novel, Jaws, the environment and the economy are comparable systems, both highly dependent on a delicate balance in order to thrive, and the disruption of one closely parallels the disruption of the other. Critical interpretation of Jaws has tended to focus on Steven Spielberg's 1975 blockbuster, and to foreground the many symbolic 'meanings' of the shark. This paper, however, explores the importance of ecological systems as allegory for economic systems in Benchley's original novel, and argues that this relationship is crucial to any understanding of Jaws as an ecohorror text. Emily Bourke is a Government of Ireland Postgraduate Research Scholar at Trinity College Dublin, currently completing the third year of her PhD. She holds a B.A in New Media and English from the University of Limerick, and an M.Phil. in Popular Literature from Trinity. Her research traces the origins and development of eco-­‐horror as a prominent theme in American popular culture, with a particular focus on the period from 1945 to the present. Conscientious Enthusiasm: The Reshaping of Identities on the American Home Front During the First World War Jordan Markey, NUI Galway The entry of the United States into the First World War created signiAicant challenges in regards to mobilisation. While this naturally involved a heavy material component, it also entailed cultivating an enthusiasm towards the war among the general populace on the home front. A crucial part of this was through the codiAication of acceptable American identities as those that contributed to the war effort. This was multi-­‐faceted and formed a central part of many different inter-­‐related processes. Government led propaganda campaigns utilised popular culture and emerging mass media in order to deAine acceptable forms of identity and behaviour. ReconAigurations of the relationship between state and labour would also take place in order to portray productivity as intrinsic and valued to the American nation, creating favourable labour environments through compromise. An active enforcement of identity change allowed an undercurrent of vigilantism to be condoned in American society, where deviants faced both governmental persecution and mob rule. In particular, the new phenomenon of conscientious objectors suffered greatly as a result. The Selective Service system itself would explicitly reAlect a hierarchical system of identity valuation. Minority adapted and various ways, some more successfully than other, with African Americans being particularly important. Women were not excluded from these processes, and were also explicitly and implicitly coerced into conforming to more traditional maternal and supportive roles. This would especially create !13
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difAiculties within the emerging suffragette movement, who went through turmoil internally over how to proceed and with the American public whom they increasingly alienated. This paper will seek to address the aforementioned topics and issues in the context of the American home front, and seek to illustrate how various mainstream identities changed during the period and to what extent did a wartime consolidation of broader identities take place. Jordan Markey is from Carrickmacross, Co. Monaghan. He has obtained a B.Sc. in Computing from Dundalk Institute of Technology and has recently completed a B.A. (Hons.) in History and Geography at NUI Galway, where he has been conferred the title of University Scholar multiple times and has been awarded a Postgraduate Masters Scholarship. He has previously served as the Auditor and Secretary of An Cumann Staire (NUI Galway) and has been a member of the 2016 Irish History Students’ Association Conference Organising Committee. His research interests lie within the modern United States – in particular, the Civil War, Reconstruction, presidential legacies, terrorism and foreign policy. Currently, he is completing a M.A. in History at NUI Galway, where his thesis addresses Irish reactions towards U.S. presidential visits to the Republic of Ireland. !14
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NOTES
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