Meeting 265

British Association for American Studies

Minutes 265th

Minutes of the 265th Meeting of the Executive Committee, held at the University of Manchester on 14 January 2011 at 1.00pm.

1. Present: M Halliwell (Chair), W Kaufman (Vice Chair), C Morley (Secretary), T Saxon (Treasurer), I Bell, D Ellis, Z Feghali, S Lucas, G Lewis, R Mason, and M Whalan.

Apologies: C Bates, M Collins, P Davies, J Fagg, I Morgan and T Ruys Smith.

In attendance: Dr Rachael McLennan (UEA).

2. Minutes of the Previous Meeting

After some minor amendments, these were accepted as a true record and will now go on the website.

3. Matters Arising

4. Chair’s Business (MH reporting)

(a) Announcements

Professor Heidi Macpherson has been appointed as Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research at De Montfort University from January 2011.
Dr Celeste-Marie Bernier, School of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham, has been awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize worth £70,000 for her research in the History of African American Art.
The new Journal of American Studies team is Professor Scott Lucas (Birmingham) as Editor, Dr Celeste-Marie Bernier (Nottingham) as Associate Editor (Reviews) and Dr Bevan Sewell (Nottingham) as Associate Editor (Media). The terms of Scott and Celeste are January 2011 to December 2014, and for Bevan January 2011 to December 2012 (renewable for one term).
Professor Guo-Qiang Qiao from Shanghai International Studies University will be a Leverhulme Visiting Fellow in American Literature at the University of Leicester in spring 2011 and spring 2012.
MH has been appointed to the English Association Higher Education Committee, which will be useful for BAAS, particularly as the Chair of the AHRC sits on that Committee. MH will report back to the Exec after the EAHEC meeting next week.

(b) Invitations

MH noted that he had attended the very-well organized BAAS Postgraduate Conference at the RAI, Oxford in November 2010, along with CM, MW, DE, MC and ZF. MH also had the opportunity to have a follow-up meeting with Lauren Welch from the Fulbright Commission. At the PG conference, Lauren, MC and MH provided a triple-header talk about BAAS, the Fulbright Commission and the NYU Summer School; and DE gave a very useful lunchtime session on publishing.
MH attended a meeting at the British Academy at the end of October for Scholarly Associations – his report was circulated at the time. MH spoke to Professor Bruce Brown, the Chair of REF Panel D, at this event.
MH was invited to, but couldn’t attend, a meeting on internationalization at the British Academy on 11 November (the day of the student strikes).
BAAS held the Heads of American Studies meeting at the Institute for the Study of the Americas on 10 December 2010. The Secretary’s minutes were circulated to those in attendance and the wider Heads/Representatives list.
MH will be attending the launch of the Campaign for Social Sciences at the House of Lords on 20 January along with the Secretary, and also the AHRC Emergency General Meeting at the Royal Academy of Arts on 4 February.

MH wrote to David Willetts in October (on the day of the Browne Report) about BAAS’s concerns regarding 4-year degrees. He received a rather generic response in late November which acknowledges our concerns.
MH wrote to Roger Kain, the Dean of the School of Advanced Study, London, to promote the cause of the Institute for the Study of the Americas. With Tim Lynch moving to Melbourne, Iwan Morgan remains the only full-time US specialist at the ISA. MH noted he received a receptive letter from Roger Kain and will follow this up.
MH wrote to the organisers of this year’s BAAS Postgraduate Conference, Stephen Ross and Aaron Hanlon, to congratulate them on a successful conference.
MH wrote to Susan Castillo to mark the end of her term of office as Editor of the Journal of American Studies.
MH has continued to correspond about the REF over the last three months. IB asked if MH had been in touch with Professor Birch (English). MH noted that he had been in touch with her, as he had been with other REF Subpanel Chairs.

(d) Consultations

Major business here involved the AS Heads meeting held on 10 December. The key issues discussed at the meeting were: (i) Recruitment Patterns; (ii) Institutional Change; (iii) REF 2014 & Impact; and (iv) External Relations: Subject Centres and the BAAS Internship.

The following action points emerged from the Heads meeting:

The Chair will write to strategic individuals in the community and policy bodies, on the proviso that Heads send names to MH by the end of January 2011.

BAAS will consider ways to lobby Vice-Chancellors regarding 4-year degrees, but we should wait until the release of the White Paper before proceeding with this action point. We agreed to present two proposals: (i) 1/3 fees for year abroad and/or (ii) scholarships within the subject area. The scholarship model seems to be favoured strategy.
BAAS will write to the AS REF panellists with these five points: (i) the quality of a given piece should be given primacy; (ii) international reach is crucially important; (iii) cross-referral is important for American Studies scholarship; (iv) to take heed of cross-disciplinary impact; and (v) emphasize the high calibre of US presses and stringent review processes for edited books.
BAAS will advertise the BAAS Fulbright Internship.
BAAS will develop a strategy regarding the HEA Subject Centres.

MH will circulate a set of PowerPoint slides from an Impact Event held recently at Leicester.
DE added that the LLAS Subject Centre is having an emergency meeting in London today to discuss the way ahead for the subject centre if and when it is cut lose from the HEA in York. They are contemplating strategies on how they might continue as a subject centre and the financial sources that will need to be available be able to maintain it. He noted the possibility also of the HEA locating people across the country. DE will report on this at the next meeting when he has firmer details. MH noted that we cannot develop a strategy until we know what’s happening. In terms of the English Subject Centre personnel, he noted that Nicole King and Ben Knights may try to maintain roles at RHUL.
The logistics of the BAAS Internship were discussed in detail. Finalised copy of the document has been re-circulated and all Exec members are encouraged to promote. WK’s successor as Development subcom chair will act as mentor to the BAAS Intern.
In terms of the first action point above, MH noted that he had not had any information on the names/contact details of policy bodies. MH will pursue SN for information and he asked the Exec to forward names/contacts.
In terms of the second action point, the Exec discussed how institutions and American Studies centres could defray the extra cost of doing a 4-year degree for future AS students. MH noted that the discussion at the Heads of AS meeting had produced two possible strategies (mentioned above), and the Heads favoured the second of these. The Exec endorsed this. MW noted that in terms of fair access, the major problem students face is with the visa, i.e. having money in the bank to guarantee their visa and suggested that this needs to be addressed too. MH will talk to subject associations in ML to get a sense of their plans for the 4-year degree and to share our ideas. The Exec agreed it was best to wait until after the publication of the White Paper before writing to Vice Chancellors.

5. Secretary’s Business

(a) CM noted that, as usual, her main role revolved around information flow. She regularly passed information on to Kaleem Ashraf, Graeme Thompson and Michael Collins for ASIB, the mailbase and the website respectively. She helped direct people with research and awards queries to the appropriate sources. She had also updated our Awards listings with the Peterson’s Register.

(b) CM reported that she had fielded a number of queries from scholars in the US about BAAS membership and BAAS publications. She thanked DE for securing some documents from the BAAS Archive in Birmingham.

(c) CM noted that she had attended the BAAS Postgraduate Conference at the RAI, Oxford in November 2010, along with MH, MW, DE, MC and ZF.

(d) CM noted that she had liaised with Lauren Welch and others from the Fulbright Commission about improving links with BAAS. She also publicised a number of Fulbright initiatives.

(e) CM noted that work on the newly designed BAAS leaflet has stalled and she will leave this task for her successor.

(f) CM will be attending the launch of the Campaign for Social Sciences at the House of Lords on 20 January. She also intends to attend the launch of the Humanities Matter Campaign at the House of Commons on 9 March 2011.

(g) CM attended the AS Heads meeting in December 2010 (Minutes previously circulated).

(h) CM noted that she, along with IB and RM, had interviewed the shortlisted candidates for the BAAS Wyoming Graduate Assistantship awards on 13 January 2011.

(i) CM added that she had been advertising the upcoming BAAS elections, where the position of Secretary and three 3-year Exec positions would be available. She asked the Exec to publicise the AGM and the elections to ensure we get good candidates to stand.

(j) CM reported that she had spent quite a lot of time updating archive sections of the website including the addition of recent Minutes, back issues of ASIB, and she had amended some links to AS centres. More work is required to bring these sections fully up to date.

6. Treasurer’s Business (TS reporting)

(a) The Treasurer noted that the bank accounts (as at 13/01/11) were as follows: General Deposit, £46,685.17; Short Term Awards, £1,883.15 (TS will move to close this account as it will be easier to manager the accounts); Current, £944.65; making a total of £49,512.97. The RBS Jersey account has been closed and the US Dollar Account has $9,454.27.

(b) TS reported that fully paid up members for 2011 (14/01/11) currently stand at 296 (122 postgraduate). This compares favourably to the position last year, which was 210 (with 74 postgraduates). When those who haven’t so far updated their Standing Orders and those who have not yet renewed for 2011 (i.e. those who pay by cheque) are included, the numbers rise to 424 (154 postgraduate).

(d) TS added that the online system is working well and is proving to be very effective despite the occasional blip. She noted that she receives a lot of spam comes through this system. She also warned that we need to be aware of attempts at hacking.

(e) TS and WK are to meet soon to discuss the Embassy support forms.

7. Development Subcommittee (WK reporting)

(a) WK reported that he had attended the AS heads event in December.

(b) WK has rewritten the conference support form to include information regarding the support of School and UG students.

(c) In terms of funding requests, the Development subcom recommended that BAAS award £225 to Francisco Costa at UEA for a Tennessee Williams conference. This was unanimously supported.

(d) WK noted that CB had submitted a plan regarding potential outreach activities. This plan had generated some discussion about developing links between BAAS and university departments. CB suggested that BAAS might contact universities for lists of their schools contacts. Those universities which responded might then be regional hubs for BAAS schools liaison activity. The eventual ambition would be to have a regional hub advertising lectures on AS topics, targeted at Year 5 and Year 6. WK to liaise with CB about this but we need more clarity for objectives on this initiative. The subcommittee will consider the suggestions and come back to the next meeting with some concrete plans. DE added that if we do go down this line then we need to think about the resources implications of high profile/high appeal events. The argument advanced by CB is that Schools impact will only be achieved at a local level.

(e) CB has been in touch with TS about a Schools event at the UCLan conference. TS noted that there are things in process at Preston at the moment and local schools in Preston have been made aware of the conference. ZF suggested a Schools lunch rather than a vague discussion forum might work well. GL noted that in the past such lunches have worked very well and have shown how vibrant the area is.

(f) MH noted that BAAS has developed some new Schools leaflets, which will be at the conference in April. He offered thanks to JF for coordinating and helping with the design of the leaflet.

8. Postgraduate Business (ZF reporting)

(a) ZF noted the success of the BAAS PG conference in Oxford and thanked all involved. She added that the PG organisers felt very supported.

(b) ZF reported that she had received 4 applications for hosting the 2011 BAAS PG Conference: ‘American Frontiers’ from Birmingham, ‘American Borders’ from UEA; ‘America in the World’ from Brunel, and ‘Writing the Real’ from Bath Spa University. Based on the Development subcom discussions, she recommended the Exec support the bid from Birmingham. The Exec approved this. The conference will be held in November 2011 (exact date to be confirmed). ZF will write to the organisers and the unsuccessful candidates.

(c) MH noted that the Birmingham PG conference organisers will need to have a mentor. ZF noted that this seems to be Professor Scott Lucas. MH to write to SL. ZF will be involved in the production of the poster. MH also suggested that ZF draw up a briefing document for the organisers regarding procedures for the conference.

(d) MW raised the issue of the confusion regarding the conference issue of US Studies Online and 49^th Parallel. Problems had arisen due to poor communication between the editors and 49^thParallel solicited for contributions during the conference. There had been some concerns about this and it has complicated the process for getting the papers into US Studies Online. MC (acting Editor of US Studies Online) is interested in formalising the links between the two journals but noted that we need to be very clear that US Studies Online have the first option on these papers, without discouraging 49^th Parallel either. ZF was more directly involved in some of the discussions and has discussed the issue with MC who is meeting with the editors of 49^th Parallel on 28 January to discuss the matter further.

(e) MH noted that at future PG conferences Exec members in attendance should be used as panel chairs. If there are parallel sessions it is difficult for the US Studies Online Editor to see everything. Exec members will need to liaise in advance to ensure that every paper is heard by at least one of us.

(f) ZF asked for reconfirmation that the PG conference organisers get £200. CM to check back in the Minutes.

(g) ZF also flagged up possibility of a PG lunch at the conference in April. ZF to liaise with TS.

(h) DE returned to the issue of 49^th Parallel, noting that Dr Helen Laville has been appointed as an academic overseer to ensure continuity on the journal. DE will email HL with the information.

9. Publications Subcommittee (MW)

(a) BRRAM (KM sent a written report)

The material relating to the West Indies and Latin America has been completed and sent to SO customers.
KM is still awaiting Evie Vernon’s Introduction, which should be ready soon.
The Bolton Whitman collection is now ready, as is the Dr Brazer collection.

(b) Edinburgh University Press (EUP)

Dr Rachael McLennan has had her book proposal on American Autobiography approved.
TS has submitted the manuscript for American Theatre: History, Context, Form.

Issue 44.4 has been delayed slightly and this has been noted with CUP.
Issue 45.1 is Professor Susan Castillo’s farewell issue and it will be out in the Spring.
The full layout ready for 44.2 and 44.3 will be 9/11 special issue.
The issue regarding prestige and online publication arose again. If the Journal were to proceed with print only articles then with already accepted pieces the journal is full till the end of 2012. SL’s inclination is to move ahead with online-only publications in certain circumstances. A forthcoming Summer 2012 issue will have two articles in print linked to two articles online, which will comprise a suite on a particular theme. There was strong support from the subcom for this principle.
MW noted that he’d sent out a call for information on potential changes/new directions for JAS but had not received a great response. He appealed for more replies.
MW noted that the JAS Editorial team are piloting the online submission system. They have been trained in this by CUP and it will enable tracking all submissions online.

(d) American Studies in Britain (ASIB)

Work on the next issue is progressing and KA will mail out in the latter half of February. 31 January is the copy deadline. KA is coordinating a joint mailing with RAS.
KA has been in discussion with Bob Pomfret (based at Oxford Brookes University) who will continue typesetting but keep new design templates.
Picking up on the previous discussion about advertising in ASIB, MW has liaised with Martine Walsh about this. CUP journals would usually charge between £150-£250 for an advert. However, an advert in ASIB would add £250 to printing cost so yield very little. For the advantage of such a small amount it was not worth the transition. DE wondered if the amount would change if an advert were placed on the back cover only. MW will ask KA to return to the printer to see if this would incur any extra cost.
MW reported that KA had proposed a new Q&A feature (max. two pages) with members of the subject association. KA has made contact with a relative of Richard Wright for a potential feature of this nature. Subcom thought this was a good idea and KA will be in touch to look for suggestions.

(e) US Studies Online

See business under Postgraduate Business.

The Publications Subcom recommended Carina Spalding (University of Manchester) for the position of US Studies Online Editor. The Exec happily endorsed Ms Spaulding. MH will have a short meeting with Ms Spaulding next week in Manchester on 24 January.

(f) Website (MC reporting)

MC noted that an RSS feed has been added to News and Events button.
MC has added the links with BRRAM and continued to put up events all Autumn including information regarding the BAAS internship.
ASIB is now fully archived and the page is to be tidied up with folder links.
The latest edition of US Studies Online is now on the website.
The introductory page message will be updated more regularly with new features/responses to debates.

10. Conference Subcommittee (GL reporting)

(a) GL has written to various European associations and invited them to the conference.

(b) GL investigated the cost of producing a BAAS Conference banner. This would come to somewhere in the region of £200-£300. TS will check the cost with UCLan.

(d) The UCLan conference is coming along very well. One of the two hotels is about to open. The University of Manchester reception has been organised. The conference banquet is no longer in Deepdale. A solid number of paper proposals has been received. These will be put into panels in the next two weeks. The full cost of the conference will be £335. The online booking form is ready. GL asked if Abstracts Online is still funded by Embassy. TS will check the general conference budget.

(e) Manchester 2012 is coming along well. The conference will be housed in new buildings, teaching rooms have been booked and 100 hotel rooms have also been booked. MH suggested the organisers use rooms in the Ibis, the Holiday Inn Express, Jury’s Inn and Premier Inn as well as at the Manchester conference centre. The banquet is likely to be in the Town Hall. The cost should come in at somewhere in the region of £320-£330.

(f) GL has made a few enquiries regarding the possibility of a London-based conference for 2015. He has made contact with Dr Kasia Boddy who thought it would be a good idea; Dr Boddy cannot be the main organiser herself but will forward the names of potential organisers. A collaborative event might be possible but we would need to think about a banquet and accommodation.

(g) GL suggested he bring a review of the conference more generally to the summer meeting. We need to think again about what we really want from the conference, how long it ought to be, etc. We also need to consider if abstracts should be considered anonymously, think about themed strands for the conference, consider using Exec to sift through proposals, etc. TS noted that we also need to consider the Eccles input and the Embassy input in terms of wider community relationships. CM noted that we also need to have a space for the AGM.

11. Awards Subcommittee (IB reporting)

(a) IB thanked the Exec for all their hard work during the Awards season. This year has seen record numbers of applications for Awards with 49 applications for the STAs, 13 applications for the BAAS Book Prize, 12 applications for the BAAS Book Prize and 15 application for the BAAS-Wyoming Graduate Assistantships.

(b) IB offered thanks to Robert Mason for all his work on the TAShips. Everything is in place for New Hampshire (History) and Virginia (English) next year.

12. Libraries and Resources Committee (DE reporting)

(a) DE missed the most recent BLARs meeting due to weather conditions.

(b) DE reported that the social network session is now in place for the UCLan conference and set for usual time slot.

(c) BLARs has been successful in its Embassy bid to support the production of RAS. The final production arrangements are in process.

(d) DE reported that members of BLARs are concerned by the BL’s decision to destroy hard copies of journals and research items (due to digitisation).

(e) DE’s main item of business centred on his proposal for sharing American Studies resources. BLARs have been looking at idea of sharing and collaborating resources electronically and have drawn up a document, which was taken to the Development subcom. This is a lengthy document with numerous proposals and suggestions, therefore more time is needed to weigh up the virtues of the various ideas. The Exec will come back to the issue in June, after everyone has had a chance to read the document. The matter will be managed by the new Chair of the Development subcom. DE apologised for the delay in producing the document, noting that BLARs is a committee comprised of librarians who have worked on this out of kindness.

13. EAAS (CM reporting on behalf of PD)

(a) The EAAS newsletter did not appear. PD will investigate why this is the case and report back to the committee.

(b) The call for proposals for EAAS Conference workshops/lectures has been circulated (and was passed on to BAAS members). This call can be found on the EAAS website, and the deadline is the end of January, so please encourage those who might be interested to put in their ideas for the conference.

(c) At the last meeting the precise location and dates were still unconfirmed, but the EAAS is now advertising the dates as 30 March-2 April 2012, in Izmir, Turkey.

14. Any Other Business

MH noted that CM, MW, WK and RM are stepping down and suggested a meal the night before the conference (Wednesday, 13 April 2011).

15. Date of next meeting

The next Executive Committee meeting will be held at the University of Central Lancashire on Thursday 14 April 2011 at 10.30am. Subcoms will not meet.

Dr. Catherine Morley

email: catherine.morley@leicester.ac.uk

Office Phone: (0116) 223 1068

Meeting 264

British Association for American Studies

Minutes 264th

Minutes of the 264th Meeting of the Executive Committee, held at the University of Leicester on 17 September 2010 at 1.00pm.

1. Present: M Halliwell (Chair), C Morley (Secretary), T Saxon (Treasurer), I Bell, M Collins, P Davies, D Ellis, J Fagg, Z Feghali, S Lucas, T Ruys Smith and M Whalan.

Apologies: C Bates, S Castillo, R Mason, G Lewis, I Morgan, W Kaufman.

2. Minutes of the Previous Meeting

After some minor amendments, these were accepted as a true record and will now go on the website.

3. Matters Arising

4. Chair’s Business (MH reporting)

(a) Announcements

Professor Geoff Plank has joined the School of American Studies at UEA as Professor of American History.
Dr John Fagg will join the University of Birmingham in January 2011.
Professor Tim Lynch will move to the University of Melbourne in 2011.
Dr Maria Ryan at the University of Nottingham has been awarded an AHRC Early Career Research Grant worth £47,000.
Professor Iwan Morgan’s book The Age of Deficits: Presidents and Unbalanced Budgets from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush (Kansas, 2009) was awarded the American Politics Group’s Richard E. Neustadt Book Prize for 2010. This follows Tim Lynch’s award in 2010.

(b) Invitations

MH attended the LLAS Advisory Board meeting on 15 June, and a celebration of 10 years of the subject centre. Following the recent consultation on the future structure of subject centres, MH has written to Craig Mahoney, the new CEO of the HEA (as well as the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leicester) promoting the third of three proposed options: ‘A geographically dispersed structure with 13-15 sites located within (or associated with) HEIs or other HEI related bodies, retaining a central office in York and smaller offices in Scotland and Wales.’ This came out of discussions earlier in the year as something BAAS wanted to promote. Various colleagues noted that their VCs had written to Mr Mahoney regarding the matter.
MH had a lunch meeting with a former chair of BAAS in July (PD), and has been in correspondence with another former chair (Professor Judie Newman) about the REF strategy.
MH also has a meeting scheduled for 29 September to meet Penny Egan from the Fulbright Commission.
MH met with Graham Thompson (the new Head of American Studies at Nottingham, for one year in the first instance) to discuss the implications of the restructuring at Nottingham. Film Studies (c. 8 members of staff) have now formed a separate unit with Cultural and Critical Theory, to leave American Studies (22 staff) as an independent unit. American Studies remains a School for 2010-11, but it will then be absorbed into a broader School of Cultures and Languages where it is likely to be renamed as a Department.

MH has written to the US Embassy in India to apply for funding to sponsor 4 or 5 Indian scholars to contribute a roundtable on international relations (from a broad political, social, cultural and linguistic perspective) at next year’s BAAS conference. The funding would be for air fare, the conference fee and accommodation and would be in the region of $7500.
MH has written to the Vice-Chancellor at Sussex University to promote the application of an American Studies Research Centre as a key component of their recent reorganization. MH wrote in July but has had no reply.
IM noted that Tim Lynch is to leave the ISA in 2011 but will not be replaced straight away by a US specialist. This leaves IM as the only US Politics specialist at the ISA, reduced from three. This might jeopardise North American Studies at the ISA. IM will write to the Dean and to Maxine Molyneaux to remind them of the importance of a North American focus and the hemispheric model in which it was set up originally. MH noted that ISA is complex as they do not submit to the REF but are subject to 5-year reviews. The ISA’s teaching programme has not attracted vast numbers of PG students, though IM has attracted quite a few PhD students. PD thought it would be difficult for the institute to continue with the ISA title without the US component. He noted that there had been hopes for endowments and donations but this has not really happened. MM would welcome support.
MH corresponded with Martine Walsh at CUP about potentially recycling savings from next year’s UK-based JAS lecturer for postgraduate bursaries. In consultation with the other officers, he agreed with MW to take a lower level of support this year and go back to normal next year.
MH has written to the organisers of this year’s BAAS Postgraduate Conference, Stephen Ross and Aaron Hanlon, as well as their mentor Reena Sastri at Oxford.
All other correspondence over the last 3 months relates to the REF, as outlined below.

(d) Consultations

REF

MH wrote to Heads of American Studies in June to ascertain the likely submission patterns for the REF. It seems highly likely that (unless plans develop over the next two years) that Nottingham could be the only American Studies unit submitting directly to the Area Studies subpanel. All other departments/units are likely to divide submissions between the four ‘parent’ panels: History, English, Politics & International Relations, and Communication, Cultural & Media Studies.
In early August MH wrote to Professor Bruce Brown, the Chair of Panel D, copied to Dame Finch the Chair of Panel C (where the Politics subpanel is located) and to the REF Manager Graeme Rosenberg. In the letter MH outlined the community’s likely submission patterns and lobbied for the same number of Americanists as served in RAE 2008, but redistributed across the five subpanels to correspond to submissions. The proposal is for 2 panelists on each of the Area Studies, History, English, Politics and 1 on Cultural & Media Studies (as we had zero last time): 9 Americanists in all (the same number as in RAE 2008, when we had 6 on Area Studies and one on each of English, History and Politics).
MH noted that Bruce Brown had responded very positively, but at that stage (early August) was looking to appoint subpanel chairs before looking at the composition of panellists. (MH will follow up this correspondence once we know which subpanel chairs have been appointed). MH also wrote to Linda Anderson, the Chair of CCUE, to apprise her of the need for two Americanists on the English subpanel.
On the suggestion of BAAS Exec members MH wrote to three RAE 2008 panellists to encourage them to stand as subpanel chairs: Professor John Dumbrell (Politics), Professor Heidi Macpherson (Area Studies) and Professor Simon Newman (History). John and Simon did not feel able to apply for these positions; Heidi will apply for the Area Studies subpanel chair and MH has written on behalf of BAAS to support the application. The deadline for applications is 17 September.
MH has compiled the list of suggested panellist nominations sent from BAAS Exec members and discussed these with BAAS Officers. The Secretary will run over our recommendations in her business, and ask the Exec for their endorsement.

Subject Centres

Business as outlined above under Invitations.

5. Secretary’s Business

(b) CM noted that work on the newly designed BAAS leaflet is ongoing.

(c) CM reported that she had spend quite a lot of time updating archive sections of the website including the addition of recent Minutes, back issues of ASIB, and she had amended some links to AS centres. More work is required to bring these sections fully up to date.

(d) CM represented BAAS at an ESRC event on the Humanities and Social Science on 16 June 2010.

6. Treasurer’s Business (TS reporting)

(a) The Treasurer noted that the bank accounts (as at 13/09/10) were as follows: General Deposit, £27,467.73; Short Term Awards, £1882.92 (TS will move to close this account as it will be easier to manager the accounts); Current, £6120.39; making a total of £. The RBS Jersey account has been closed and the US Dollar Account has $9450.42.

(b) TS reported that fully paid up members for 2010 currently stand at 314 (127 postgraduate). This does not compare favourably to the position last year, which was 500 (with 180 postgraduates). When those who haven’t so far updated their Standing Orders and those who have not yet renewed for 2010 (i.e. those who pay by cheque) are included, the numbers rise to 593 (235 postgraduate. The figures do not compare well to last September when we had 492 members (177 postgraduate). In June 2010 we had 307 members (124 postgraduate).

(c) TS confirmed that the accounts are finalised and have been sent to the Charities Commission. The new accountants have decreased our bill.

(d) TS also noted that BAAS’s gift aid rebateof £1939.95 came in on 14 July.

(e) TS noted that the Standing Order renewals are still slow but some people have updated.

(f) TS reported that PayPal is now online and available. There is also a button which will enable people to update their SO and pay the £7 deficit.

(g) TS confirmed that the Embassy grant for next year has been approved. TS met with Sue Wedlake and the Embassy are expressing a preference for financial matters to be dealt with through the Treasurer (to help set up an audit trail). WK and the Development subcom are supportive of this shift. TS noted that this will increase her workload significantly and she would welcome some kind of support.

7. Development Subcommittee (MH reporting on behalf on WK)

(a) WK has revised the conference support form and recommends the usage of this form to all conference support applicants. The new form emphasises PG bursaries as an area BAAS would especially like to support. PD asked if WK would replace ‘PGs’ with the word ‘students’ so as to extend our reach to UGs and Schools. This was agreed as a good idea.

(b) MH reported that the subcom had received four conference support requests, all of which were approved: 1. APG BAAS colloquium; 2. Congress to Campus; 3. Sarah Graham £220 Studies in Youth; 4. American Genders Conference £300.

(c) MH reported that CB and JF had drafted a Schools flyer which had been circulated among the subcom for consideration. Various colleagues suggested amendments which will MH will forward to CB. The flyer has since been approved has been used at various events throughout Autumn 2010.

(d) MH also noted that CB has been working with MC to reorganise the Schools pages. CB has also prepared a paper on Schools outreach which will be revisited in January.

8. Postgraduate Business (ZF reporting)

(a) ZF noted that the BAAS PG conference would take place at the Rothermere Institute on 15 November. The organisers had received 48 abstracts and 40 were accepted.

(b) DE has been in contact with the organisers and will give a talk on publishing opportunities. MC will talk about the Fulbright New York Summer School scheme; and MH, CM and MW will be in attendance. MH noted that Lauren Welch from the Fulbright Commission would also give a short presentation.

(c) ZF reported that she had looked into conference grants for PGs from the Royal Historical Society and suggested applying for £200 to subsidise History students’ attendance at the BAAS 2011 conference. The Exec agreed that this was an excellent idea and encouraged the application. TS will give BAAS conference posters for the PG conference.

9. Publications Subcommittee (MW)

MW began his report by welcoming KA to the Development subcom as ASIB Editor. He thanked AK for her hard work.

(a) BRRAM (KM sent a written report)

The online version of the Bolton Whitman material will be ready for October.
The Samuel Martin collection from the British Library has been released, with new quality images.
RV will continue discussions with the University of Bangor archivists regarding the Penrith archives.

(b) Edinburgh University Press (EUP)

Kasia Boddy’s book is now out.
Theresa Saxon’s book on American Drama is scheduled for release next July (2011).
Rachel McLennan’s proposal on American Autobiography has been revised and is with readers.
Nick Gerhardt is revising his manuscript proposal for his book on rock ‘n roll.

MW reported that the subcom had considered the CVs of various candidates for the JAS Editorial Board. Jacques Pothier (Versailles) emerged the clear favourite. MW asked the committee to endorse the nomination, which they did. CM requested a copy of Professor Pothier’s CV for the BAAS archives. Since the meeting Professor Pothier has accepted the nomination.
MW reported that the first phase of the JAS handover has gone well. SC asked MW to mention her thanks to all involved, especially her editorial assistant Christina Matteoti.
SL noted he is now shadowing SC but the new associate editors are already handing reviews and the electronic side of things. SL noted that he had asked MW to collate the Exec’s ideas about where BAAS would like to see the journal in terms of identity. He also asked for ideas about how to promote the journal, increase interaction with the readership, etc.
SL mentioned that at the upcoming Editorial Board meeting he will propose the idea of a revised screening process, thereby streamlining what is sent out to readers. SL will also propose publishing electronic articles in an effort to build the journal’s electronic identity. He noted that the editorial team are very pleased with the Katrina issue. A future special issue will focus on the anniversary of 9/11. He added that three further special issues have also been proposed. Such special issues, while clearly important, present problems in terms of clearing the backlog of articles awaiting publication. Thus the case for developing an electronic side of the journal is stronger than ever.
MH will write to SC to thank her for her work on the journal.
MW will write to the Exec to solicit views regarding the direction and identity of the journal.

(d) American Studies in Britain (ASIB)

MW reported that the handover of the editorship has now taken place.
KA brought a sample copy of the forthcoming Autumn issue which contains more colour and pictures than previous editions. He has moved production to a small company near him (Run Print Run) and has saved £200. However this saving comes about because he has personally handled the typesetting. MW asked if there a case for splitting this typesetting work from the printer in order to make a saving. TS suggested that it would be difficult to find someone with the necessary skills. The Exec agreed that it was best to let the printer handle the typesetting.
MW also asked if the back cover of ASIB could be used for advertising, thereby producing a revenue stream to offset the costs of producing the newsletter. SL noted that many educational publications contained this kind of advertising and suggested that it would be possible to use the space for this purpose. MH suggested doing some market research on this, writing to presses and finding out interest. TS asked about the costs incurred by such advertising as typesetting would have to be changed. KA will investigate and report back to the committee via MW.

(e) US Studies Online

MC will act as Editor for the Conference and the December issues. He will attend the BAAS PG conference in November with a view to selecting papers.
MW noted that the editors of 49^th Parallel have contacted the BAAS PG conference organisers with regards to publishing some papers from the conference. MW suggested that US Studies Online reserve first choice. CM wondered if this was problematic as an author can choose where they might prefer for their article to come out. MW and MC will contact the BAAS PG organisers to discuss the matter further.
The Call for new Editor has gone to ASIB and will go out via the mailbase. The deadline for applications is 1 January 2011.

(f) Website (MC reporting)

MC thanked CM for regularly updating the website while he was abroad.
MC noted that he had made no progress on digitising the archive yet. However, all material is archived at the back end of the website.
MC will add a link to BRRAM.

10. Conference Subcommittee (TRS reporting on behalf of GL)

(a) The UEA accounts have been closed and paperwork will go to TS, who will forward an honorarium to the conference organiser.

(b) All is in place for UCLAN 2011. There has been some flux in venues for panels due to bureaucratic issues. Some accommodation issues are yet to be resolved as one of the hotels is still in construction. However once completed it will have a good capacity and is in a good location.

(c) Publicity for the conference is rolling along and new posters, which will feature the names of the plenary speakers, will soon be ready. All plenary speakers have been confirmed.

(d) Sue Wedlake from the Embassy has suggested that the Embassy fund a ‘musical interlude’ from Harvey Cohen from King’s. This is to be a one-off event. TS is supportive of the idea and the Exec agreed this would be a great addition to the conference.

(e) TRS mentioned that UCLAN have various plans afoot for local school involvement.

(f) GL was written to various associations with formal invitations for panel proposal.

(g) TRS noted that the overall cost of the conference is still being reviewed. He noted that it might be necessary to run the conference at a deficit and cap the cost at £350.

(h) TS and TRS suggested it might be worth investing in future conferences, for instance producing BAAS banners that can be used year on year. GL will investigate costs and report back at the next meeting.

(i) Ian Scott, the conference organiser for Manchester 2012, will attend meetings from January 2011. TRS asked the Exec to send plenary suggestions for 2012 to GL.

(j) MH suggested that GL write to the Secretaries of the larger European Associations with information regarding the conference.

(k) MH noted that he had written to Michael Macy regarding the funding of Indian scholars to attend the conference. He is hopeful of success and we might use this venture as a model for the future, for instance for delegates from China and Australia.

11. Awards Subcommittee (IB reporting)

(a) IB reported that Laura Crean had started her teaching assistantship at the University of New Hampshire. He added that Robert Mason has taken over chief liaison and organiser of the teaching assistantships.

(b) IB and CM noted that they had made enquiries with CB regarding the Arthur Miller Book Prize but had received no reply. TRS will follow this up. IB noted that the review panel for the prize should include a representative from the Embassy, the BAAS Chair and someone from Centre. The deadline should coincide with the deadline for the BAAS Book Prize and the prize amount needs setting.

(c) IB noted that all the Awards posters (apart from one final one) are ready to be distributed and are also online. He thanked the Secretary for organising the design and production of the posters for the 2011 Awards. Next year this will be handled by Louise Cunningham, the Awards administrator.

12. Libraries and Resources Committee (DE reporting)

(a) DE reported that the exploration of resource sharing is nearly completed and he expects to table a report at the next meeting. The idea is to look at strategies for sharing resources in regions and national spheres.

(b) The BLARs journal is to produce an acquisitions listing.

(d) DE raised the issue of financial support for the journal, noting the difficulties of extracting guarantees about funding. He suggested the provision of emergency funding from the BAAS treasury if necessary (but with the expectation of continued Embassy funding). The Exec agreed to this in principle but it needs to be reviewed in June 2012 (i.e. after the election of the new Treasurer and every such election thereafter). DE noted that it might also be worth considering moving RAS over entirely to electronic function.

(e) DE also raised the issue of the BLARs constitution which in past has been quasi autonomous in order to give librarians a platform independent of academics. Committee members are not elected but are seconded. With this in mind, the BLARs committee have asked if, in future, they may recommend someone for the role of Chair who is finally approved by the Exec. The Exec endorsed this proposal. The terms of office still apply.

13. EAAS

(a) PD reported that the EAAS website has been redesigned and looks very good.

(b) PD noted that he is gathering information for the next newsletter.

14. Any Other Business

(a) MH noted that he is trying to fix a date for Heads of American Studies meeting. He has settled on 10 December at the ISA. The date is strategic given the announcement of the REF Panel Chairs and results of the REF Pilot Impact Exercise and Comprehensive Spending Review. He asked for other Agenda items. DE suggested looking at the national position/shape of AS (as noted in Minutes 263) and the mutation of AS over the past 10 years. MH asked about how (and which) data could be captured from University schools and/or departments.

Colleagues suggested that we ascertain information about provision and changes in provision.
It was suggested that the HESA might be able to help with student numbers and even application numbers.
It might also be useful to look at Americanists who teach in other departments, such as English, Politics and History, with a view to measuring Americanist topics that students have been drawn to.
IB noted that what is required is a picture of institutional change. With the closure of departments it seems like AS is in an unhealthy state but if we can show the picture to be otherwise then we can support places at risk.
DE added that this would help us to see the way forward and address the philosophical issues of what, if anything, we need to do.
MW noted that scholars based in single subject departments really need the subject association. BAAS and the conference is very important for many such scholars, offering a way forward which is missing in their home environments. BAAS provides opportunities for the support of interdisciplinary discussion, providing the rationale for AS locations. All agreed that it is important for BAAS to look to support isolated interdisciplinarians but also flag AS centres and departments.
JF asked if it was worth looking at Modern Literatures and monitoring their mechanism for gaining government support, etc. DE concurred that we need to think of perspectives like this.
MH reiterated that the kind of information required includes student numbers, staff numbers, institutional changes, submission for RAEs, application numbers (HESA), ideas of where the students have gone (narrative examples), narrative elements like Hook Centre, and anecdotal external relations cases. He noted that this was a significant amount of work and would take some time. DE agreed but suggested we prioritise the list and work through it methodically. The key areas are, clearly, the RAE narrative, institutional changes, and student and applicant numbers.
The Exec agreed that this was a job we would need to pay a PG to undertake over the course of one year as an internship project. The committee agreed that a sum of £2000, staggered over four instalments would be suitable. JF suggested following the Nottingham internship model by setting a number of work hours, a clear work specification and methodologies, etc. JF added that he would be happy to act as a point of contact. MH will work with the officers and JF to draw up the BAAS internship specification, to be advertised via the mailbase, ASIB and the website. The internship will start in April 2011 and the successful candidate will be announced at conference.

(b) CM raised the possibility of adding two new members to the Executive Committee. All were in general agreement that this would be a good thing and the matter is to be revisited at the January meeting.

(c) PD noted that he would welcome suggestions for speakers/events at the Eccles Centre. Forthcoming events include an afternoon seminar with Tom Mann (a politics pundit from the US), a evening with Brian Cox, the Congress to Campus series, the APG BAAS colloquium, and a December conference entitled ‘Can Government be Repaired?’. Spring events include an exhibition of American English (with Steven Pinker) and a session on rap, a session on rhetoric, Garrison Keeler on 15 March, Philip Bobbitt on 29 March, and the BAAS and BACS lectures. Possible future events include Michael Dukakis, a conference on Rivers in Cities, the Anglo American conservation, the Shakers, and Amanda Palmer.

(d) MH raised idea of a future BAAS conference in London in 2015. The idea will be revisited at the January meeting.

15. Date of next meeting

The next Executive Committee meeting will be held at the University of Manchester on Friday 14 January 2011. Subcoms will commence at 10.30am.

Dr. Catherine Morley

email: catherine.morley@leicester.ac.uk

Office Phone: (0116) 223 1068

Issue 17, Autumn 2010: Article 4

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Continuity and Change―or Routine and Crisis?

Katharina Worch

Approaching the subject of continuity and change with the Frankfurt sociologist Ulrich Oevermann’s theory of crisis the goal of this article is twofold: first, to summarise Oevermann’s conceptual pairings that accentuate and explain different aspects of continuity and change, and to show their value as an explanation of the emergence of the new; and second, to demonstrate what the theoretical model can contribute when dealing with a fictional personal crisis.[1] For that purpose, this article will present an application and further testing of parts of Oevermann’s theory to a work of literature, Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer, published in 1961.

Looking at the conceptual pairing of continuity and change, by which the historical process is divided into a common structure that is at times interrupted by a momentous event, it becomes clear that such an event is only capable of interruption when it brings about something new. If there was no permanent innovation in the societal sphere there would be no historical development. And if this innovation was only generated accidentally according to the principle of contingent mutation then historical development and evolution would neither be meaningful nor capable of systematic reconstruction.

At this point, the problem of the seeming contradiction between explicability and newness arises, which Oevermann solves through the dialectic of emergence and determination of the new. The emergent and the new hold such qualities only in relation to two aspects: first, the idea of something absolutely new seems contradictory, as we would simply not be able to notice it. Something that is new is always new in relation to something that is obsolete, and in its specific negation of the obsolete the new assimilates that which it replaces. Second, the quality of the new is only valid in relation to a form of practice and its process of formation. Therefore, a term is needed for defining the entity that, as a living agent, accounts for the structural processes of transformation that take place in the emergence of the new. Here, Oevermann introduces the term ‘life-practice’ (Lebenspraxis), which describes human life independent of its aggregation or dimension―be it a person, a group, a community or a nation―and which is able to grasp the interrelation of soma, psyche and sociality. Furthermore, the term refers at the same time to specific historical cases and to universal constitutive properties of human life.

In George Herbert Mead’s theory, the autonomous decision-making centre that is also the initiator of the new is called the ‘I’ in opposition to the ‘Me’―another conceptual pairing Oevermann includes in his theory. In the ‘I-Me-relationship’, the ‘I’, in the immediacy of a crisis, has to spontaneously deal with something (a situation, a brute fact, etc.) it does not yet know, and in this process the ‘I’, through retrospective reconstruction of its own actions i.e. through ‘predication’, is complemented by a ‘Me’. This is how the ‘Me’ evolves, and in this act of realisation the ‘I’ becomes apparent again. Identity is thus constituted through the ability to recall crises and their specific solutions, and these dealings and solutions are represented by the ‘Me’.[2]

For Oevermann, decisions (by what Mead calls the ‘I’) and their reconstruction (in what Mead calls the ‘Me’) are not made into open uncharted territory but along lines of algorithmic rules. Hence any decision will have meaning that is derived from its position within a sequence. Meaning is thus generated through decisions based on rules.[3] From the perspective of the preceding sequential position of a course of action, the subsequent concrete act is a meaningful, logical consequence made possible by valid rules for the generation of meaning. And in this way, its meaning is pre-determined, even though, of course, the decision itself is not determined. The possible meanings of a decision are determined in that the meanings of available choices in a given situation are set, but this meaning emerges only once the decision is made by a concrete ‘life-practice’. A ‘life-practice’ may be travelling in a whole new direction and choose to pursue a path it had not taken before because it was not considered a realisable, rational choice―for itself or even for others. The dialectic of emergence and determination―seen from the standpoint of sequence analysis―results from the combination of two basic structural parameters for each course of action in a world structured by rules. First, the opening of possibilities of meaningful continuation which are generated at each sequential position by algorithmic rules and, second, the concrete selection of one of these opened options according to norms, maxims and motives by a concrete ‘life-practice’. This selection will take place in keeping with that individual’s (group’s, nation’s, etc.) ‘pattern’ or ‘structure’ for such decisions, and this ‘pattern of interpretation’ or ‘case structure’ has cumulated from similar preceding decisions. In this way, each sequential position is at the same time a selective opening and closing of options and possibilities.

Actions emerge when a decision involves not only the reproduction of a ‘pattern of interpretation’ or ‘case structure’ but also its transformation. In addition, emergence is not a static quality but a sequential and processual one, as outlined above. On the one hand theory has to be able to identify the emergent in its original state as an independent momentum of transitional dialectic in opposition to the present, and on the other hand, to explain, ex post, this emergent from the perspective of reconstruction as systematically generated and motivated all along. Each sequential position holds the potential for emergence, and each determined, routinised, act originally contained the seed of emergence. Emergence is the phase in which something latent is turned into something manifest by a ‘life-practice’.

The structural position of the emergence of the new in Oevermann’s theory of genetic structuralism is identical with the subject in its crisis of decision. He terms it genetic structuralism because it looks for and defines the conditions and parameters that are responsible for the manifestation of a latently held potential for innovation, which takes place in crisis. A crisis can never question or challenge the sum total of sequential rules, only part of it. In Oevermann’s theory, structural reproduction is regarded as the marginal aspect of the more general case of structural transformation because the subject evolves through continuous, future-expanding, cumulative transformations of ‘structure’. Whereas in practical experience crisis is the marginal case and routine the normal one, because otherwise a ‘life-practice’ would simply be unable to act.

For Oevermann, the terms autonomy and individuation are central ones. Based on the opening of action alternatives generated by rules in a series of sequences each sequential position holds the potential of autonomy (in the ‘life-practice’s’ realisation). Thus, autonomy is, on the one hand, the constitutive presupposition for action as such. At the same time, sequences can be reconstructed and thereby it can be defined, whether at the sequential position the opened potential for autonomy was enlarged or further restricted. From such a reconstruction the relative autonomy of a ‘case structure’ of a practice can be determined. To the amount that a ‘life-practice’ realises (in both its meanings: to perceive and to perform) its potential of autonomy it becomes individuated.

The constitutional model of a self-identical subject that is capable of acting autonomously is expressed by successful individuation. There is no principle criterion for successful individuation, only gradual realisations. The endeavour for individuation and establishing autonomy never stops until the ‘life-practice’s’ death and is therefore the unceasing driving force for coping with crises in life, this interrelation being a matter of probation. ‘Life-practice’ is constituted by the dilemma of being forced to decide and being obliged to give reasons of justification. There is a pressure to make decisions because in a crisis situation facing an unknown future the ‘life-practice’ must choose between possible alternatives which are characterised by the lack of already established rational routines for judging what is right or wrong. At a later point in time, however, the ‘life-practice’ will need to be able to give (rational) reasons for having decided in a particular way—to himself as part of his coherent ‘structure’ or to others. When established routines fail to work or do not yet exist, the ‘life-practice’ has to come up with a new solution, thus, transformation takes place. For that the human qualities of creativity and spontaneity are essential. In the individual’s justification of its decision his premises of action are depicted. These have their seeds in the process of socialisation, which is both historically universal and culturally distinctive. Oevermann regards the evolving subject’s autonomous ability of construction as a crucial driving force, constitutive of which is that it is executed into an open future i.e. the coping with crises that can arise in the first place only when competing future courses of action become conscious.

One is only able to stand up to this dilemma with an internalised maxim of self-confidence, which Oevermann calls ‘structural optimism’. The term describes the basic habitus formation that an individual rather unconsciously develops during the process of a normal birth, which is the first crisis of every human being.[4] There he experiences what can be paraphrased by the positivity formula: in case of doubt there will be a successful outcome. Based on that assumption the individual deals with his future crises. The opposite―’structural pessimism’―describes a disordered habitus formation according to the negativity formula: in case of doubt it will fail.

For the ‘life-practice’, the crisis is present, which refers to its three-dimensionality of time (now), space (here) and social reciprocity (gift), whereas from the perspective of the scientist, the crisis is always gone and can only be brought forth through reconstruction. In the concrete crisis, the ‘life-practice’ is confronted with an Unknown that it realises but cannot classify and that is in some way related to the ‘life-practice’. Thus, in its quality of being present and critical but Unknown, i.e. not positively predicated, it is alarming to the ‘life-practice’. As one cannot not react to an Unknown, one needs to solve it through predication. Therefore, predication is the first form and mode of coping with a crisis. In consequence, something that is predicated from then on constitutes the inventory of routine. Every routine was once a crisis, which is again the reason why we have to regard crisis as the normal case and routine as the marginal one. In its reaction the ‘life-practice’ leaves a record of the solution behind, whose ‘objective structure of meaning’ can be reconstructed after the fact. Hence, the crisis is the relational characteristic between the ‘life-practice’ and the Unknown.

The subject in crisis is the crucial place of emergence that is turned retrospectively into determination. The crisis becomes a routine through its solution and, thus, is detached from the epistemological subject and its concrete conditions of life, and assumes an independent existence. In other words, the subjectivity of experience comes to itself in crises, whereas in the routinisation of the solution to the crisis it merges in the general. Therefore, in routine we cannot grasp the ‘life-practice’ any more because routines vanish into the general rationality. While a routine is past and general, a crisis is present and particular. Thus, if we wish to grasp the subject we need to look at its action in crisis. Still, crisis and routine exist only as a complementary construct, there is no routine without crisis and no crisis without routine.

Recapitulating, Oevermann introduces and works with different conceptual pairings that emphasise the various aspects of change and continuity. They are emergence and determination, Mead’s ‘I’ and ‘Me’, transformation and reproduction, crisis and routine. In the following interpretation of Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer the latter pairing, crisis and routine, will be exemplarily applied.

The novel is set in New Orleans during the week before the 30^th birthday of the protagonist, Binx Bolling, which falls on Ash Wednesday. As the title suggests, movie-going occupies most of his time, and for Binx movies serve as an exemplary way to lead one’s life. Although almost 30, Binx, both protagonist and narrator, is not an autonomous person. He avoids change, is unsure in his decisions, and always chooses the closest alternative that requires the least effort on his side. For example, he boards with an old lady, he works in a branch office of his step-uncle’s law firm, and his respective secretary is always simultaneously his fiancée, as he has replaced them three times in four years. These observations are expressions of a personal crisis of reaching the age of 30, which brings him to think about his career aspirations, his future companion and his place of residence. Seen from a socio-psychological side, these are all questions of adolescence. The adolescence crisis is particularly interesting because overcoming it results in adulthood (which usually happens in the ‘life-practice’s’ early twenties) but in this case it is also a delayed adolescence crisis. What is the reason for the delay and crisis beyond the approach of a milestone birthday? What brings the crisis to an end? And does Binx’s solution indicate success or failure?

A first hint to the stimulus of the crisis is found in the first chapter in the following sequence, where Binx raises the issue of change after having described his life and customs:

But things have suddenly changed. My peaceful existence in Gentilly has been complicated. This morning, for the first time in years, there occurred to me the possibility of a search. I dreamed of the war, no, not quite dreamed but woke with the taste of it in my mouth, the queasy-quince taste of 1951 and the Orient. I remembered the first time the search occurred to me. I came to myself under a chindolea bush. Everything is upside down for me, as I shall explain later. What are generally considered to be the best times are for me the worst times, and that worst of times was one of the best. My shoulder didn’t hurt but it was pressed hard against the ground as if somebody sat on me. Six inches from my nose a dung beetle was scratching around under the leaves. As I watched, there awoke in me an immense curiosity. I was onto something. I vowed that if I ever got out of this fix, I would pursue the search. Naturally, as soon as I recovered and got home, I forgot all about it.[5]

A sudden change from ‘peaceful’ to ‘complicated’ has taken place in the narrator’s life, but he does not or cannot qualify it any further than just speaking of ‘things’. This might be due to him not being able to reach the ‘things’ because it affects certain parts of his self that lie deep in his unconscious. The change was triggered by an incident―the occurrence of a search, or rather of the possibility of a search, an idea not new to him but long forgotten. Speaking of search also implies that the change in life was not imposed on him by an exterior force because a search requires a person’s activity. That means that the narrator has brought about the change willingly, but he still uses the passive ‘occurred to me’, as if he wanted to conceal this active side from himself. In tracing back the appearance of his search he remembers that he dreamed of the Korean War in such a realistic way that he was even able to recall the taste of it. This is more than a dream, rather a re-enactment, which gives a first clue to his suffering a war trauma. Indeed, he tells of a battlefield injury to his shoulder, which made him lose consciousness, and which is closely connected with the first appearance of the search: when he came round and found himself under a bush―the shoulder not hurting due to the shock―he had the sense that this extremely critical situation was, strangely enough, good for him because watching a dung beetle close to him aroused in the narrator the feeling of being engaged in a search and thus of having a goal to accomplish. In this extraordinary situation―a matter of life and death―it became clear to him that he must prove himself in life. But he calls search what is, in fact, probation. He invented this search because he realises that he experiences a change, then needs this invention as a pretence to not let his crisis of probation become conscious. When the narrator is home again, he is so absorbed by the repression of the trauma that everything else becomes secondary, including the search. But repressing a trauma excludes the process of working through it, and in consequence it will reappear again someday. This very event arrived that morning: the narrator finds himself at the same point in life, where he is now able to resume the search and work through his trauma. Up to that moment he had been too weak to bear facing his trauma and therefore something had a stabilising effect on the state of his psyche.

The above dream ignites a period of eight days where the narrator confronts his crisis of probation in a rather unconscious manner, i.e. he is not able to name it. In the end this leads to a change of his vision of life and his vocation, but most notably, a change of his relationship with his step-cousin Kate. On the first day Binx describes Kate’s thoughts as follows:

In her long nightmare, this our old friendship now itself falls victim to the grisly transmogrification by which she unfailingly turns everything she touches to horror.[6]

Kate’s psychic instability becomes clear immediately when the narrator speaks of her ‘long nightmare’. A nightmare requires sleep, which is, in its characteristics of being detracted from practice and in its darkness and helplessness, similar to the emotional condition of a person suffering from depression. The nightmare is already ‘long’ and has not ended yet, and now it takes the toll of their friendship. Their friendship is ‘old’ because Binx lived with Kate―who is five years younger―and her father and her stepmother, who is his great-aunt, from the age of 15 and still spends every Sunday there: effectively it is a 15-year-long brother-sister-relationship. Binx, assuming Kate’s perspective, perceives this transformation of their friendship as scary and unidentifiable because it means the end of it and the beginning of something new. Here, an emerging love relationship is indicated, and Kate fears that the transition might fail, which would indeed mean the end of their friendship. She is afraid to start, even just to ‘touch’, something because it might go wrong. A person with this attitude towards life is unlikely to be able come to terms with the demands of life. Kate’s psychic instability is due to trauma from a car accident she and her fiancé had when she was 19, in which he was killed and she survived unscathed. Like Binx with his war wound, she regards it as the happiest moment of her life.

Binx spends the fourth day of that week with his new secretary, Sharon, at the beach with the intention of gaining her love. Watching her returning from a swim in the sea he thinks:

My throat catches with the sadness of her beauty. Son of a bitch, it is enough to bring tears to your eyes. I don’t know what is wrong with me.[7]

With the catch in his throat Binx feels the bodily effect of the emotional state of grief; a block that prevents the person affected from speaking or swallowing properly, is strongly directed towards the inside and is likely to end in an outburst to relieve the pent-up feelings. The reason for Binx’s grief is the sight of Sharon’s beauty. He cannot look at her without sadness because a relationship with her is not within reach for him–not because she won’t return his affection, but because Kate already occupies this position. Inside, he has already said goodbye to Sharon but the moment signals more than just a farewell to her; it is also farewell to Sharon as a representative of his life up to this day. He swears at this insight (‘son of a bitch’), which still does not become conscious. This is clear when he states that he has no idea why he cannot enjoy the beautiful woman and his seemingly carefree life any more. Here, Binx desperately tries to hold on to his routine but at the same time unconsciously makes way for the coming transformation.

Both Binx and Kate are scarred by their individual traumatisation, both are currently in a relationship that does not satisfy them, and both end those relationships in the course of the week―Binx gives up Sharon and Kate breaks her engagement with Walter, her fiancé. On a train journey from New Orleans to Chicago they finally sleep with each other (which includes both possibilities of success or failure) and thus consummate a love relationship. This transformation is evident in the following sequence, set on the sixth day of the week right after their arrival in Chicago, where Binx’s reveals his thoughts on Kate:

There I see her plain, see plain for the first time since I lay wounded in a ditch and watched an Oriental finch scratching around in the leaves…[8]

He sees her in a new light, i.e. with the eyes of a lover. Additionally, he is able to see clearly for the first time since the traumatising event. Interestingly, the dung beetle from the dream tale of the beginning has turned into a songbird, i.e. symbolically from something ugly (dung) and low (ground) to something beautiful (song) and high (sky). Here, we find the reference to the dream, which ignited the crisis. From the moment he was wounded in Korea until the night with Kate his sight was indeed blurred. He gains self-knowledge of his internal state, which is a necessary condition for overcoming the trauma, and thus leads to the solving of his crisis. This sequence indicates a successful outcome.

Summarising the reading, the novel begins when Binx has reached the point in life where recovery is possible (to the amount attainable for him) and his present life is not interesting enough and appealing any more. The coming of his 30th birthday sets the time for the appearance of the crisis. During this critical week he thinks of marriage, starting a family or becoming a doctor, but also considers allowing things to remain as they are. He is ridden by nightmares of the war, endures more sleeping problems than usual, and he discovers his interest in his step-cousin Kate whilst nonetheless trying to fall in love with his new secretary. There is an unconscious desire for change that competes with the seeming convenience of his well-established life. As the relationship with Kate intensifies he unconsciously slides into transformation. At the end of the novel, Binx and Kate marry, he starts medical training and they move to her parents’ neighbourhood. With this new vision of life he can prove himself to the extent possible to him, though he still chooses the closest alternative: Kate, with whom he grew up, and medicine, which his father practised and his aunt wishes him to pursue, and a house near their relatives. Regarding Kate’s and Binx’s traumatisation, however, here two people have come together who mutually help each other and are able to understand the partner in his or her limitations. By this means, their life together constitutes the highest amount of autonomy and probation achievable for both.

The fundamental premise of action established in The Moviegoer is in accordance with the model of ‘structural pessimism’ outlined above. That does not mean the protagonist fails every time he is confronted with a problem, but rather that he carries the burden of a lack of self-confidence. It leads to a relatively late and rather unconscious perception of the crisis, and due to an uncertainty of what the best answer might be, finally, to avoid making a decision. But as that is not a possible alternative in the long run (because one cannot avoid taking action), the crisis recurs until delaying it any further would ultimately lead to defeat. At that point in time the protagonist finally takes action with the help of (mostly self-imposed) external circumstances―the approaching 30th birthday―and thus, solves the crisis just in time and with as little commitment as possible. Because of this lack of confidence in one’s ability to tackle crises and in relying on one’s experience, there is a high risk of making a wrong decision, which then serves to reinforce the ‘structural pessimism’ of which it is a part―and it is almost impossible to break this cycle.

Goethe-University, Frankfurt

Notes

[1] Ulrich Oevermann, ‘Natural Utopianism in Everyday Life Practice – An Elementary Theoretical Model’ in Jörn Rüsen, Michael Fehr, Thomas W. Rieger (eds.), Thinking Utopia―Steps into Other Worlds (New York: Berghahn, 2005), pp. 136–147; ‘Sozialisation als Prozeß der Krisenbewältigung’ in Dieter Geulen, Hermann Veith (eds.), Sozialisationstheorie interdisziplinär―Aktuelle Perspektiven (Stuttgart: Lucius & Lucius, 2004), pp. 155–182; ‘Die Soziologie der Generationsbeziehungen und der Generationen aus strukturalistischer Sicht und ihre Bedeutung für die Schulpädagogik’ in Rolf-Torsten Kramer, Werner Helsper, Susann Busse (eds.), Pädagogische Generationsbeziehungen (Opladen: Leske + Budrich, 2001), pp. 78–128; ‘Die Philosophie von Charles Sanders Peirce als Philosophie der Krise’ in Hans-Josef Wagner (ed.), Objektive Hermeneutik und Bildung des Subjekts (Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2001), pp. 209–246; ‘Die Struktur sozialer Deutungsmuster―Versuch einer Aktualisierung’, in Sozialer Sinn 1 (2001), pp. 35-82; ‘Die objektive Hermeneutik als unverzichtbare methodologische Grundlage für die Analyse von Subjektivität. Zugleich eine Kritik der Tiefenhermeneutik’ in Thomas Jung, Stefan Müller-Doohm (eds.), ”Wirklichkeit” im Deutungsprozeß: Verstehen und Methoden in den Kultur-und Sozialwissenschaften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993), pp. 106-189; ‘Genetischer Strukturalismus und das sozialwissenschaftliche Problem der Erklärung der Entstehung des Neuen’ in Stefan Müller-Doohm (ed.), Jenseits der Utopie; Theoriekritik der Gegenwart (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), pp. 267–336.

[2] George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self & Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955).

[3] John Searle has something similar in mind when he speaks of ‘Background’.

[4] For the original use of the term see Pierre Bourdieu, La distinction. Critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Edition de Minuit, 1979).

[5] Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (New York: Vintage, 1998), pp. 10-11.

[6] Ibid. p. 63.

[7] Ibid. p. 130.

[8] Ibid. p. 206.

Issue 17, Autumn 2010: Article 3

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

‘How Did It All Fit In’: Alice Notley’s ‘101’

Yasmine Shamma

In poems that remember or describe domestic space, to what extent does the stanza take on the etymology its name recalls? This is a particularly relevant question to ask when reading Alice Notley’s Mysteries of Small Houses and, more specifically, her poem ‘101’ which retraces the apartment she and Ted Berrigan lived in throughout their time in New York City and as members of the unofficial Second Generation New York School. Since the period in the 1970s and 1980s when Notley and Berrigan lived in, wrote from, threw parties at, and had started a family from 101 St. Mark’s Place, Notley has moved to Paris and to other forms of writing (most recently, she is working on epics). But this collection of poetry survives and serves not only as an artifact of remembered places, but as an underappreciated work of art, and though it was a finalist for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize, few critics have written about the collection.[1] Though Notley explains in interviews and essays that she wrote this book as a response to discussions of ‘the self’ that were occurring in the nineties, the poems in the book go beyond that discussion and deal with the way that ‘the body-self’ is ‘such a shadowy fragile house’ unadorned and open, like her poetry.[2] Throughout the book, domestic space is linked not only to the self remembering or inhabiting space, but to the poem which takes on the look of its surroundings. I am interested in the way that this poem is part of a larger 20th century trend of poems—in the process of dealing with place—imitating housed city life.

Of particular interest is the Second Generation New York School which picks up on a poetic tradition set in motion by Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch and others, and follows through with its commitment not only to an alternate line, but to visual attention. As the school named after a painting movement and based in New York City, an urban landscape ripe with visual stimulation, it becomes interesting to think of how this attention to viewpoint factors into the poems which so often address physical constructs: the musing activities of New York School poems very often occur in apartments. What does it mean that these room-ed moments are recollected in stanzas?

The Modern stanza—grappling with questions of place, seems to become a kind of linguistic room or inner space in which poets can register their concerns and impressions of city life. Many studies have addressed the role of landscape in poetry, and the city in poetry, but one of the smallest units has been eclipsed by 20th century literary criticism. Rooms are described throughout contemporary and modern American poetry within stanzas, so that the room might be being imitated or reflected in the shape of the stanza. In returning to the etymological roots of the word, recent City poets not only engage an age-old conceit of western poetry but also reinvent that conceit to accommodate the conditions of late 20th century urban life. And as the stanza has been such a place to respond, it gets, by the late 1980s in New York City, increasingly crowded, breathless and intense. Accordingly, the page becomes a place riddled with the tensions of city life, as poets who have lived in cities, or in the idea of them, manipulate syntax, style and form—poetically rendering urban density.

For example, in the poetry of the New York School poems seem pieced-together, little punctuation, the sense that characters are proliferating and time is unmarked and rapidly slipping, along with the sheer exhausting, undeniable length of poems, hinting at an inescapable density. Yet the same is true of New York, just in a more physical or actual sense. So when Kenneth Koch writes ‘The Boiling Water’ and Allen Ginsberg writes ‘Howl’ or ‘America’, Frank O’Hara, ‘Meditations in an Emergency’ or Alice Notley, ‘Place myself in New York (Need One More Time There)’ all in chunks of rarely broken up stanzas and seemingly haphazard form, I would argue that they are answering to their external, or urban, situations.[3] Likewise, in a much earlier era, when T.S. Eliot writes four neatly revised near sonnet stanzas (as in ‘Preludes’), and Wallace Stevens, eight (as in ‘Sunday Morning’) and separate or space the activities within them with roman numerals and white stanza breaks on the page, I would argue that they are answering to the architecture of their lives.

So the page becomes a place to situate the perceived conditions—instead of the actual dimensions—of roomed life. In Michail Bakhtin’s term, such poetry is ‘answerable’ to the environment from which it speaks. Bakhtin writes of this phenomenon in ‘Art and Answerability,’in which he first disapproves of art that is

… Too self-confident, audaciously self-confident, and too high-flown, for it is in no way bound to answer for life. And, of course, life has no hope of ever catching up with art of this kind. ‘That’s too exalted for us’—says life. ‘That’s art, after all! All we’ve got is the humble prose of living’.[4]

The ‘humble prose of living’is taken up by Eliot when he writes ‘Think: I made this’ (‘Marina’); by Stevens when he writes ‘She dreams a little’ (‘Sunday Morning’); Bishop when she writes, ‘She shivers and says she thinks the house / feels chilly’ (‘Sestina’); and, later, New York poets, as O’Hara writes, ‘Oh! Kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! / You really are beautiful! Pearls, / harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins!’ (‘Hymn to Life’); Koch remembers, ‘the men with their eyes on the myth / And the missus and the midterms’ (‘Doctor Fun’); Notley reflects ‘I have a headache in a burning house for years / Hardly know that it’s burning’ (‘Flowers’) and Berrigan in his ‘Last Poem’writes: ‘I … gave / Blood, regained my poise, & verbalized myself a place / In Society. 101 St. Mark’s Place, apt. 12A, NYC 10009’.[5] Note that this ‘humble prose of living’ tends to allude to the place of living. And in this way, these poetries are comprehensively ‘answerable’. What Bakhtin abstractly seeks as a ‘unity of answerability’ becomes actualised in the unity of these poems.[6]

With all of these poets seeming to be conscious of the pity of unanswered inspiration, their poetry reacts to urban life. The poems account for the experience of roomed life, rendering forms inwardly, often to critical effect. The ‘serious house on serious earth’ (Larkin) becomes the poem, or becomes imitated or held in the poem, itself serious and housing.[7]

Philosophers, environmental psychologists and urban theorists have considered the implications of such a Russian doll effect of experience in houses. Place philosopher Edward Casey reflects on Heidegger’s, Merleau-Ponty’s and Bachelard’s conceptions of space, eventually arguing that the parameters of experience had in a house are more informative than the actual physical parameters of the house.[8] This will prove crucial when considering poets writing from small spaces—such as New York City studios, as the qualities of their lives become the dimensions of their lives. Casey claims that the home, however small, becomes a ‘place-world, a world of places’. As Casey continues through this line of thought, he arrives at a point relevant to this study of Notley’s rooms in 101 St. Mark’s Place: ‘What matters (in a house) is the degree of intimacy and intensity of our experience there; when these are acutely felt, the very distinction between universe and world…becomes otiose. … The exploration is not architectural, much less geometrical; it is a matter of rooms as dreamed, imagined, remembered—and read’.[9] With this claim in mind, reading Notley’s ‘101’ conjures imagining, remembering and dreaming. But while Casey reflects on the ‘exploration’ being neither architectural or geometrical, the formulation of the exploration within poetry (I believe Notley’s poem is one of many from the first and generation New York School poets that enact this) is forced into something between architecture, geometry and dreaming.

Notley’s poems from her Mysteries of Small Houses muse on the thin lines between imagining and re-placing oneself within an architected time and place.[10] Specifically, ‘101’ the poem in tribute to the apartment in which Notley and Berrigan began a family, just a few doors down from the Poetry Project, provides a floorplan worthy of formal consideration. While it is tempting to read this poem as a contemporary ‘Room of One’s Own’, Notley asks her audience not to gender her poetry, as she responds to Adrienne Rich’s feminist criticism: ‘I don’t like the way she uses the pronoun “We”. I think she emotionally blackmails you with it. And I never feel like I’m part of her “We”’.[11] But reading Notley as a woman writing about the place of women has recently become more possible, and more difficult to resist. Her two following books ‘look down’, to borrow a phrase from ‘101’, into the heroine in epics.[12] But before she began exploring the relationship of women to epics, Notley wrote Mysteries, a book involved in a wholly different pursuit. Throughout the collection she recalls her time not only in New York City, but in apartments and small living spaces throughout the world. Because the book dwells on themes of inhabiting (‘I like how small the apartment it pulls us closer’ (‘Place Myself in New York…’) and treats the fact of being a woman as a mere fact (‘Not a diva experimentalist genius or ferocious outlaw—/just a poet… / just pick up words not toys / just a poet’), this book deserves attention as a book about those small places, and that human perceiving them.

The book is unique in its context of 90s poetry at a time when the Iowan Creative Writing Program (where Notley met Berrigan) was churning out many a female ‘Experimentalist’ like Jorie Graham who drew on myth in her poetry and won the prize Notley was nominated for, and Notley’s poems stand out as resisting tendencies of abstraction.[13] Writing persona-less from the place of her life, memories, visions and daily errands, her poems seem aware of the risks of ‘getting too far away from earth’, that Rich herself writes about: ‘Even in the struggle against free-floating abstraction, we have abstracted’.[14]

Because Mysteries… stands in this small way against ‘the struggle’, and Notley’s own essays on women dismiss the positioning of her poetry within a women’s canon, I would like to look at this collection, and more specifically this poem, as one concerned with concrete place, written by ‘just a poet’.

‘101’, in the way of New York poetry, begins:

It’s possible that I still live there
Apartment that is path-narrow
I don’t want to be there in this poem if
Anyone else is, from the past, I want it to be empty
A lot of dust I let fall
It gets smaller See mobiles from when, a flasher
Whose penis had broken off That other mobile I
Made it’s talismanic objects
A bottlecap a rose a centaur a cactus a coin
tiny rooms

Throughout interviews, essays, poems and her life, Notley affirms, almost unwaveringly, that she is ‘interested in the true’. Here and throughout the poem, details are recalled, corrected and recollected, with the act of writing and documenting ‘the true’ playing in an interesting way with remembering. As the tour of ‘101’ begins, the wants which the poem indulges in become muddled with the stasis of the vision—for though the speaker ‘wants it to be empty’, it doesn’t appear to be. The question of control, then, becomes immediate. ‘I don’t want to be there, in this poem, if / anyone else is, from the past’, but the mention of ‘anyone else’ summons the ghosts (both of Notley’s husbands, Berrigan and Douglas Oliver, died) so that they, and the speaker’s resistance to them, come to occupy the poem.

Already in the poem’s first stanza, everything happens in twos:

It’s possible that I still live there

Apartment that is path-narrow

I don’t want to be there in this poem if

Anyone else is, from the past, I want it to be empty

A lot of dust I let fall

It gets smaller …

The ‘there’ of the poem becomes the ‘there’ of the apartment (‘I don’t want to be there in this poem’); What the poem / apartment is comes up against what she wants the poem / apartment to be (‘I want it to be empty’); empty spaces become deliberate in the ‘lot of dust I let fall’. The seen mobile hangs in contrast to the made mobile, and two gaps are offered, allowing the closing of space to relate to the fracturing of memory. More precisely, Notley’s ‘talismanic’ objects are at once souvenirs of the remembered place and, implicitly, the result of remembering as the poem becomes a talisman.

As ‘101’ continues, it moves from its first stanza to its second, and also interestingly to its second room, or liminal space—the hallway:

Several handmade afghans always and many filthy blankets

Shawls on whatever chair a Mexican shawl a cotton cloth from Africa

What about all of the plants they would get very scrubby

Cunty conches rock collections art everywhere collages and fans

But the apartment’s a hallway and odah orange and purple curtains at one window

Held up by a rope and hanging clothes tacked up dividing successive tiny rooms

As cloth spreads to cover, so do these lines. And the coverages are all creations: ‘handmade’, ‘filthy’, ‘collections’, ‘collages’ and ‘successive’, which are, in turn, covered by human touches: ‘held up… tacked up’. They also blanket in their multitude, being: ‘several’, ‘always’, many’, ‘whatever’, ‘all’, very’ and ‘everywhere’, burying the stanza and room’s only life (plants) in clutter. One gets the sense of being touched too much, for all these coverings are also ‘talismanic objects: afghans, blankets, shawls, etc, increasing the sense of multiple handlings. These blankets don’t warm, comfort or shield people, though—they cover things, fill and mark space: a chair is mentioned, not a person in a chair; curtains are ‘at one window’ and not ‘on’ or ‘over’ the window, clothes ‘divid(e)… rooms’ instead of covering people or ‘being doors’. So there comes a sense of overwhelming and insistent hollowness despite the clutter, for though there are clothes for them, there are also no people in this stanza and, apart from the poet-speaker, no living people are ‘enumerated’ in the entire poem.

Out of these layers, we are led into the spatially concerned third stanza: ‘Come into the kitchen from outside look down through slanty-floored narrow nearly-rooms’. Navigating, the verse starts with two verbs: ‘Come’ and ‘Look’ which are the poem’s first real present tense verbs, and also imperative. The imperative to ‘look’ is guided downwards: ‘into’ here, and ‘in’, repeated seven times throughout this stanza, emphasising that the space being probed is internal, that time and place are, for the poem’s moment, fixed spatially below, pinned down or even ‘slowed’. This first invitation to do something is also the first time that the reader is called in, so that the reader’s role is to participate in envisioning. The reader is invited to join the poet in musing on the artifacts of the past:

The mobiles dangle on the way to the real front room where radiant south light is

And there’s some light in the kitchen in spring and summer

As well as in the corridorish bedrooms

In the kitchen’s a small bathtub underneath it’s dark cockroach hell

In the toilet room off the kitchen are the Christmas tree decorations

On top of the kitchen cabinet are dead radios never sent to Nicaragua

In the 80s and in the 70s are minor plants on the sill three or four

They look like a few arms reaching malformed something always

Hangs beside the window

A plastic medallion someone once found or a shoehorn

No the shoehorn was in a bedroom

At this point in the poem, we are one third through the memory and the floorplan, and stand at the cusp of the ‘narrow nearly-rooms’. Both artist and audience are led to gaze at a memory, clearly lost, as time goes backwards and the speaker stops to try to put a finger on things: ‘something always hangs….’ ‘No the shoehorn was in a bedroom’. As if to look up for the lost shoehorn, and change the sense of stillness, the fourth stanza rushes: ‘You had to walk past people in bed to get anywhere’. It helps to consider the 1980s and Roger Gilbert writes on the difference between 80s and 90s poetry:

… the dominant poetic style of the eighties featured a dense sediment of sheer information, most of it contemporary in reference… Typical eighties poems were cluttered with names, ephemera, fragmentary factoids that carried little historic resonance or allusive depth … the nineties saw a shift from anecdote to archetype—from the random, the particular, the contingent and contemporary to the ideal… In spatial terms, the movement was decidedly upward… If the typical eighties poem was written with the TV on, figuratively if not literally, the typical nineties poem was written with the TV off, a Gregorian chant playing softly in the background.[15]

Looking to Notley’s fourth stanza recollection of ‘Fenellosa on art Fat City the Quiller Memorandum’, Shibumi the Time / Life Wildlife Series Levis-Strauss and Bruhl / All of Stevenson herbals the Mahbarata the First Folio the new / Tale of Genji the new Proust in the 70’s when those were new’, one notes that yes, this is 80s poetry: ‘a dense sediment of sheer information, most of it contemporary in reference’ cluttered by mostly, plenty.

Alongside the ‘dense sediment’ of objects the hint of a crowd enters into the fifth stanza. Though, from its start, the poem stands in an ambiguous tense (‘It’s possible that I still live there’), for the most part it sticks to the past until this fifth stanza anticlimax, when the tense most explicitly shifts:

There isn’t any room in this treehouse three flights up people

keep coming in

They ring the buzzer in various codes which we often ignore

You can tell by the pressure applied to the button who it is anyway

They keep coming in I won’t enumerate but they’re all there at all

of the ages and stages we

Were it’s too crowded isn’t it or not you love it whoever but I’m pushed far

inside

At this moment finding space down the well of myself

Though I am this land this apartment in hieroglyphs inscribed round

the well as I drift down

The various people with ‘various codes’ apply pressure to the doorbell and to the poet’s ability to remember the apartment and create ‘this poem’ without ‘anyone else … from the past’ (recall the first stanza). The recollection of many makes the memory of two–line broken–’we / were’ feel at once tucked away and fragile. Here is the middle point of the entire poem, and, appropriately, it is in this time and place of the memory that the poet gets ‘pushed far inside’. In their study of ‘how apartment dwellers view their surroundings,’ Annie Moch, Florence Bordas and Daniele Hermand note that ‘actual physical density’ is not as important as ‘perceived density’.[16] In this way, the fact that the apartment was physically small, translates, perceptively and poetically, to a stanza that is dense in tense, emotion, and frenzy. The study of density cites two situations in one neighborhood—both apartments were technically the same size, but in one, people had to walk through a corridor to get to their space, and: ‘Even though the average amount of space per person was the same… the ‘corridor’ students experienced a stronger feeling of living in overpopulated housing, complained of unwanted encounters, tried to avoid and often cut themselves off from others…. They need to be alone is created and so is the feeling of discomfort’.[17] The stanza which led to this moment of needing to ‘drift down’ was preceded by a recollection of the apartment’s railroad layout: ‘You had to walk past people in bed to get anywhere’. The fact that the poet-speaker remembers and retraces this feeling so acutely, from outside of the moment and place of its origin, speaks to its intensity.

Through ‘it all’, we arrive at the fifth stanza confession. Amid the unnamed crowds, the shoehorn is still sought, and as the stanza and speaker unravel, the shoehorn becomes an anchor:

This apartment wasn’t me really it was everyone else it was the

outer world

How did it all fit in it was all-nighters parties near-fistfights

breakdowns

Endless conversation and controversy dinner parties on a bed

An eternal heart-to-heart ‘It smells like McSorley’s in here’

A death occurs and a couple more offstage the room’s full of mourners

I sit up half the night

Staring near the shoehorn hanging from a nail staring at nothing

Some wood in a bookshelf that never got varnished

Trying to understand how a person vanishes will I ever vanish

Making ‘varnish’ slip to ‘vanish’ seems the play that is precisely Notley’s point. That the sound of a word can slip–and the meaning, and the image, because there are so many other things there–into fear, or wish, quite plainly, of mortality: ‘Will I ever vanish’. And, as Bachelard suggests, ‘the outside becomes a prison’, the city subject confirms that it ‘wasn’t me it was everyone else it was the outerworld’ marking her own confines.[18] The preceding stanza’s note, ‘There isn’t any room in this treehouse’ marks the poem’s spatial crux, and ‘I sit up half the night’, highlighted by a line break, marks the emotional crux.

Maybe it should be mentioned that Notley has lost many loved ones, all male. Mysteries of Small Houses calls on the death of her father, her brother, and two husbands. But when asked why she left New York, Notley explains first that it was ‘Doug’s idea’ and then in a mere sentence: ‘Too much had happened for me there; I couldn’t be there anymore’.[19] In ‘101’, though, she offers more of an explanation in the poem’s final stanza, beginning even, with the causality of ‘So’:

So I walk up the block trapped in time not even so much in those

times

But the time of walking up the block and around it to the store

Over the years I had too often walked on that block to the store and back

What do you do in life go to the store and the next day and the next and

Trapped in the time of walking to the store

And back one day I popped free from time

I popped out of sequence out of walking that stretch for a second

everything felt light I wasn’t there

That wasn’t the first time something like this had happened

It had happened a few years earlier on Third Avenue

I didn’t exactly leave time that time time slowed

And people slowed and walked in slow motion and had naked faces

They all looked vulnerable benign not hard but this time in

1991

I realized I wasn’t even there at all I was unlocated untimed

About a year and a half later and there is no connection particularly

I left New York

The ‘So’ that begins the stanza meets the seeming contradictory ‘there is no connection particularly’ that ends it. However, there being ‘no connection particularly’ is the cause of Notley’s departure from New York, and the speaker exiting this poem of too much. The too-much-ness of the previous lines is complemented by their unpunctuated seeming haphazardness. In this stanza, an actual activity is recalled as repetitive and somehow entrancing, too, however mundane: the walk to the supermarket. And in being remembered as something that happens with some timed frequency to it: ‘trapped in the time of walking to the store’, it receives the only detectable rhythm in the poem, as daily habits do in life. For this short moment, a faint iambic pentameter is set in motion by anapests, and followed by the traditionally elegiac dactylic pentameter. And it all halts or explodes, too appropriately, when the moment comes to be ‘popped out of time’ replaced by lines that make the reader out of breath.

‘101’ implies that this staggering popping happens to Notley’s speaker, precisely because in a place of so much, ‘there is no connection’ and more specifically, ‘Particularly’. As she notes innumerable things happening, rooms filling, and people coming in and vanishing almost despite or regardless of her, the particular comes to feel eerily effaced. It is by virtue of these happenings happening to her and in her house, that the ‘self’, house and poem become inseparably shaped and, overwhelmed by particulars, subject to ‘popping out’. Leaving New York, then, becomes, as a reverse kidnapping, crucial.

But this is not an escape. Ginsberg sensitively explains after ‘Howl’: ‘Mind is shapely. Art is shapely’, and Berrigan, Notley’s first personal teacher, echoed: ‘I want to make the poems have shape, be shapely‘.[20] Mysteries of Small Houses, though, is centrally concerned with the places within places—the city ‘embodied’ in the room, the room ‘embodied’ in the stanza. As the alleyway becomes the recess of the cityscape, and the room the recess of the street, the poem or painting or even flower arrangement becomes a recess of the room. And the want to get it all right becomes, in this reverse arranging way, a want to get out. Sensing the threat of muddle and estrangement caused by the city’s Too Muchness/excess, Notley’s speaker subtly explains, in the calm shaped by the coupling of the poem’s last lines, safely popped out in the carved white space of a stanza break, that departing is a resistance to abstraction.

In an essay finally comparing their poetry, Eric Selinger assumed that Berrigan wrote the following line about Notley: ‘Technically, she is impeccable, & / If She is clumsy in places, those are clumsy places’.[21] The line is actually inspired by Anne Waldman, but the mistake is understandable—the line is loving, and Berrigan loved Notley and Waldman in potentially equal, though different, capacities. Furthermore, throughout Notley’s poetry, her stanzas seem to emulate the looks of the places they are written from. In ‘101’ Notley’s spatial memory is impeccable, tripping often, it seems, to suggest that New York’s East Village is a clumsy place. While, as Aristotle bluntly predicted: ‘The power of place will be remarkable’, philosophers have reconsidered the ‘power of place’ with Philip Sheldrake noting: ‘The most fundamental fact of human existence is that because people are ‘embodied’ they are also ‘somewhere’, and Bachelard, hinting at the boiling therein: ‘Entrapped in being, we shall always have to come out of it’.[22] But what happens when the place you come out into is the messy city or the overcrowded apartment? And when this place is recalled in a poem, do stanzas take on the literal contours their etymologies recall? In considering how a city may overwhelm, Notley’s interview confession illuminates: ‘I got interested in the fact that there was this control on the page’.[23]

‘I’m not being clear,’ writes Notley in her ‘Flowers’. ‘We had inappropriate emotions / The American poetry vacant lot’s small and overgrown.’ She so directly alludes not only to city life, but to the syntax of a poetry movement. A trope of emergence becomes traceable with Koch’s ‘boiling water’, O’Hara’s ‘re-emerging’, Ginsberg’s ‘howling’ and, in Notley’s ‘101’ ‘Popping free from time’ all suggesting an underlying, unnaturally supernatural push radiating from the urban sidewalk.[24] In ‘101’ Notley implicitly asks: What happens when a person is pushed out? When a city subject becomes irrelevant?—or when a house, too crowded, ejects one of its inhabitants? In ‘101’ Notley confesses ‘it wasn’t me’, and so answers, eventually leaving the poem and New York City, formally resisting clutter through poetic exit.

University of Oxford

Notes

[1] Peter Middleton wrote an article on “101” for the website Intercapillary Space, which provides a good general introduction to the poem. Libbie Rifkin concludes her Career Moves with a look at “Flowers” from the book, and Brian Kim Stefan’s review of Disobedience in the Boston Review addresses Mysteries… in its introduction (Vol. 27, No. 6, December 2002/January 2003).

, I was firstly trying to realize the first person singular as fully and nakedly as possible… Saying I in that way I tried to trace I’s path through my past. I’ve never understood that word [“self”] very well and how people use it now in any of the camps that use it pro or con – I guess I partly wrote Mysteries in order to understand it better. I came to the conclusion, in the final poem of the book, that self means ‘I’ and also means ‘poverty’, it’s what one strips down to, who you are when you’ve stripped down.” Alice Notley, ‘The Poetics of Disobedience’, <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/poetics-essay.html?id=238698>.

[3] Kenneth Koch, Collected Poems (New York: Knopf, 2005), p. 330

[4] Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Art and Answerability’, in Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990) pp. 2-6 (p. 2).

[5] Kenneth Koch, Collected Poems (New York: Knopf, 2005), p. 330; Frank O’Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara ed. by Donald Allen (California: University of California Press, 1995) p. 197; Alice Notley, Mysteries of Small Houses (New York: Penguin, 1998) p. 56. All further references to Notley’s poems are from this edition. T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems (New York: Penguin Books, 1998) pp. 10-14; Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning’ in Norton Anthology of Poetry. 5^th ed. by Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy (USA: Norton and Company, 2005) p. 1257.

[6] Bakhtin, ‘Art and Answerability’, p. 2.

[7] This phrase comes from Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Church Going’.

[8] Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) p. 336.

[9] Ibid. p. 290.

<http://jacketmagazine.com/40/iv-notley-ivb-shamma-2009.shtml> (accessed October 8, 2010).

[12] Susan McCabe writes about this to some extent in “The Performance of Crisis in Alice Notley’ in Jacket 25 http://jacketmagazine.com/25/glen-notl.html

[13] Willard Spiegelman’s The Nineties Revisited provides a useful overview of trends in Nineties poetry. Contemporary Literature XLII, 2, (University of Wisconsin, 2001).

[14] See endnote 2. Adrienne Rich, “The Politics of Dis-location”, Women, Feminist Identity, and Society in the 1980s. ed. By Myriam Diaz-Diocaretz and Iris M. Zavela, (USA: John Benjamin’s Publishing, 1985) pp. 7-25.

[15] Roger Gilbert, ‘Awash with Angels: The Religious Turn in Nineties Poetry’, Contemporary Literature, Vo. 42, No. 2, Summer 2001, p. 238-269.

[16] ‘Perceived density: how apartment dwellers view their surroundings’, Le Courrier du CNRS, #82, 1996, pp. 131-2.

[17] Ibid. p. 131.

[18] Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958) p. 216.

[19] Alice Notley interview with Leonard Schwartz, Cross Cultural Poetics, Episode 28: EuroNorth America (Evergreen University, 2005).

[20] Nice to See You, ed. Anne Waldman (Coffee House Press, 1991) p. 113.

[21] Eric Selinger, ‘That Awkward Grace’, Parnassus: Poetry in Review Vol. 21.2 (1996). pp. 298-324 (p. 299).

[22] Philip Sheldrake, Spaces for the Sacred: Place, Memory, and Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001) p. 9; Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. 213.

[23] Leonard Schwartz, Cross Cultural Poetics

[24] For more on ‘Emergence Theory’ see Stephen Johnson’s Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software (New York: Touchstone, 2001).

Issue 17, Autumn 2010: Article 2

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Adapting Kali: Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Stotras to Kali Destroyer of Illusions’

Nicola Scholes

O MOTHER and Spouse of the Destroyer of the three cities

Hymn to Kālī: Karpūrādi-Stotra.[1]

O Statue of Liberty Spouse of Europa Destroyer of Past Present Future

Allen Ginsberg, ‘Stotras to Kali Destroyer of Illusions’.[2]

Many critics acknowledge the vast array of influences on the work of the twentieth-century American ‘Beat’ poet Allen Ginsberg. Gordon Ball, for example, in his essay on Ginsberg’s seminal poem ‘ “Howl” and its Influences’ reminds us that Ginsberg ‘drew richly […] from an almost unlimited range of source and inspiration’.[3] Another critic, Laszlo Géfin, observes that in the early stage of his career Ginsberg ‘turned to imitating sixteenth–and seventeenth–century poets like Wyatt and Marvell’ before learning from one of his contemporaries, the American poet William Carlos Williams, ‘to adapt his poetry rhythms out of the actual talk rhythms (that) he heard’.[4] Although it is recognised that Ginsberg imitates or adapts diverse literary and cultural forms, there has been little discussion on his poem ‘Stotras to Kali Destroyer of Illusions’ (Planet News 1968) as an adaptation or otherwise of the Hymn to Kālī: Karpūrādi-Stotra, an ancient Hindu text. And yet, as the above-quoted openings of each text suggest, ‘Stotras to Kali’ sustains a close intertextual relationship with the Karpūrādi-Stotra. I show the nature and the extent of this relationship by comparing the corresponding passages in each text, and by highlighting the points at which the texts converge and diverge. The Karpūrādi-Stotra worships Kali, a fearsome mother goddess of death and destruction. Ginsberg, in ‘Stotras to Kali’, reinvents Kali as a symbol of America. He transforms the Kali-worship in the Karpūrādi-Stotra into an ironic critique of America and her ‘worshippers’ during the Cold War. In this, I argue, he is motivated by a combination of political, aesthetic and personal concerns. Following the comparative analysis of the two texts, I ask if it is possible, in view of recent theories of adaptation, to speak of ‘Stotras to Kali’ as an adaptation of the Karpūrādi-Stotra.

Ginsberg wrote ‘Stotras to Kali’ in Bombay in 1962 and was published in Planet News in 1968. A draft of the poem, ‘Notes for Stotras to Kali as Statue of Liberty’, appears in Ginsberg’s Indian Journals in 1970. After 1970, it is possible to read ‘Notes for Stotras’ before seeing the revised poem in Planet News. Acknowledging that it is possible to consume adaptations before their so-called originals, the literary theorist Linda Hutcheon argues that ‘Multiple versions exist laterally, not vertically’.[5] This is also true in the case of drafts that are written before, and yet published after their revised versions. The Karpūrādi-Stotra from which I quote in this essay is also a version—‘a form or variant of a thing’—and, as such, is informed by processes of adaptation.[6] I refer to Arthur Avalon’s version, in which the Karpūrādi–Stotra’s verses are translated from Sanskrit to English, numbered and separated by pages of commentary. According to Avalon, authorship of the Karpūrādi-Stotra is believed to be a deity: ‘Mahākāla Himself’ (p.1). As with the Bible and other older texts, there are no copyright restrictions on the Karpūrādi-Stotra, enabling Ginsberg to draw upon it freely in his poem, without need of permission. Ginsberg transforms 16 of the Karpūrādi-Stotra’s 22 verses, and this transformation—a term that fittingly describes the metamorphosis of images here—forms the bulk of his poem (more than three of the four-and-a-quarter pages that make up ‘Stotras to Kali’ in Planet News). In order to show the nature, order and comprehensiveness of Ginsberg’s engagement with the Karpūrādi-Stotra—what he retains, what he omits, and what he transforms—I shall emphasise in bold typeface the words and phrases in the Karpūrādi-Stotra that are repeated in ‘Stotras to Kali’ and show their corresponding appearances in ‘Stotras to Kali’.

In Verse 1 of the Karpūrādi-Stotra, Kali is addressed as follows:

O MOTHER and Spouse of the Destroyer of the three cities, they who thrice recite Thy Bīja formed by omitting from Karpūra, the middle and last consonants and the vowels, but adding Vāmāksī and Bindu, the speech of such, whether in poetry and prose, like that of men who have attained all powers, issues of a surety with all ease from the hollow of their mouth, O Thou who art beauteous with beauty of a dark rain cloud (p.43)

A footnote to the italicised word Bīja explains that this word means ‘seed’ and that it refers to a particular kind of mantra: ‘the “seed” mantra’ (p.45). In Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews, Ginsberg relates his knowledge of, and enthusiasm for Sanskrit prosody. He informs his interviewer Michael Aldrich that ‘the mantra formulas have what are called bija syllables, or seed syllables, because their deployment, physiologically in the body during their pronouncing, is crucial’.[7] Ginsberg’s interest in the physiological effects of language clearly constitutes one of his aesthetic reasons for working with the Karpūrādi-Stotra. Both the Karpūrādi-Stotra and ‘Stotras to Kali’ are texts that are conscious of their textuality in that they draw attention to themselves (‘Thy Bīja’ and ‘this Anthem’ respectively), and address not only their objects of praise, but their readers, who are positioned as worshippers, for example, by the repeated phrase ‘they who recite’. In the opening lines of ‘Stotras to Kali’, Ginsberg ‘superimposes the terrible mother Kālī onto the figure of the Statue of Liberty, combining the violently sexual Tantric goddess with the icon of American identity’:[8]

O Statue of Liberty Spouse of Europa Destroyer of Past Present Future

They who recite this Anthem issuing from empty skulls the stars & stripes

certainly makes a noise on the radio beauteous with the twilight (p.41)

The Statue of Liberty, the stars and stripes of the American flag, and the suggestion that the poem is an anthem, possibly an alternative national anthem, all help to frame Kali as America, whose statue, flag and anthem are worshipped. Whereas in the Karpūrādi-Stotra, the mouths of Kali’s worshippers are hollow—like musical instruments—in order to sing her praise, in ‘Stotras to Kali’ the hollow mouths become ‘empty skulls’ whose mindless worship of America produces not music but ‘noise on the radio’. We can see and hear Ginsberg’s repetition of the language structure and rhythms in the Karpūrādi-Stotra. The sounds of ‘Europa Destroyer’ and ‘Future’ in ‘Stotras to Kali’ echo ‘Mother’ and ‘Destroyer’ in the Karpūrādi-Stotra, as does ‘certainly’ in ‘surety’ and ‘Liberty’ in ‘cities’. In the Karpūrādi-Stotra, Kali is the ‘Spouse of the Destroyer of the three cities’, which refers to her power in granting liberation from the ‘three bodies, gross, subtle, causal’ (p.43). In ‘Stotras to Kali’, America is the ‘Spouse of Europa Destroyer of Past Present Future’. ‘Spouse of Europa’ suggests Zeus, the king of the gods, who seduced ‘Europa in the guise of a bull’.[9] In this reading, America is as powerful and as seductive as Zeus. The reference to the three stages of time—past, present, and future—suggests that, additionally, Ginsberg is invoking myths of the Great Mother, for the Jungian psychologist Erich Neumann, ‘the Great Mother is goddess of Time’.[10] She is often depicted in triplicate form in order to reflect ‘the three temporal stages of all growth (beginning-middle-end, birth-life-death, past-present-future)’.[11] Neumann cites as examples the ‘numerous Greek goddesses who appear in threes, (and) the Roman weaving goddesses of fate’.[12] In bringing the figures of Kali and the Statue of Liberty together with allusions to the Great Mother, Ginsberg effectively conflates Indian, American and classical mythologies.

Ginsberg also creates myths by ‘taking the news of the day and making hyperbole of it’.[13] In the manner of the English Romantic poet William Blake, he mythologises dozens of politicians and artists by ‘magnif(ying) roles into cosmo-demonic figures.’[14] The politicians in ‘Stotras to Kali’ include Earl Browder, Adlai Stevenson, Patrice Lumumba, Nikita Khrushchev, Theodore Roosevelt and George Washington. There are also references to the writers Edgar Allan Poe and Gertrude Stein, the publisher William Randolph Hearst, the jazz musician Thelonius Monk and the actor James Dean. In Spontaneous Mind, Ginsberg speaks about his technique of building lists of references, and likens it, interestingly, to the art of basket-weaving:

the thing would be to take all of contemporary history, newspaper headlines and all the pop art of Stalinism and Hitler and Johnson and Kennedy and Viet Nam and Congo and Lumumba and the South and Sacco and Vanzetti—whatever floated into one’s personal field of consciousness and contact. And then to compose like a basket-like weave (…) out of those materials.[15]

In other words, rather than speaking of conflating various pieces of information, as I have done, Ginsberg conceives his artistic process as a kind of weaving of journalistic detail in which the names of key political figures and cultural icons are woven with, in ‘Stotras to Kali’, the threads of ancient Eastern and Western myths. In view of the feminine connotations of weaving, this is an intriguing analogy. In fact, the Great Mother, as Neumann demonstrates, is herself considered to be a weaver.[16] She ‘weaves the web of life and spins the threads of fate’.[17] In this way, Ginsberg assumes a feminine position as a spinner or weaver of prophetic poetry, and elevates his role of author to the status of a god(dess). He draws attention to his authorial status in the final line of the draft ‘Notes for Stotras’: ‘Here ends the National Anthem by Allen Ginsberg, entitled H*Y*M*N T*O* U*S*’.[18] Ginsberg positions himself here as both a citizen of the U.S.—one of ‘us’—and the author, or weaver, of her fate.

As a weaver of fate, the Great Mother is often depicted ‘adorned with the moon and the starry cloak of night’.[19] According to Neumann, this is because the ‘moon and night sky are the visible manifestations of the temporal process in the cosmos’.[20] The Karpūrādi-Stotra also suggests that Kali is an expression of the Great Mother in Verse 2, where she is depicted as a moon goddess:

O MAHEŚI, even should one of poor mind at any time recite but once another doubled Bīja of Thine, composed of Īśāna, and Vāmaśravana, and Bindu; then, O Thou who hast great and formidable ear-rings of arrow form, who bearest on Thy head the crescent moon, such an one becomes all powerful, having conquered even the Lord of Speech and the Wealth-Giver, and charmed countless youthful women with lotus-like eyes (p.47)

As we have seen in Verse 1, Kali is considered beautiful because she is dark and powerful (‘a dark rain cloud’). In keeping with images of sky, in Verse 2 ‘the crescent moon’ illuminates Kali’s darkness by crowning her with a half-halo of light. Her power and fighting nature are represented in her ‘great and formidable’ arrow ear-rings. This verse suggests that, in worshipping Kali, a man is able to transform his material or intellectual disadvantage to become powerfully eloquent, wealthy, and charismatic. Ginsberg transforms these lines in ‘Stotras to Kali’ as follows:

should one skinny Peruvian only spell your name right O thou who

hast formidable eyebrows of spiritual money & beareth United Nations in your

hair

such Peruvian becomes higher Jaweh charming countless moviestars with

disappearing eyes (p.41)

The ‘poor mind’ in the Karpūrādi-Stotra, becomes the alliterative ‘Peruvian’ in ‘Stotras to Kali’, whose poverty is illustrated by his skinniness. These lines suggest that, in worshipping powerful, wealthy America, (perhaps by learning English, as in ‘only spell your name right’) the Peruvian will become as powerful and as charismatic as the Old Testament (name of) God, Jaweh (rhyming with ‘hair’ in the previous line). There is no beautiful moon above America; only the United Nations in her hair. Considering Kali’s ‘long, dishevelled hair’, we may infer that the United Nations is tangled in America. Verse 3 also refers to Kali’s dishevelled hair:[21]

O KĀLIKĀ, O auspicious Káliká with dishevelled hair, from the corners of whose mouth two streams of blood trickle, they who recite another doubled Bīja of Thine composed of Īśa, Vaiśvānara, Vāmanetra, and the lustrous Bindu, destroy all their enemies, and bring under their subjection the three worlds (p.50).

This verse recalls the fearsomeness of Kali ‘on the battlefield, where she is a furious combatant who gets drunk on the hot blood of her victims’.[22] It suggests that those who worship Kali will destroy their enemies as effectively as Kali destroys her own. Kali is mostly the Terrible Mother, the negative aspect of the Great Mother. For Neumann, ‘It is in India that the experience of the Terrible Mother has been given its most grandiose form as Kali’.[23] He argues that every archetype has both positive and negative features, and so ‘The Great Mother is the giver not only of life but also of death’.[24] He continues to suggest that ‘in a profound way life and birth are always bound up with death and destruction. That is why this Terrible Mother is “Great.”’[25] In ‘Stotras to Kali’ Ginsberg transposes the Terrible Mother onto America:

O republic female mouth from which two politics trickle they who recite the name thy 28th star OMAHA subjugate hungry ghost-hoards ascreech under Gold Reserve (p.41)

The two politics that trickle from America’s mouth may be seen as the Republican and Democrat parties. When read with knowledge of the Karpūrādi-Stotra, this line shows America as thirsty for the blood of politics. The sound of ‘Reserve’ in ‘Stotras to Kali’ echoes ‘worlds’ in the Karpūrādi-Stotra. The Karpūrādi-Stotra suggests that those who worship Kali by reciting her mantra will be successful in destroying their enemies. Likewise, Ginsberg suggests the power of mantras in ‘they who recite | the name’ and the capitalized ‘OMAHA’, which, if considering his interest in mantra chanting, may be read as OM-AH-HA. Ginsberg defines a mantra as ‘a short magic formula or prayer with syllables consisting of the names of deities’.[26] Making a mantra of the name of the American city OMAHA, therefore, accords with the poem’s deification of America. I am reminded here of Ginsberg’s desire to ‘make Mantra of American language’ in his poem on the Vietnam war ‘Wichita Vortex Sutra’ also published in Planet News.[27] In ‘Wichita’ he enlists the power of words, or the ‘magic’ of mantra, to end the war with a performative speech act: ‘I here declare the end of the War!’[28] Ginsberg explains that he wanted this declaration to:

counteract and ultimately overwhelm the force field of language pronounced out of the State Department and out of (President Lyndon B.) Johnson’s mouth. When they say ‘We declare war,’ their mantras are black mantras, so to speak.[29]

In ‘Stotras to Kali’ the speaker also condemns the ‘black magic’ of some American ‘mantras’ such as radio broadcasts, as suggested in the lines: ‘They who recite this Anthem issuing from empty skulls (…) certainly makes a noise on the radio’, (p.41) and ‘endless devotions intoned by mustached radio announcers’ (p.43).

For Ginsberg, Kali’s gruesome appearance and love of killing make her an apposite symbol of warmongering America. In the Karpūrādi-Stotra Kali holds a severed head in Verse 4 and wears a necklace of heads in Verse 6. Nonetheless, her protective nature is suggested in Verse 4, where she makes ‘the gesture which dispels fear’ and ‘which grants boons’:

O DESTRUCTRESS of the sins of the three worlds, auspicious Kālikā, who in Thy upper lotus-like left hand holdest a sword; and in the lower left hand a severed head; who with Thy upper right hand maketh the gesture which dispels fear, and with Thy lower right hand that which grants boons; they, O Mother with gaping mouth, who reciting Thy name, meditate in this way upon the greatness of Thy mantra, possess the eight great powers of the Three-Eyed One in the palm of their hands (p.53)

The destructive left-hand side of Kali is balanced by her positive right-hand side. Similarly, in Verse 6, Kali’s ‘moonlike face’ suggests a certain beauty in spite of the severed heads around her neck:

O DEVĪ of full breasts, whose throat is adorned with a garland of heads, They who meditating recite any one or two or three of Thy very secret and excelling Bījas or all thereof together with Thy name, in the moonlike face of all such the Devī of Speech ever Wanders, and in their lotus-like eyes Kamalā ever plays (p.59)

For the Hinduism scholar David Kinsley, the Karpūrādi-Stotra modifies Kali’s appearance in order to give her a ‘benign dimension’.[30] He sees this Kali as ‘not only the symbol of death but the symbol of triumph over death’.[31] There is no similar benevolence in Ginsberg’s America, however, whose thirst for death is insatiable:

O fortress America Guardian Blueprint who in thy nether right hand hangs a bathroom

in thy nether left the corpse of Edgar Poe in front right hand hanging the skull

of Roosevelt with grey eyeballs & left hand George Washington his tongue hanging out like a fish

Your huge goddess eye looming over his severed head your bottomless throat open (p.41)

The fact that George Washington, one of America’s ‘founding fathers’, is one of America’s victims may suggest that America has severed the ‘original’ nationalist spirit of her past. Further on, she dances with ‘one foot goddesslike on the corpse of Uncle Sam’ (p.42) displaying her dominance over an earlier, masculine personification of America. This image evokes representations of Kali and Siva, who is sometimes Kali’s consort. In these, Kali ‘is usually standing or dancing on Śiva’s prone body’.[32] For Kinsley, Kali is ‘apt to provoke Śiva to dangerous activity’.[33] It may be that in placing Uncle Sam in Siva’s position, Ginsberg is implying that America also provokes Uncle Sam to dangerous activities, such as producing war propaganda, as in the ‘I Want You for U.S. Army’ recruitment poster.

At this stage, the poem takes leave of the Karpūrādi-Stotra and continues independently for more than a page with its description of Kali as America. It is arguably the most enjoyable part of the poem due to its wonderful reinvention of Kali. Those not familiar with the Karpūrādi-Stotra but familiar with Kali’s appearance, characteristics and behaviour may still recognise and appreciate this reinvention of Kali, and experience it as a palimpsest. Stressing the importance of a given audience’s reception to an adapted work, Hutcheon argues that ‘Contemporary events or dominant images condition our perception as well as interpretation (of an adaptation), as they do those of the adapter’.[34] Accordingly, throughout his 1962 adaptation of the Karpūrādi-Stotra in which he reorients Kali as America, Ginsberg refers to the atom bomb, the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, nuclear disarmament, and other fears and crises of the Cold War. As Kali, America appears to enjoy playing with the taste of nuclear war; her ‘mountainous red tongue | licking vast bubbles of atomic gum’ (p.41). Rather than measuring up to her reputation as a ‘Destroyer of Illusions’, as suggested in the title of the poem, she is portrayed as frivolous and even mad. She talks to herself on the phone and is easily distracted, suggesting traditional sexist representations of the feminine as inconstant and subject to temptation. In addition to her multiple hands, which hold the corpses of her victims, the poem refers to her ‘arms’. In a clever transposition, Kali’s arms become America’s weapons, so that America has ‘arm after arm snaking into place in aether battleships’ (p.42). She also has her ‘thirteenth palm closed in sign of Disarmament’ perhaps suggesting a desire to end the Cold War nuclear arms race (p.42). The poem re-engages with the Karpūrādi-Stotra in its transformation of phrases from the previously-quoted Verses 4 and 6:

O Freedom with gaping mouth full of Cops whose throat is adorned with skulls of Rosenbergs (p.43)

This line suggests the hypocrisy of America’s ideal of freedom by naming her as a police state who electrocutes dissidents. Ginsberg made his feelings known about the impending electrocution of the Rosenbergs in a telegram to President Eisenhower, that read: ‘Rosenbergs are pathetic, government Will sordid, execution obscene America caught in crucifixion machine only barbarians want them burned I stay stop it before we fill our souls with death-house horror’.[35] In ‘Stotras to Kali’, America kills her own citizens in order to maintain her so-called freedom. Similarly, Kali ‘begins to destroy the world that she is supposed to protect’.[36] In executing Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage, America destroys, like Kali, in the name of (national) protection.

Kinsley suggests that Kali is ‘worshipped by tribal or low-caste people in uncivilized or wild places’.[37] Accordingly, Verse 7 of the Karpūrādi-Stotra suggests that worshipping Kali will refine a person’s mind:

O MOTHER, even a dullard becomes a poet who meditates upon Thee raimented with space, three-eyed Creatrix of the three worlds, whose waist is beautiful with a girdle made of numbers of dead men’s arms, and who on the breast of a corpse, as Thy couch in the cremation-ground, enjoyest Mahākāla (p.61)

The emphasis on the number ‘three’ in ‘three-eyed Creatrix of the three worlds’ again suggests the Great Mother and her three incarnations. Rather than ‘three-eyed’, America is ‘crosseyed’, perhaps suggesting foolishness and an inability to ‘see straight’:

for even a dope sees Eternity who meditates on thee raimented with Space

crosseyed

creatrix of Modernity whose waist is beauteous with a belt of numberless

Indian scalps

mixed with negro teeth Who on the breast of James Dean in the vast bedroom

of Forest Lawn

Cemetery enjoyest the great Passion of Jesus Christ (p.43)

The ‘dullard’ in the Karpūrādi-Stotra becomes the ‘dope’ in ‘Stotras to Kali’. In view of the 1960s countercultural movement in America, this small change creates an image of a meditating hippie, high on ‘dope’ (cannabis or heroin in the U.S.). The dope’s visions of eternity may therefore be drug-induced, as well as conjured by meditating on America. The image of meditation continues in Verse 8:

THOSE who truly meditate on Thee, the Spouse of Hara, who art seated in the cremation-ground strewn with funeral pyres, corpses, skulls, and bones, and haunted by female jackals howling fearfully; who art very youthful, and art in full enjoyment upon Thy Spouse, are revered by all and in all places (p.64)

In ‘Stotras to Kali’ America is:

seated on the boneyard ground

strewn with the flesh of Lumumba haunted by the female shoes of Kruschev & Stevenson’s long red tongue

enjoyest the worship of spies & endless devotions intoned by mustached radio announcers (p.43)

Although not in the same sequence, ‘Lumumba’ (presumably referring to murdered Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo Patrice Lumumba) echoes ‘Hara’ in Verse 8. In naming Lumumba as one of America’s victims, the poem suggests that America is responsible for Lumumba’s death. Those not acquainted with the Karpūrādi-Stotra may wonder why in ‘Stotras to Kali’ the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev has ‘female shoes’ when ‘female’ is adopted from ‘female jackals’ in the Karpūrādi-Stotra. Likewise, the image of Adlai ‘Stevenson’s long red tongue’ may be read against the image of ‘female jackals howling fearfully’, as well as America’s own ‘mountainous red tongue’ (p.41). In Verse 10, Kali’s worshipper resembles Kali in appearance:

IF by night, Thy devotee unclothed, with dishevelled hair, recites whilst meditating on Thee, Thy mantra, when with his Śakti youthful, full-breasted, and heavy-hipped, such an one makes all powers subject to him, and dwells on the earth ever a seer (p.68)

Once again, Ginsberg transforms this image of Kali’s devotee into an American hippie or drop-out:

If by night thy devotee naked with long weird hair sit in the park & recite this Hymn

while his full breasted girl fills his lap with provincial kisses and meditates on Thee

Such such a one dwells in the land the supreme politician & knows Thy mystery (p.43)

In worshipping America, the poem suggests, the hippie will become a powerful politician. In Verse 11, the speaker also promises to reward with ‘great powers’ those who devoutly worship Kali:

O SPOUSE of Hara, should (a Sādhaka) daily recite Thy mantra for the space of a year meditating the while with knowledge of its meaning upon Thee intent upon Thy union with the great Mahākāla, above whom Thou art, then such a knower has every pleasure that he wills upon the earth, and holds all great powers in the grasp of his lotus-like hands (p.70)

This verse is transformed in ‘Stotras to Kali’ to suggest that America is worshipped in the activities of her spies and intelligence agencies, and in radio propaganda:

O Wife of China should thy patriot recite thy anthem & China’s cut-up & mixed together

with that of Russia Thy elephant-headed infant mighty in all future worlds

& meditate one year with knowledge of thy mystic copulation with China this next age

Then such knower will delight in secret weapon official Intelligence kodaked in his telegraphic brain (p.43)

The sounds of ‘China’ and ‘Russia’ in ‘Stotras to Kali’ echo ‘Hara’, ‘Sadhaka’ and ‘mantra’ in the Karpūrādi-Stotra. The prophesied union of Kali and Mahākāla is transformed into a radical, if not humorous, marriage between America and China. It may be that America’s obsessive fear of China has the ironic effect of producing a ‘mystic’ or psychic liaison between the two countries.

In Verse 12 Kali is a protective mother, suggesting that the destructive side of her nature is primarily for destroying evil in the world:

O MOTHER, Thou givest birth to and protectest the world, and at the time of dissolution dost withdraw to Thyself the earth and all things; therefore Thou art Brahmā, and the Lord of the three worlds, the Spouse of Śrī, and Maheśa, and all other beings and things. Ah Me! how, then, shall I praise Thy greatness? (p.72)

As aforementioned, Kali’s protective nature in the Karpūrādi-Stotra is absent in ‘Stotras to Kali’. Instead of protecting the world, America brings it to the brink of annihilation in giving birth to a ‘Hydrogen Age’:

Home of the Brave thou gavest birth to the Steel Age before the Hydrogen Age the

Cobalt Age earning power over entire planets all futurity Male-female spouse of the solar system

Ah me why then shall I not prophesy glorious truths for Thee (p.44)

The absence of the exclamation mark after ‘Ah me’ renders the phrase a sigh of resignation, as opposed to its tone of amazement and awe in the Karpūrādi-Stotra. This has the effect of suggesting that the speaker in ‘Stotras to Kali’ does not entirely welcome the inevitable ‘glorious truths’ that he prophesies for America. The suggestion of a ‘Hydrogen Age’ following a ‘Steel Age’ accords with Ginsberg’s belief in a ‘Kali Age’. In an interview in 1966, he insists that:

in Hindu mythology, they speak of This Age as the Kali Yuga, the age of destruction, or an age so sunk in materialism. You’d find a similar formulation in Vico, like what is it, the Age of Gold running on to the Iron and then Stone, again. Well, the Hindus say that this is the Kali Age or Kali Yuga or Kali Cycle.[38]

Ginsberg therefore locates the Cold War and the 1960s in particular in a global Age of Kali, or an age of destruction. He sees American politics during the Cold War as contributing to, if not determining, this age of destruction. With its patterns of praise and its images of Kali, the Karpūrādi-Stotra offers Ginsberg a template for his ironic praise of America’s destructive impulses.

Verse 13 introduces the speaker’s wild desire for Kali:

O MOTHER, people there are who worship many other Devas than Thyself. They are greatly ignorant, and know nothing of the high truth, (but I) of my own uncontrollable desire for Thee approach Thee, the Primordial Power, who dost deeply enjoy the great Bliss arising from union (with Śiva), and who art worshipped by Hari, Hara, Viriñci, and all other Devas (p.74)

Building on this, the speaker’s desire for America in ‘Stotras to Kali’ is specifically sexual:

Ah me folks worship many other

countries beside you they are brainwashed but I of my own uncontrollable lust for you

lay my hands on your Independence enter your very Constitution my head absorbed in the lips of your

Bill of Rights O Liberty whose bliss is union with each individual citizen intercourse

Alaskan Oklahoman New Jerseyesque dreaming of embraces even Indonesian Vietnamese & those Congolese (p.44)

Kali’s fierce independence is transformed into the American Declaration of Independence. Her body becomes a body of American official documents. At this point, both texts shift from third-person devotion (as exemplified in the frequently repeated phrase ‘they who recite’) to a first-person ‘I’ placing the speaker in the direct role of worshipper. This move heightens the irony and humour in ‘Stotras to Kali’, particularly where the speaker claims that others are brainwashed when it is clear that it is the speaker who is driven, if not brainwashed, by his lust for America. Sexually aggressive desire for Kali is dramatically expressed in the following unnamed poem in Ginsberg’s Indian Journals:

Fuck Kali

Fuck all Hindu Goddesses

Because they are all prostitutes

(I like to Fuck)

All Hindu Goddesses

are prostitutes

Fuck Ma Kali

Mary is not a prostitute because

she was a virgin

Christians don’t

Worship prostitutes

like the Hindus.[39]

This poem suggests that Ginsberg’s fascination with Kali is partly due to her sexual promiscuity. For Ginsberg, Kali is a far more interesting mother goddess than Christianity’s virgin mother Mary, to use his example. Neumann maintains that ‘in her positive and non-terrible aspect, (Kali) is a spiritual figure that for freedom and independence has no equal in the West’.[40] Kali’s sexual freedom, I argue, endears her to Ginsberg in view of his own quest for homosexual liberation. Many of Ginsberg’s poems are, of course, sexually explicit and subversive, and form a part of his gay liberation activism. The Ginsberg critic Tony Trigilio reminds us that homosexual ‘desire was policed by Cold War discourses that equated normative sexual desire with national security’.[41] Dissenting from such discourses, Ginsberg’s radical sexual politics contextualise his interests in Kali and in India. The religion scholar Hugh B. Urban puts it that:

For Ginsberg, India represents the complete opposite of modern America: whereas America is sexually repressed, uptight, and overly rational, India is the land of unrepressed, spontaneous sexuality. And Tantric sexuality, embodied in the violent, terrifying goddess Kālī, is a liberating alternative to the oppressive prudery of Cold War America.[42]

Urban’s insights help to shed light on ‘Stotras to Kali’ as a critique, not only of America’s political power, but of her sexual repression. In the poem the citizens of America and other countries are merely ‘dreaming of (America’s) embraces’ (p.44). The speaker wants America to receive these embraces to re-focus her attention on matters of love or sex instead of war.

In Verse 14 of the Karpūrādi-Stotra, the speaker begs Kali’s mercy:

O KĀLĪ, spouse of Giriśa, Thou art Earth, Water, Fire, Air and Ether. Thou art all. Thou art one and beneficent. What can be said in praise of Thee, O Mother? Of Thy mercy show Thy favour towards me, helpless as I am. By Thy grace may I never be reborn (p.76)

Likewise, the speaker in ‘Stotras to Kali’ begs America’s mercy:

O Liberty Imagewife of Mankind of thy Mercy show thy favor toward each me everywhere helpless

before thy manifest Destiny by grace may I never be reborn American I and all I’s

neither Russian Peruvian nor Chinese Jew never again reincarnate outside Thee Mother

Democracy O Formless One take me beyond Images & reproductions spouse beyond disunion

absorbed in my own non-Duality which art Thou (p.44)

The speaker’s ‘I’ is multiplied to include ‘all I’s’ or all people of the world. These lines suggest that it is not only Americans who are ‘helpless’ before America, but people in other countries. The unusual address ‘O Liberty Imagewife of Mankind’ is created from ‘O KĀLĪ, spouse of Giriśa’. While previous lines identified China as America’s spouse, the phrase ‘Imagewife of Mankind’ suggests America’s relationship with all countries, as a global emblem of ‘Liberty’ and ‘Democracy’. The speaker’s sincere call to America to take him ‘beyond Images & reproductions’ suggests that he believes in America’s revitalising powers. Here, Ginsberg’s Kali is both ‘the annihilating mother’ and ‘a revivifying maternal source of prophetic consciousness’.[43] As the Great Mother, America possesses the power to liberate as well as to destroy.

The Karpūrādi-Stotra returns in Verse 15 to speaking of a third-person worshipper:

HE, O Mahākālī, who in the cremation-ground, naked, and with disheveled hair, intently meditates upon Thee and recites Thy mantra, and with each recitation makes offering to Thee of a thousand Ākanda flowers with seed, becomes without any effort a Lord of the earth (p.78)

In these musical lines, we can hear the rhymes of ‘He’, ‘Mahākālī’, ‘Thee’ and (nearly) ‘seed’. In the long and equally musical lines of ‘Stotras to Kali’, Ginsberg adheres to the form of the Karpūrādi-Stotra and also makes it distinctly his own. One line in particular—‘Who on the breast of James Dean in the vast bedroom of Forest Lawn’—reads as if it has come straight out of ‘Howl’ (p.43). For the poetry critic Marjorie Perloff, Ginsberg’s long ‘Whitmanesque’ lines in ‘Howl’ are analogous to ‘biblical strophes, tied together by lavish anaphora and other patterns of repetition’.[44] Likewise, the numbered verses of the Karpūrādi-Stotra resemble Biblical verses. Ginsberg’s interests in religious texts are multifaceted and embrace his love of music, and his belief in poetry as prophecy. In his major poem ‘Kaddish’, for example, ‘the grief-encoded rhythms of the blues and the Kaddish merge, despite their different ethnopoetic sources’.[45] In addition to ‘the rhythm the rhythm’ in ‘Kaddish’, Ginsberg put many of his poems to music, and he sang them to audiences while playing a harmonium.[46] He collaborated with composer Philip Glass and toured with popular singer/songwriter Bob Dylan. In view of his interest in the sound and performative or declarative qualities of poetry, therefore, the Karpūrādi-Stotra is an apt choice of text for Ginsberg. As a stotra, or hymn, it is meant to be sung. Its prose is rhythmic, prophetic and histrionic, and its images are striking—all the right ingredients for a Ginsberg poem.

In ‘Stotras to Kali’, the rhymes of ‘He’, ‘Democracy’, ‘thee’, ‘intensity’ and ‘poetry’ echo ‘He’, ‘Mahākālī’ and ‘Thee’ in Verse 15:

He O mother American Democracy who in the cremation ground of nations with dishevelled hair in sweat of intensity meditates on thee

And makes over his pubic hair to thee in poetry or electrical engineering he alone knows thy Cosmic You-Me (p.44)

The speaker identifies with America in ‘thy Cosmic You-Me’, perhaps suggesting his belief in the ‘oneness’ of all existence. The word ‘nations’ in ‘Stotras to Kali’ echoes ‘naked’ in Verse 15, while ‘pubic hair’ is added to ‘dishevelled hair’. In worshipping Kali, ‘an offering is made of the wife’s hair, the curls (…) of which have been straightened out with the comb’ (p.81). By contrast, Ginsberg suggests the offering of curly (pubic) hair. The importance of hair as an offering of worship is suggested in Verse 16:

O KĀLĪ, whoever on Tuesday at midnight, having uttered Thy mantra, makes offering even but once with devotion to Thee of a hair of his Śakti in the cremation-ground, becomes a great poet, a Lord of the earth, and ever goes mounted upon an elephant (p.80)

In addition to becoming an esteemed poet—the reward for an offering of hair in the Karpūrādi-Stotra—whoever worships America in ‘Stotras to Kali’ also conquers the Cold War:

O America whoever on Tuesday at midnite utters This My Country Tis of Thee in the basement men’s room

of the Empire State Building becomes a Poet Lord of Earth and goes mounted on Elephants

to conquer Maya the Cold War (pp.44-45)

The speaker suggests that the Cold War may be understood as ‘Maya’, which, in ‘Indian metaphysics’, refers to ‘the phenomenal and multiple appearance of the world, its questionable reality, and its impermanence’.[47] As Maya, therefore, the Cold War is illusory or ‘unreal’. The influence of Eastern philosophies on Ginsberg’s work and life is extensive. In view of his meditation practices, manta-chanting and ‘Buddhist poetics’, the Karpūrādi-Stotra, with its high regard for poets and its emphasis on meditation and mantras, is a particularly rich text for Ginsberg.

Accordingly, Verse 17 suggests that Kali rewards dedicated meditation with poetic inspiration:

THE devotee who, having placed before himself, and meditated and again meditated upon, the abode, strewn with flowers, of the Deva with the bow of flowers, recites Thy Mantra, Ah! he becomes on earth the Lord of Gandharvas, and the ocean of the nectar of the flow of poesy, and is after death in Thy supreme abode (p.83)

In ‘Stotras to Kali’, America rewards even ‘halfhearted conviction’ with commercial success:

whoever recites this my country tis of thee with the least halfhearted

conviction he becomes himself Big Business & Giant Unions flowing with production and is after

death father of his country which is the Universe itself (p.45)

The final verse of the Karpūrādi-Stotra that Ginsberg transforms is Verse 18:

HE who at night, when in union with his Śakti, meditates with centred mind on Thee, O Mother with gently smiling face, as on the breast of the corpse-like Śiva, lying on a fifteen-angled yantra deeply enlisted in sweet amorous play with Mahākāla, himself becomes the destroyer of the God of Love (p.86)

This verse inspires the conclusion to ‘Stotras to Kali’:

and will at night in union with Thee

O mother with eyes of delightful movies enter at last into amorous play united with all Presidents of US (p.45)

Kali’s ‘gently smiling face’ becomes America’s ‘eyes of delightful movies’, suggesting the Hollywood film industry. The final plea to America to indulge in sexual activity with her presidents, to unite them—and ‘us’—in sexual play, suggests the speaker’s unwavering belief in the positive power of sex.

As I have shown, Ginsberg draws upon Verses 1-4, 6-8 and 10-18 of the Karpūrādi-Stotra, omitting Verses 5, 9 and 19-22. He draws upon these verses extensively, structurally—following their rhythms and patterns of speech—and chronologically. In view of their similarities, how might we speak of the relationship between these two texts? Is it possible, for instance, to speak of ‘Stotras to Kali’ as an adaptation of the Karpūrādi-Stotra? I shall answer this question with reference to some recent theories of adaptation.

Hutcheon defines an adaptation ‘as an extended, deliberate, announced revisitation of a particular work of art’.[48] ‘Stotras to Kali’ is clearly an extended and deliberate revisitation of the Karpūrādi-Stotra, but does Ginsberg announce this to his readers? The similarity of the two titles may alert some readers to their intertextual relationship but, presumably, the Karpūrādi-Stotra would not be a well-known text for the majority of Ginsberg’s readers. Readers of the Karpūrādi-Stotra may not be familiar with ‘Stotras to Kali’, just as readers of ‘Stotras to Kali’ may not be familiar with the Karpūrādi-Stotra. As a non-Hindu reader of Ginsberg in the early years of the 21st century, my awareness of the Karpūrādi-Stotra is the result of research on Kali. I accessed the Karpūrādi-Stotra from the Internet, a medium not yet 20 years old in terms of its availability to the general public. In other words, cultural, historical and technological factors impinge on a person’s awareness of, and ability to access, the Karpūrādi-Stotra. Without knowledge of the Karpūrādi-Stotra, ‘Stotras to Kali’ cannot be read, to use Hutcheon’s expression, ‘as an adaptation’:

If we know the adapted work, there will be a constant oscillation between it and the new adaptation we are experiencing; if we do not, we will not experience the work as an adaptation.[49]

To compare ‘Stotras to Kali’ with the Karpūrādi-Stotra is to enjoy their similarities and differences. On the other hand, ‘If we do not know that what we are experiencing actually is an adaptation (…) we simply experience the adaptation as we would any other work’.[50] Likewise, before I learned of the Karpūrādi-Stotra my experience of ‘Stotras to Kali’ was as any other Ginsberg poem. By unknowingly consuming an adaptation before its adapted text, we unwittingly challenge ‘the authority of any notion of priority’.[51] When I later read the Karpūrādi-Stotra, I enjoyed it for its ‘palimpsestic doubleness’ with ‘Stotras to Kali’, almost as if the Karpūrādi-Stotra was the adaptation.[52] My experience of ‘Stotras to Kali’ was also changed; no longer could I read it as an independent text. The adaptation theorist and literary critic Julie Sanders asks if ‘knowledge of a source text is required or merely enriching’ for consumers of adaptations.[53] In order to appreciate ‘Stotras to Kali’, I argue, it is not necessary to be familiar with the Karpūrādi-Stotra. The poem does stand on its own. That said, it is greatly rewarding to read ‘Stotras to Kali’ against the Karpūrādi-Stotra. I agree with Sanders for whom ‘an intertextual awareness deepens and enriches the range of possible responses’ to a text.[54] It is pleasurable and insightful to see how unusual images in ‘Stotras to Kali’ are transformed from the Karpūrādi-Stotra but it remains that Ginsberg does not announce his indebtedness to the Karpūrādi-Stotra. Unless we accidentally stumble across the Karpūrādi-Stotra, we are not going to experience ‘Stotras to Kali’ as an adaptation.

Might ‘Stotras to Kali’ be considered, alternatively, an appropriation, a term that brings to mind ‘the notion of hostile takeover’?[55] For Sanders, ‘the intertextual relationship may be less explicit’ in appropriations.[56] The intertextual relationship between ‘Stotras to Kali’ and the Karpūrādi-Stotra is explicit in the sense that, once known, it is undeniable, but not in the sense that Ginsberg fails to make it known. In appropriations, Sanders continues, ‘what is often inescapable is the fact that a political or ethical commitment shapes a writer’s … decision to re-interpret a source text’.[57] This is true for Ginsberg, whose reasons for working with the Karpūrādi-Stotra, as I have suggested, are political, aesthetic and personal. Ginsberg is not interested, however, in ‘talking back’ to the Karpūrādi-Stotra. He is not motivated by a desire to change the way that people read the Karpūrādi-Stotra. Instead, he sees the potential of the Karpūrādi-Stotra as a stimulus for his critique of America. This transformation of a Hindu hymn into a Western poem perhaps constitutes the ‘decisive journey away from the informing source into a wholly new cultural product and domain’ that, for Sanders, is characteristic of an appropriation.[58] While ‘Stotras to Kali’ decisively departs from the sincere devotion to Kali in the Karpūrādi-Stotra, Ginsberg achieves his objective of ironic praise by sustaining a close relationship with the formal qualities of the Karpūrādi-Stotra. Although a change of genre is necessary neither for adaptations nor appropriations,[59] it is worth commenting on the movement from stotra to poem. In view of the similarities of the style of the Karpūrādi-Stotra and Ginsberg’s prose poetry, this movement (from East to West, religious to secular) is not considerable. The two texts are not only situated in the literary mode but, by and large, in the mode of poetry.

In summary, ‘Stotras to Kali’ is not likely to be experienced as an adaptation because it does not announce its major intertextual relationship. While this point serves to orient the poem as an appropriation, ‘Stotras to Kali’ reproduces the style of the Karpūrādi-Stotra too closely for it to be considered an appropriation. I have spoken throughout of Ginsberg’s transformation of words and images in order to describe his creative process. It is more difficult to find a term that reflects ‘Stotras to Kali’ as a creative product. Hutcheon complains that ‘people keep trying to coin new words to replace the confusing simplicity of the word “adaptation”’.[60] She suggests that ‘most end up admitting defeat: the word has stuck for a reason’.[61] In a similar spirit, I concede that although it is problematic to speak of ‘Stotras to Kali’ as an adaptation, it is still perhaps the best term to describe its relationship, once known, with the Karpūrādi-Stotra.

Conclusion

‘Stotras to Kali’ may be experienced as an adaptation of the Karpūrādi-Stotra. Ginsberg transforms the Kali-worship in the Karpūrādi-Stotra into an ironic critique of Cold War America. The relationship between the speaker and the construction of the worshipper in the poem enables a dialogical reading of the praise, and helps to achieve its ironic effect. At other times, when the speaker assumes the role of worshipper, the desire for America reads as sincere and spiritually urgent. Both ‘Stotras to Kali’ and the Karpūrādi-Stotra invoke myths of the Great Mother, and Kali and America appear mostly as the Terrible Mother, the negative aspect of the Great Mother. Ginsberg transforms Kali into a symbol of America primarily because in his opinion America, like Kali, loves killing, and for Ginsberg, the Cold War is an Age of Kali, or an age of destruction. America is the Great Mother, who spins ‘the fate of the world, its darkness as well as its light’.[62] As a violently sexual figure, Kali also enables a critique of America’s oppressive Cold War sexual politics: Ginsberg, a gay rights activist, suggests that America may be liberated by the awakening of her dormant sexuality. In addition to his personal-political reasons for working with the Karpūrādi-Stotra, Ginsberg is motivated by an aesthetic interest in the text. The Karpūrādi-Stotra’s dramatic images, rhythmic prose and prophetic statements appeal to Ginsberg’s fascination with the physiological aspects of religious language. While ‘Stotras to Kali’ may be read and enjoyed without knowledge of its major intertext, it is more enjoyable to experience the poem, where possible, as an adaptation of the Karpūrādi-Stotra. Indeed, the pleasure of reading any text stems from ‘the act of reading in, around, and on (and on)’.[63]

University of Queensland

Notes

[1] Hymn to Kālī: Karpūrādi-Stotra, trans. by Arthur Avalon, Tantrik Texts Series ix (London: Luzac and Co, 1922), p. 43. Further references to the Karpūrādi-Stotra are given after quotations in the text.

[2] Allen Ginsberg, ‘Stotras to Kali Destroyer of Illusions’, in Planet News, 1961-1967, Pocket Poets Series (San Francisco: City Lights, 1968), p. 41. Further references to ‘Stotras to Kali’ are given after quotations in the text.

[3] Gordon Ball, ‘Wopbopgooglemop: “Howl” and Its Influences’, in The Poem That Changed America: ‘Howl’ Fifty Years Later, ed. by Jason Shinder (New York: Farrar, 2006), p. 93.

[4] Laszlo Géfin, ‘Ellipsis: The Ideograms of Ginsberg’, in On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg, ed. by Lewis Hyde (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), p. 274. Allen Ginsberg in Géfin, p. 274.

[5] Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. xii.

[6] Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 164.

[7] Allen Ginsberg, Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews, 1958-1996, ed. by David Carter (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 139.

[8] Hugh B. Urban, Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 224-25.

[9] Barry B. Powell, Classical Myth, trans. by Herbert M. Howe, 5^th edn (New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007), p. 463.

[10] Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, trans. by Ralph Manheim, Bollingen Series xlvii (New York: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 226.

[11] Ibid. p. 228.

[12] Ibid. p. 229.

[13] Allen Ginsberg, Holy Soul Jelly Roll: Poems and Songs, 1949-1993, liner notes (Los Angeles: Rhino Records, 1994), p. 15.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ginsberg, Spontaneous Mind, p. 50.

[16] Neumann, The Great Mother, p. 227.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Allen Ginsberg, ‘Notes for Stotras to Kali as Statue of Liberty’, in Indian Journals, March 1962-May 1963: Notebooks, Diary, Blank Pages, Writings (San Francisco: Haselwood and City Lights, 1970), p. 20.

[19] Neumann, The Great Mother, p. 226.

[20] Ibid.

[21] David Kinsley, ‘Kālī’, in Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 116.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Neumann, The Great Mother, p. 150.

[24] Ibid. p. 67.

[25] Ibid. p. 153.

[26] Ginsberg, Spontaneous Mind, p.176.

[27] Allen Ginsberg, ‘Wichita Vortex Sutra’, in Planet News, 1961-1967, Pocket Poets Series (San Francisco: City Lights, 1968), p. 127.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Ginsberg, Spontaneous Mind, p. 152.

[30] Kinsley, ‘Kālī’, p. 125.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Ibid. p.120.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, p. 149.

[35] Allen Ginsberg, As Ever: The Collected Correspondence of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady, ed. by Barry Gifford (California: Creative Arts Book Company, 1977), p. 150.

[36] Kinsley, ‘Kālī’, p. 120.

[37] Ibid. p. 117.

[38] Ginsberg, Spontaneous Mind, p. 34.

[39] Allen Ginsberg, Indian Journals, p. 80.

[40] Neumann, The Great Mother, p. 332.

[41] Tony Trigilio, ‘Strange Prophecies Anew’: Rereading Apocalypse in Blake, H.D., and Ginsberg (New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 2000), p. 129.

[42] Urban, Tantra, p. 224.

[43] Tony Trigilio, Allen Ginsberg’s Buddhist Poetics (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007), p. 223.

[44] Marjorie Perloff, ‘“A Lost Battalion of Platonic Conversationalists”: “Howl” and the Language of Modernism’, in The Poem That Changed America: ‘Howl’ Fifty Years Later, ed. by Jason Shinder (New York: Farrar, 2006), p. 30.

[45] Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 248.

[46] Allen Ginsberg, ‘Kaddish’, in Kaddish and Other Poems, 1958-1960, Pocket Poets Series (San Francisco: City Lights, 1961), p. 7.

[47] Ruth Reyna, The Concept of Māyā: From the Vedas to the 20^th Century (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1962), p. 4.

[48] Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, p. 170.

[49] Ibid. p. xv.

[50] Ibid. p. 120.

[51] Ibid. p. xiii.

[52] Ibid. p. 127.

[53] Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, p. 23.

[54] Ibid. p. 28.

[55] Ibid. p. 9.

[56] Ibid. p. 2.

[57] Ibid.

[58] Ibid. p. 26.

[59] Ibid.; Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, pp. 33-34.

[60] Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, p. 15.

[61] Ibid.

[62] Neumann, The Great Mother, p. 229.

[63] Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, p. 4.

Issue 17, Autumn 2010: Article 1

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

“Mad-Eyed From Stating the Obvious”: The Cold War Symmetries of Robert Lowell and Richard Wilbur

Stephen Ross

Who would it surprise

If (after the flash, hush, rush,

Thump, and crumpling) when the wind of prophecy

Lifts its pitch, and over the drifting ash

At last the trump splits the sky.

No One should arise…

W.S. Merwin, ‘No One’[1]

Like most mid-century American poets, Robert Lowell and Richard Wilbur sought in earnest for poetic forms and for poetic language equal to conveying the magnitude of the nuclear crisis. Though routinely set in contrast to each other, particularly in the “anthology wars” years of the late 50s and early 60s, Lowell’s and Wilbur’s most famous Cold War poems, ‘Fall 1961’ (For the Union Dead, 1964) and ‘Advice to a Prophet’ (Advice to a Prophet, 1961), tell a different story, showing the poets to have been, at least for a time, more curiously aligned, or at least far less disparate, both politically and artistically, than Lowell’s famous ‘raw and cooked’ dichotomy of the time would lead us to believe. I propose to investigate further these Cold War symmetries by way of a comparative reading of the poems, conducted in the larger context of Wilbur’s and Lowell’s shared debts to William Carlos Williams. I take the year 1961 as my pivoting point, the year in which the US and the Soviet Union came to the brink of nuclear war during the ‘Berlin Crisis’. In that year, Lowell published Imitations and composed ‘Fall 1961’, while Wilbur published his fourth volume of poetry, Advice to a Prophet, and travelled to the USSR with Peter Viereck as an American emissary in early September, days after the Soviets had recommenced atmospheric nuclear testing.

My argument will build from and seek to extend John Gery’s analysis of the sources and flowering of Cold War American poetry, Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary American Poetry: Ways of Nothingness. In his study, Gery singles out Gertrude Stein’s 1945-46 prose poem ‘Reflection on the Atomic Bomb’ and William Carlos Williams’ ‘Asphodel, That Greeny Flower’ as early touchstones of Cold War American poetics, arguing that while Stein’s prose poem focuses on ‘the potential bankruptcy of imagination awaiting the poet who takes on the nuclear threat…Williams demonstrates quite conversely how that threat can permeate poetic subject matter itself, implying therefore that we must imagine it before we can resist it’.[2] Gery also devotes part of a chapter to the troubling theme of “sensible emptiness” in three poems by Richard Wilbur. In these poems, ‘written at roughly ten-year intervals between the 1940s and 1960s—‘A World without Objects Is a Sensible Emptiness’, ‘Advice to a Prophet’ and ‘In the Field’—Wilbur specifically confronts the potential annihilation of “the things of this world”, not only their physical eradication, but their spiritual annihilation as well’.[3] But while Gery rightly postulates the seminal importance of these works, he does not go on to explore Williams’ direct impact on Wilbur as a poet and prophet of the nuclear age, nor does he offer more than a few passing remarks on Lowell, whose Cold War poetry was certainly as influential as Wilbur’s and who was also inspired by Williams in important ways. As I will seek to demonstrate, ‘Advice to a Prophet’ and ‘Fall 1961’ can be fruitfully read as products of Wilbur’s and Lowell’s engagement with Williams over the first decade-and-a-half of their careers.

Let us begin by considering the poems themselves, beginning with ‘Advice to a Prophet’ (below), first published in the New Yorker on April 4, 1959, and followed by ‘Fall 1961’:

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,

Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,

Not proclaiming our fall but begging us

In God’s name to have self-pity,

Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,

The long numbers that rocket the mind;

Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,

Unable to fear what is too strange.

Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.

How should we dream of this place without us?—

The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,

A stone look on the stone’s face?

Speak of the world’s own change. Though we cannot conceive

Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost

How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,

How the view alters. We could believe,

If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip

Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,

The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,

The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip

On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn

As Xanthus once, its gliding trout

Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without

The dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return,

These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?

Ask us, prophet, how we shall call

Our natures forth when that live tongue is all

Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken

In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean

Horse of our courage, in which beheld

The singing locust of the soul unshelled,

And all we mean or wish to mean.

Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose

Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding

Whether there shall be lofty or long standing

When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.[4]

‘Fall 1961’:

Back and forth, back and forth

goes the tock, tock, tock

of the orange, bland, ambassadorial

face of the moon

on the grandfather clock.

All autumn, the chafe and jar

of nuclear war;

we have talked our extinction to death.

I swim like a minnow

behind my studio window.

Our end drifts nearer,

the moon lifts,

radiant with terror.

The state

is a diver under a glass bell.

A father’s no shield

for his child.

We are like a lot of wild

spiders crying together,

but without tears.

Nature holds up a mirror.

One swallow makes a summer.

It’s easy to tick

off the minutes,

but the clockhands stick.

Back and forth!

Back and forth, back and forth—

my one point of rest

is the orange and black

oriole’s swinging nest![5]

Both poems fall into a much larger category of Cold War poetry that convey cold war anxieties through figurative images of nature rather than through images of mass destruction. Whether mad-eyed like Lowell or sanguine like Wilbur, both poets are ‘interested in the living not the way of killing them’, as Gertrude Stein writes; accordingly, each, in his own way, ‘speaks of the world’s own change’, as Wilbur counsels, not of ‘the weapons, their force and range’.[6] Both poems hinge on the figure that ‘nature holds up a mirror’, that the natural world provides the first, perhaps the only, index for self-understanding. Without nature—‘the glass…in which we have seen ourselves and spoken’—the motive for metaphor would not exist.

Wilbur’s dizzying litany of images suggests the imagination’s cascading fears of nuclear annihilation: ‘the sun [that is] mere fire’; ‘how the dreamt cloud crumbles’; ‘vines blackened with frost’; ‘white-tailed deer that slip into shade’; ‘the jack-pine that loses its knuckled grip’; ‘every torrent burning as Xanthus once’; ‘gliding trout stunned in a twinkling’; ‘the dolphin’s arc’; ‘the dove’s return’; ‘the rose of our love’; ‘the clean horse of our courage’; ‘the singing locust of the soul’; ‘the worldless rose’; and ‘the bronze annals of the oak-tree’. Lowell, occupying a tighter, more cage-like poetic space, observes local, domestic objects with a manic pathos—‘the orange bland ambassadorial face of the moon on the grandfather clock’ and ‘the orange and black oriole’s swinging nest’. He ‘swims like a minnow behind [his] studio window’ and plaintively muses that ‘one swallow makes a summer’. ‘We are like a lot of wild spiders crying together but without tears’, he writes, stealing his four-year-old daughter Harriet’s remark about a piece of music by Anton Webern. In short, Wilbur’s ‘sun that is mere fire’ and Lowell’s ‘moon that lifts, radiant with terror’ both gesture toward post-apocalyptic landscapes that each poet dared not name explicitly.

Admittedly, a comparative analysis of nature imagery in these poems does not alone make for a very interesting or sophisticated argument, so here I will propose that we understand the larger significance of these overlaps by considering the poems’ common sources of inspiration in the work of William Carlos Williams. ‘I speak in figures’, Williams writes in Book I of ‘Asphodel, That Greeny Flower’, his influential Cold War love poem that first appeared in 1955. And like Wilbur’s and Lowell’s poems, ‘Asphodel’ also hinges on a select group of natural images—namely storm, sea, flower, and garden—all made to reflect the various facts of the mid-century human condition:

Are not facts flowers

and flowers facts

or poems flowers

or all works of the imagination

interchangeable?[7]

Williams asks in Book III. At the beginning of Book II, he had already written that the bomb, too, belongs in that list of facts:

The poem

if it reflects the sea

reflects only

its dance

upon that profound depth

where

it seems to triumph.

The bomb puts an end

to all that.

I am reminded

that the bomb

also

is a flower

dedicated

howbeit

to our destruction.[8]

For better or worse, the bomb is part of our lives, Williams writes. It is the job of the modern artist to allow this fact to enter, but not overpower, his/her consciousness. It must be a fact among facts. Wilbur hits on a similar point, albeit without specific reference to nuclear weapons, in a 1956 essay, ‘Poetry and Landscape’, when he writes, ‘After a struggle of approximately one and one-half centuries, our poetry has managed to accept mills, railroads, airfields and bulldozers as legitimate material, worthy of consorting with more traditional images’.[9]

From the start of their careers, Wilbur and Lowell observed a cautiously reverential distance from Williams, learning to fashion versions of him in their own images that they could safely manipulate. By the time they were writing ‘Advice to a Prophet’ and ‘Fall 1961’, each poet had zeroed in on those aspects of Williams’ craft that they wished to emulate or appropriate: for Wilbur, this meant Williams’ specialised understanding of the terms ‘things’ and ‘imagination’, while for Lowell it meant a general loosening of form and use of common speech. Let us first consider the case of Wilbur.

I. Wilbur

Wilbur, like Lowell, made Williams’ acquaintance in the mid-40s, at the start of his career. For Wilbur, winner of the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for Things of This World, it was the ever-beguiling Williams of ‘no ideas but in things’, who held the most appeal. ‘What poetry does with ideas’, Wilbur wrote in 1966, ‘is to redeem them from abstraction and submerge them in sensibility; it embodies them in persons and things and surrounds them with a weather of feeling; it thereby tests the ability of any ideas to consort with human nature in its contemporary condition’.[10] It was this version of Williams—still homespun, but imbued with a mystical strain—that Wilbur took both as a mentor and as a point of departure. In a 1950 review of Williams’ Selected Poems, Wilbur writes that a Williams poem is ‘not a nexus of thoughts and images but an act of strict outward focus and realization’, adding that ‘the full enjoyment of the poem depends on one’s sharing with the poet an essentially mystic or magic feeling—a feeling that words, rightly arranged, become one with the things they signify’.[11] Of course, in casting Williams as a kind of naïvely inspired mystic of words and things, Wilbur, like many others, grossly reduces him to something less than his true stature. Yet, while Wilbur’s comments might fall short as incisive criticism of Williams, they do offer some useful points of critical purchase for his own poetics.

‘Advice to a Prophet’ emerges directly from Wilbur’s early engagement with Williams, during which he strained, often in rarified language, to articulate his beliefs about the relationship between the poetic imagination and the world—the ‘things’—that it imagines. A quotation from Wilbur’s 1968 interview with Joan Hutton brings out this point and offers a good launching point for my reading of ‘Advice to a Prophet’ in the context of Williams. Wilbur says:

I believe what I was trying to do in that poem (‘Advice to a Prophet’) was to provide—myself, of course—with a way of feeling the enormity of nuclear war, should it come. The approach of that poem, which comes at such a war through its likely effect on the creatures who surround us, is a very “thingy” one. It made it possible for me to feel something beside a kind of abstract horror, a puzzlement, at the thought of nuclear war; and it may so serve other people. I hope so.[12]

The operative word in this statement is ‘thingy’, a loaded term in the English poetic tradition going back at least as far as Wordsworth and inevitably associated with Williams, as Wilbur well knew. Indeed, Wilbur took his early engagement with Williams as an opportunity to flesh out his own poetics, his ‘lyric calling-to-life of the things of this world’, as Randall Jarrell put it, a poetic program he has stayed more or less faithful to for over 60 years.[13] At the age of 27, twenty years before his making his remarks on the ‘thingy’ quality of ‘Advice to a Prophet’, Wilbur participated in a ‘knock-down’ discussion of poetic forms with Williams and Louise Bogan at the Bard College poetry conference, which in turn inspired an essay on Williams, free verse, and the merits of formal verse, which Wilbur entitled, rather clunkily, ‘The Bottles Become New, Too’. The essay called for an art consisting of ‘moment(s) of tension between a formative mind and a reality which that mind insists on recognizing’, which would be, as Wilbur early sensed, the tension that would prompt many of his finest poems.[14] Much of the essay, with its New Critical inflection and its emphasis on poetry’s prophetic qualities and on the moral necessity of recognising the physical reality of the world, reads like a blueprint for ‘Advice to a Prophet’.

Flattering both Williams and himself, he writes that ‘it is the province of poems to make some order in the world, but poets can’t afford to forget that there is a reality of things which survives all orders great and small. Things are. The cow is there. No poetry can have any strength unless it continually bashes itself against the reality of things’.[15] Later, he adds:

In a time of bad communications, when any self-transcendence is hard to come by, to perceive the existence of a reality beyond all constructions of the consciousness is to experience a kind of call to prophecy. To insist on the real existence of the four elements, of objects, of animals, taking these things as isolable representatives of the ambient reality, is a kind of minimum devoutness in these days. It is a step toward believing in people.[16]

‘To perceive the existence of a reality beyond all constructions is to experience a kind of call to prophecy’—turgid as this early passage might be, its use of the term ‘prophecy’, its moral though not moralistic tone, and its insistence on ‘the real existence of the four elements, of objects, of animals’ as ‘things’ to be taken as ‘isolable representatives of the ambient reality’ all preempt the concerns of ‘Advice to a Prophet’. Significantly, it was Wilbur’s early engagement with Williams that first prompted him to express his position on these issues, particularly his abiding notion that poetry cannot merely bash itself against the reality of things but must also acknowledge the tension between things and the mind. For Wilbur, this is a moral directive as much as it is an aesthetic one.

In an uncollected 1956 essay, ‘Poetry and Landscape’, Wilbur tacitly issues a direct challenge to Williams, writing that ‘however personally we may take the landscape, however much sympathy and meaning we may discover in it, there is always a suspicion that our words are not anchored in the objects at all—that the word tree does not harpoon and capture the tree, but merely flies feintingly towards it and, like a boomerang, returns to the hand’. He goes on to comment that ‘the suspicion that the landscape really belongs to the scientist has undermined the poet’s confidence in the controlling, expressive and relating power of his nature-language’, presaging the opening caveat of ‘Advice to a Prophet’ that the prophet not speak of ‘the weapons, their force and range’ but rather of ‘the world’s own change’.[17] Yet, Wilbur learned to marry his scepticism about the efficacy of words with an almost Yeatsian faith in the poetic imagination’s ability to capture and re-envision reality, whence his frequent use of the term ‘prophecy’.

Wilbur has often characterised his career as a public quarrel with the ‘world-annihilating’ aesthetics of Edgar Allan Poe, confiding in a 1970 interview that it is Poe’s tendency ‘toward brushing aside and annihilating everything in the natural world, everything that stands between Poe and the realm of pure spirit’, that gives him pause.[18] Accordingly, we might say that Wilbur seeks to position himself somewhere roughly between Williams and Poe, or rather, that he seeks to build provisional bridges in his poems between Williams’ ‘things’ and Poe’s ‘realm of pure spirit’. In his 1977 Paris Review interview, he makes the following instructive distinction between ‘imagination’ and ‘fantasy’: ‘To me, the imagination is a faculty that fuses things, takes hold of the physical and ideal worlds and makes them one, provisionally. Fantasy, in my mind, is a poetic or artistic activity that leaves something out—it ignores the concrete and the actual in order to create a purely abstract, unreal realm’.[19] ‘Advice to a Prophet’ makes a similar push against ‘fantasy’—the fantasy of nuclear annihilation, the force and range of the weapons, ‘long numbers that rocket the mind’—in favor of a morally inflected imagination alive to the reality of things—‘These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken’—and the way in which they in turn inspire human reality.

Nearly 20 years after the Bard conference, a more mature Wilbur would offer a conciliatory gesture to Williams: ‘One perpetual task of the poet is to produce models of inclusive reaction and to let no word or thing be blackballed by sensibility…that is why William Carlos Williams, with his insistence on noting and naming the bitterest details of the American urban scene, was such a hero of the modern spirit…’.[20]

II. Lowell

Unlike Wilbur, Robert Lowell’s engagement with William Carlos Williams centered on issues of craft rather than poetic phenomenology. Lowell’s letters to Williams during the mid-late 50s attest, at times disingenuously (‘I have no master, only masters, you are about the first among them’), to the central role Williams played in Lowell’s decision to experiment with freer verse forms, begun with Life Studies and continued in For the Union Dead and beyond.[21] Indeed, as Lowell biographer Ian Hamilton notes, Lowell was more and more ‘inclined to learn from Williams’ from the time he published The Mills of the Kavanaughs.[22] As early as his Harvard days, Lowell tried on Williams’ cadences in ‘very simple, free verse, imagistic poems’,[23] though it would take him another 20 years to write his first successful ‘unmeasured verse’.[24] Lowell wrote Williams in 1952, ‘Still I wish rather in vain that I could absorb something of your way of writing into mine’.[25] A decade later he would still confide that ‘Williams enters me, but I cannot enter him’.[26] By the late 50s Lowell was in fairly frequent contact with Williams about his experiments in free verse, writing him in the fall of 1957, ‘I feel more and more technically indebted to you, growing young into my forties’![27] And in February 1958, he breezily wrote Williams of having ‘joined [him] in unscanned verse’. In a letter of December 1957, Williams wrote his approval of Lowell’s newfound ‘occupation with unrhymed measures’, which ‘vastly broadens your potentialities’. ‘Unrhymed verse’, Williams adds, with fatherly fondness, ‘brings one of my dreams for you into full fruit’.[28]

It is difficult to say, however, exactly how influential Williams’ line really was on Lowell’s new ‘unmeasured verse’ or how much Lowell, intoxicated by his first successful attempts at free verse, was simply caught up with praising—and likening himself to—Williams. Certainly none of Lowell’s poems sounds like a typical Williams poem; nor did Lowell have much use for Williams’ typographical innovations. As Ian Hamilton observes, ‘Lowell’s difficulty…was that rhyme and meter were for him very close to being the ‘natural speech’ that William Carlos Williams and his followers were calling for’.[29] ‘I seesaw back and forth between something highly metrical and something highly free’, Lowell would tell Frederick Seidel in his 1961 Paris Review interview, ‘There isn’t one way to write’.[30] Even with the rhymes, the swift short imagistic lines of a poem like ‘Fall 1961’, with their manic ‘back and forth’ progress might come as close to approximating the kind of ‘unscanned verse’, after Williams’ lights, that Lowell idealised at this time. One almost unrecognisable preliminary version of ‘Fall 1961’ begins:

That first night we sat together,

mooning across the Charles River,

until the cement dome

of the technicological Institute

was the Pantheon in Claude Lorrain’s Romes

By the final stanzas of this version, however, the lineaments of the finished poem begin to emerge:

Pray gods! Over Central Park

now, the atoms of Democritos drift nearer,

the moon climbs radiant with terror,

the dark

world is an electrical dragnet.

Poor child!

you are still a girl,

beautiful and unwell,

as when you looked out on the world

like a diver under a glass bell.[31]

In the finished poem, of course, it is ‘our end’ that drifts nearer, not ‘atoms of Democritos’, while ‘the state’ replaces Lowell’s young daughter, Harriet, as the ‘diver under a glass bell’.

Lowell’s correspondence of October-November 1961 highlights his increasing preoccupation with the threat of nuclear war, exacerbated by the Berlin Crisis of that summer and fall. In letters to friends and fellow writers such as Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, Mary McCarthy and William Meredith, Lowell lamented the precarious state of world politics, citing ‘the hideous comedy that we should charge the globe with so much ruin’ and bemoaning ‘the nuclear air that gets on my nerves’.[32] To Bishop he wrote in early October of ‘a queer, half-apocalyptic, nuclear feeling in the air, as tho [sic] nations had died and were now anachronistic…’. At some point during this time, he began to compose ‘Fall 1961’, his first creative work since ‘For the Union Dead’ of the previous spring. Around the same time, he began his final homage to Williams, which appeared in the winter 1961-62 Hudson Review and in which he would praise Williams as ‘a model and a liberator’.[33] Manuscript evidence of the various drafts of ‘Fall 1961’ in the Houghton Library collection of Lowell papers at Harvard University even indicates that at one point Lowell worked on the poem and the essay on the same sheet of paper. As Lowell praises Williams ‘short lines’ for ‘speed(ing) up and simplify(ing) hugely drawn out and ornate sentence structures’, the drafts of ‘Fall 1961’ also show Lowell paring down his own style.

The Williams essay concludes with a moving recollection of a reading of ‘Asphodel, That Greeny Flower’ that Williams gave at Wellesley College in 1956. ‘A drastic experimental art is now expected and demanded’, Lowell writes:

The scene is dense with the dirt and power of industrial society. Williams looks on it with exasperation, terror, and a kind of love. His short poems are singularly perfect thrusts, maybe the best that will ever be written of their kind, because neither the man nor the pressure will be found again. When I think of his last, longish autobiographical poems, I remember his last reading I heard. It was at Wellesley. I think about three thousand students attended. It couldn’t have been more crowded in the wide-galleried hall and I had to sit in the aisle. The poet appeared, one whole side partly paralyzed, his voice just audible, and here and there a word misread. No one stirred. In the silence he read his great poem ‘Of Asphrodel, That Greeny Flower (sic)’ a triumph of simple confession—somehow he delivered to us what was impossible, something that was both poetry and beyond poetry.[34]

In citing Williams’ ‘exasperation, terror, and love’, Lowell necessarily points to his own ‘exasperation’ (‘Back and forth, back and forth…), ‘terror’ (‘the moon lifts / radiant with terror’), and ‘love’ (‘A father’s no shield for his child’) in ‘Fall 1961’, itself a ‘triumph of simple confession’. Lowell’s debt to ‘Asphodel, That Greeny Flower’ lies in its confrontation of the nuclear threat’s invasion of daily life, its claustrophobic ability to ‘penetrate / into all the crevices / of my world’, as Williams writes of the asphodel at the poem’s end.[35] In Lowell’s, ‘We have talked our extinction to death’, we cannot miss the echoes of Williams, who, with equally dark and half-punning irony, had written six years earlier:

we are sick to death

of the bomb

and its childlike insistence.[36]

III. Concluding Remarks

While the relation between Lowell’s insistently public politics and his poetry has occasioned considerable critical debate, Wilbur’s politics have been less often remarked as a guiding force in his poetry. Lowell ran the gamut of political commitments in his lifetime, from ‘militant anti-Communist and liberal Cold War skeptic’ to ‘radical Cold War opponent and cosmic pessimist’, whereas Wilbur has remained a steadfast traditional liberal, confirmed in his beliefs but not outspokenly so.[37] Yet from his undergraduate years, Wilbur evinced a strong political conscience which, as James Longenbach has argued, shines through not only in ‘Advice to a Prophet’ but in many earlier and later works like ‘A World Without Objects Is a Sensible Emptiness’, ‘Year’s End’, ‘Speech for the Repeal of the McCarran Act’, ‘A Fable’, and the satirical ‘We’, which he chose not to re-publish after its appearance in the November 1948 Poetry.[38] ‘We’ begins:

“We ought to drop the bomb at once before

Those Russians do. I’m sure you all agree?”

Of course we do; and hearing of a war

The Continentals rise in clouds of tea,

Attired in looks of conscious artistry,

Decorous rags, and decorative gore.

[…]

How good to have the Russians to abhor:

It lets us dance the nation on our knee

Who haven’t been quite certain since the war

Precisely what we meant by saying we.

The alien elements have come to be

Entirely too enormous to ignore.

This sort of poem has never been Wilbur’s forte, nor has it been his habit to take on an issue like the threat of nuclear war so directly. If he does address it directly in ‘Advice to a Prophet’, he does so feintingly. ‘As for bigness and smallness in subject-matter’, he writes in John Ciardi’s 1950 anthology Mid-Century American Poets, ‘I do not sympathize with the cultural historian who finds a poem “serious” and “significant” because it mentions the atomic bomb’.[39] By the same token, the finesse with which Lowell handles the theme of nuclear war in ‘Fall 1961’—so evident when compared with the poem’s early, diffuse drafts—sets the poem apart somewhat from the rest of his oeuvre.

In 1962 Donald Hall cast Lowell and Wilbur as the ‘culminations of the twin strains of density and delicacy’in post-war American poetry [40]. The following year Randall Jarrell observed that ‘it is life that [Lowell] makes into poems instead of, as in Wilbur, the things of life’.[41] Countless other critics have used the one to pillory the other; Wilbur sums up the situation best in a 1964 interview: ‘I’m not at all conscious of being a member of or a founder of a school. It seems to be the custom at the moment among people who are making a general survey of the poetic situation to put Lowell on one side and me on the other. I’m all grace and charm and short gains, and he’s all violence and…Well, he’s Apollo and Dionysus locked in a death grip’.[42]

On March 1, 1962, Lowell and Wilbur came together to celebrate their joint birthday at Wilbur’s house in Portland, Connecticut. Along with the rest of the world, they had weathered the nuclear standoffs of the previous fall. Peter Davison chronicles this moment in The Fading Smile, his memoir of 1950s literary Boston:

At that 1962 birthday party, both men stood at the height of their powers. Wilbur would never descend from his height, but neither would he rise any higher. In essence he would never change. On the other hand, Lowell would never again attain…despite a fury of work and personal agony, the heights he had already reached.[43]

Since his death in 1977, Lowell has undergone a long slide from preeminence, while Wilbur continues to publish good—sometimes great—poems in The New Yorker. Now that the Cold War dust has settled, so to speak, we can begin to see the extent to which the judgments of Hall, Jarrell, and many others forced Wilbur and Lowell into cookie-cutter moulds that poems like ‘Fall 1961’ and ‘Advice to a Prophet’ cannot help but destabilise.

University of Oxford

Notes

[1] W.S. Merwin, Migration: New and Selected Poems (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2005), p. 67.

[2] John Gery, Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary American Poetry: Ways of Nothingness (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), p. 40.

[3] Ibid, p. 104.

[4] Richard Wilbur, Collected Poems, 1943-2004 (Orlando; Austin; New York; San Diego; Toronto; London: Harcourt, Inc., 2004), p. 258-9.

[5] Robert Lowell, Selected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), p. 143.

[6] Gertrude Stein, Writings: 1932-1946 (New York: Library of America, 1998), p. 823.

[7] William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, vol. II (New York: New Directions, 1988), p. 333.

[8] Ibid, p. 321.

[9] Richard Wilbur, ‘Poetry and the Landscape’, The New Landscape in Art and Science, ed. Gyorgy Kepes (Chicago: Paul Theobald and Co., 1956), p. 89.

[10] Richard Wilbur, Responses: Prose Pieces 1953-1976, Expanded Edition (Story Line Press, 2000), p. 161.

[11] Richard Wilbur, ‘Arts and Letters’, Sewanee Review (1950), 137-141 (p. 138-9).

[12] Richard Wilbur, Conversations with Richard Wilbur, ed. William Butts (Jackson; London: University Press of Mississippi, 1990), p. 53.

[13] Randall Jarrell, No Other Book (New York, NY: Perennial, 2000), p. 252.

[14] Richard Wilbur, Responses: Prose Pieces, p. 275-6.

[15] Ibid, p. 273.

[16] Ibid, p. 274.

[17] Wilbur, ‘Poetry and the Landscape’, p. 87.

[18] Wilbur, Conversations, p. 58.

[19] Richard Wilbur, ‘The Art of Poetry: Richard Wilbur’, The Paris Review 72 (Winter 1977), 2-38 (p. 11).

[20] Wilbur, Responses, p. 128-9.

[21] Robert Lowell, Collected Letters (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2005), p. 308.

[22] Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell: a biography (London: Faber, 1983), p. 180.

[23] Robert Lowell, ‘The Art of Poetry: Robert Lowell’, Paris Review 25 (Winter-Spring 1961), 2-41 (p. 27).

[24] Robert Lowell, Collected Letters, p. 307.

[25] Ibid, p. 181.

[26] Robert Lowell, Collected Prose (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1987), p. 41-2.

[27] Hamilton, Robert Lowell, p. 233-4.

[28] Robert Lowell, Collected Letters, p. 358.

[29] Hamilton, Robert Lowell, p. 231.

[30] Robert Lowell, ‘The Art of Poetry’, p. 13.

[31] Patrick K. Miehe, The Robert Lowell Papers at the Houghton Library (1990), p. 122.

[32] Lowell, Collected Letters, p. 750.

[33] Lowell, Collected Prose, p. 43.

[34] Ibid, p. 44.

[35] Williams, The Collected Poems, vol. II, p. 337.

[36] Ibid, p. 322.

[37] Robert Gould Axelrod, ‘Robert Lowell and the Cold War’, The New England Quarterly Vol. 72, No. 3 (Sep., 1999), 339-361 (p. 360).

[38] James Longenbach, Modern Poetry After Modernism (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

[39] Richard Wilbur, ‘The Genie in the Bottle’, Mid-Century American Poets, ed. John Ciardi (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1950), 2-8 (p. 6).

[40] Donald Hall, Contemporary American Poetry (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1962), p. 28.

[41] Randall Jarrell, No Other Book, p. 252.

[42] Wilbur, Conversations, p. 30.

[43] Peter Davison, The Fading Smile: poets in Boston, 1955-1960 from Robert Frost to Robert Lowell to Sylvia Plath (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1994), pp. 76-7.

Issue 17, Autumn 2010: Contents

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 17, Autumn 2010

‘Mad-Eyed From Stating the Obvious”:The Cold War Symmetries of Robert Lowell and Richard Wilbur

STEPHEN ROSS, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

Adapting Kali: Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Stotras to Kali Destroyer of Illusions’

NICOLA SCHOLES, UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND

‘How did it all fit in?’: Alice Notley’s ‘101’

YASMINE SHAMMA, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

Continuity and Change – or Routine and Crisis?

KATARINA WORCH, GOETHE-UNIVERSITY FRANKFURT

Meeting 263

BAAS Executive Committee: 11 June 2010 at 1.00pm

1. Present: M Halliwell (Chair), W Kaufman (Vice Chair), C Morley (Secretary), T Saxon (Treasurer), C Bates, I Bell, M Collins, D Ellis, J Fagg, Z Feghali, G Lewis, I Morgan and T Ruys Smith.

Apologies: S Castillo, P Davies, S Lucas, R Mason, M Whalan.

2. Minutes of the Previous Meeting

After some minor amendments, these were accepted as a true record and will now go on the website.

3. Matters Arising

Action List Review

The Secretary asked the Exec to comment on the status of their Action List duties. WK mentioned that Development business with schools was ongoing and criteria for small conference grants was being redeveloped and would be sent to the Secretary for addition to the website in due course. WK also noted that he had conducted an audit on Awards monies granted and conference bursaries for PGs, and had arrived at the conclusion that there was no justification for applying to the Embassy for additional funds.

All other Action List duties will be addressed under the relevant section below.

4. Chair’s Business (MH reporting)

MH made the following announcements:

Announcements

Andrew Warnes has been promoted to a Reader at the University of Leeds
Tim Lustig has been promoted to Senior Lecturer at Keele University. Martin Crawford, Steve Mills and Mike Tappin are all retiring from Keele.
Dick Ellis (Birmingham) will be a Research Fellow at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University in August.
Peter Rawlings has been made Head of the newly reconfigured Department of English, Linguistics and Communication at University of the West of England.
Will Kaufman (Central Lancashire) has been awarded an AHRC Fellowship (£34,488) for his new project on ‘Radical Guthrie’.

Sylvia Ellis (Northumbria) has been awarded £7500 by the Nuffield Foundation for a pilot study on US Universities’ Women’s Centres.

Correspondence

MH has updated the Heads list and will try to have a representative from each American Studies unit, or cognate department with and American Studies concentration. He noted that he would kept interested parties and friends of BAAS on the list (limiting one per institution). Colleagues are invited to write to MH if interested in being added to the list.
In future MH will be sending the Academy of Social Sciences bulletin through Iwan Morgan. He asked colleagues to inform Iwan if they would like to see the bulletin on a regular basis; otherwise relevant news items will be extracted for Exec meetings.
MH is in the initial stages of exploring the possibility of the US Embassy (possibly with the UK Embassy) in India sponsoring a delegation of Indian Americanists to form a roundtable at the 2011 BAAS Conference to discuss the development of American Studies in India, perhaps with an international relations focus. If this venture is successful, MH intends to replicate the model with the US/UK Embassies in China for the 2012 BAAS Conference. Simon Newman has suggested that if funds are a prohibiting factor, then video conference links could be an option. Michael Macey in Delhi is, in principle, interested in pursuing this venture. MH noted the problem regarding the relatively low value of the rupee which means that academics tend not to travel. SN suggested video conference links might be the way around this and suggested Australia would be a good option to consider for future years. MH will pursue this further.
MH corresponded with BAAS Exec Colleagues to define new roles on the Committee: Michael Collins (Website and Communication), Iwan Morgan (Academic of Social Science, HOTCUS and APG Liaison), John Fagg (UKCASA and LLAS Liaison), Robert Mason (TAShips), Tom Ruys Smith (Impact Database), George Lewis (Chair of Conference Subcom), Mark Whalan (Chair of Publications Subcom). MH also met with Zalfa and Michael to discuss the Postgraduate Representative’s role. This now means that we all have distinct roles on the Exec. These roles can be developed over the course of the coming year.
MH wrote to Edward Action, the VC at UEA, to thank him for his support of the BAAS 2010 Annual Conference and received a positive response.

Invitations

MH attended a meeting of scholarly associations to assess the future of research funding for the humanities and social sciences at the British Academy in late May (the notes have already been circulated among Exec members).
MH was invited to the launch of the RCUK’s Impacts: People and Skills Publication on 14 June at the British Academy. He is unable to attend, but Tom Ruys Smith will represent BAAS and report back at the next meeting.
MH was invited to the Eccles Centre’s Bryant Lecture and Dinner on 17 May (Heidi Macpherson attended the Lecture as outgoing BAAS Chair).
MH will attend the LLAS Advisory Board meeting on 15 June, followed by a celebration of 10 years of the subject centre.
Iwan Morgan will be attending the AGM of the Academy of Social Sciences, on behalf of BAAS, on 30 June.
MH noted that we were asked to nominate impact case studies to UKCASA for a HEFCE consultation. Will Kaufman and Dick Ellis are putting forward case studies. It is unclear at this stage whether they will be accepted (subsequent to the meeting we heard that only DE would attend the meeting). This HEFCE workshop is to be held on 30 June, with a follow-up meeting of UKCASA on 1 July which JF and DE will attend.
MH has had meetings with 3 former chairs of BAAS, and 2 more scheduled for the summer. In May he met with Maxine Molyneux, Iwan Morgan and Tim Lynch at the ISA, and with Liza Davies and Sue Wedlake at the US Embassy. CB will also see the Embassy representatives later in June.
MH reported that he had written a letter for the THE responding to a piece reporting a complaint by Martin Davidson, the CEO of the British Council, about the lack of study abroad opportunities in BA degrees in the UK. The letter was printed in shortened form in this week’s THE. The lead article lamented study abroad opportunities in the UK. MH reminded them of year abroad opportunities embedded in American Studies degrees.

Consultations and Activities

MH responded on behalf of BAAS to the REF consultation on the proposed change to the placement of the Area Studies subpanel. Subsequently, MH corresponded with the Heads of UEA, Nottingham and Warwick to ascertain their intentions for the REF – including a meeting with Pete Messent, Head of American Studies at Nottingham.

Along with most other associations, BAAS was opposed to the proposed subpanel reorganization for three reasons:

This relocation would sever the humanities and social science branches of American Studies;
The proposal to place Area Studies as a branch of Literature and Language would effectively disenfranchise US historians in particular. It would force all historians to submit to the History panel without even the option of a viable subpanel to which to cross-refer;
We argued that an Area Studies subpanel that is fully representative of humanities and social science disciplines is not only crucial for multidisciplinary units that will submit directly to the Area Studies subpanel, but also to those UOAs that submit to other disciplines (History, Literature, Politics, Cultural/Media Studies) and wish to cross-refer to a representative Area Studies subpanel.

MH noted that it was not worth discussing Impact until the Autumn, when the picture will be a little more clear.

MISC

MH noted that he would send the ‘Why American Studies?’ to contacts in India over the summer.
The Heads of American Studies meeting will take place in the autumn and it will be held at the ISA.
DE suggested that it might be worth taking a longitudinal view of AS departments and single honours degrees to analyse the sharp decline in the institutional status of American Studies. He suggested that we think through the implications of this for the community. DE reminded the Exec of an email by Paul Giles which advocated that BAAS (and American Studies more generally) should embrace the changes in the discipline. WK noted that this position was important and he suggested that perhaps BAAS’s focus on named degrees means that we are in danger of alienating those operating in the parent disciplines. He reminded the Exec that our aim is to protect AS wherever it exists, but perhaps named AS programmes have been privileged in the past. MH agreed that the institutional dynamics have changed over the last few years and suggested that one way of looking at the current situation was to argue that there is more of a level playing field without the flagship departments. JF returned to the issue of disciplinary ‘visibility’, named units created this visibility for the subject more broadly and highlighted its interdisciplinarity. MH noted the visibility of AS in the University League Tables, but reiterated the need to discuss this matter more fully at the AS Heads meeting. He suggested that, should we undertake this study, we employ a PG to conduct the work. DE proposed we look at other subjects, such as Modern Languages, which fought back on a philosophical/holistic level (i.e. making their case on the basis of their intrinsic value as well as their necessity in order to compete on an international level) – rather than on a piecemeal/individual level. This had worked to a degree and might be something that BAAS could contemplate. He warned that if we accept the drift AS will get more and more isolated, with fewer and fewer modules and provision. MH suggested that we tackle the issue in two stages: firstly, we will discuss the matter of Impact with the AS Heads, and then contemplate how to present this philosophical dimension of American Studies to government and think tanks. These issues and the matter of the study are to be revisited at the September meeting.

5. Secretary’s Business

CM noted that, as usual, her main role revolved around information flow. She regularly passed information on to Alison Kelly, Clare Elliot and Michael Collins for ASIB, the mailbase and the website respectively. These have increased hugely since the launch of the new website, with AS events pouring in every day. She helped direct people with research and awards queries to the appropriate sources. She also fielded a number of queries for AS graduates looking for Careers opportunities.
CM wrote to the Embassy with an update of the new committee members and structure and wrote to welcome all the new committee members (with details of their Trustee status); she is awaiting materials from the Charities Commission so she can update our records with details of the new committee members.
CM noted that she has begun work on the newly designed BAAS leaflet. She will circulate it electronically before printing for committee approval. The design has been slow to allow the incorporation of the new web design and new logo.
CM noted that most of her time this quarter had been given over to the website. She and MC attended a training session with Clear and Creative in Oxford on 17 May 2010, and since then they both have been busy adding materials. There have, inevitably, been a few teething problems with the website but generally everything seems to be working well and the feedback has been very positive. There are aspects of the site that require updating, such as the addition of Minutes, recent editions of ASIB, and amended links to AS centres, but these will be attended to in due course.
CM will represent BAAS at an ESRC event on the Humanities and Social Science on 16 June 2010.

6. Treasurer’s Business (TS reporting)

The Treasurer noted that the bank accounts (as at 09/06/10) were as follows: General Deposit, £25,222.48; Short Term Awards, £1,882.69; Current, £13,550.48; making a total of £40,655.65. The RBS Jersey account has been closed and the US Dollar Account has $9,450.43
TS reported that fully paid up members for 2010 currently stand at 307 (124 postgraduate). This does not compare favourably to the position last year, which was 475 (with 166 postgraduates). When those who haven’t so far updated their Standing Orders are included, the numbers rise to 495 (177 postgraduate), and with those who have not yet renewed from 2010 (i.e. those who pay by cheque) are included the numbers rise to 611 (243 postgraduate).
The balance on the Current Account is high as there are award payments that have yet to go through. CE will send out a call asking members to update their Standing Orders. TS will write to those remaining individuals who have not yet updated.
TS had received a query this year from someone attending the conference who was not a BAAS member so paid the non-member rate, but was told that the extra money would constitute the cost of their BAAS membership. The Exec agreed that this was not the case and BAAS membership was not to be rolled into the conference cost in this manner.
TS reported that she was about to send off a Gift Aid claim for £2051.
DE asked about the possibility of setting up a Direct Debit facility for the BAAS membership. TS said it would be too expensive to set up. DE asked TS to ascertain what the exact cost of Direct Debit to see if this might be worthwhile.

7. Development Subcommittee (WK)

WK began his report by welcoming John Fagg, Zalfa Feghali and Iwan Morgan to the subcom.
Following the previous meeting, the subcom agreed via email to offer support of £300 to Matthew Hill for the Nottingham Poetry series.
WK reported that Steven Ross had requested £500 for the BAAS PG conference (13 November 2010). The amount requested had been fully costed and the Executive Committee unanimously agreed to support this request. MH will write to Dr Reena Sastri to thank her for her support of the BAAS PG conference.
WK reported that the subcom had discussed how best to utilise the website’s Schools pages. One idea, for instance, was to add materials that would be attractive to teachers. For the next meeting, CB will produce a template, format and model (from a student perspective) and the subcom will decide how to develop this. CB noted that next year’s schools conference season will soon be starting and we should try to ensure we have a BAAS presence to build our network of contacts. CM suggested that we collate Schools conferences contacts, use this to promote BAAS, and to advertise Schools prize. CB will pursue this. CM will send all available Schools contacts lists to CB.

8. Publications Subcommittee (MH reporting on behalf of MW)

BRRAM

Roderic Vassie attended the meeting on behalf of KM.
The subcom was happy to recommend Evie Vernon to write the Introduction to the latest BRRAM release. This decision was endorsed by the Exec.
KM will visit ISA to look at Latin American materials.
MC will explore ways of linking MAP/BRRAM holdings to the BAAS website

Edinburgh University Press (EUP)

Kasia Boddy’s book on the Short Story will be released in August.
Theresa Saxon’s book an American Theatre will be released next summer.
SN and SC are currently considering proposals on American rock ‘n roll and American autobiography

Journal of American Studies (JAS)

The next Editorial Board meeting will be held on 20 September.
MW will pursue nominations to replace Sabine Broeck. JAS would like to appoint a senior European Americanist.

American Studies in Britain (ASIB)

KA, AK’s successor is yet to submit his PhD. MH has, therefore, asked Alison to see the next edition of ASIB through to typesetting stage. KA will take over in August.
In future, new members will submit their biographies electronically and this electronic version will be forwarded to the Editor of ASIB.

US Studies Online

The Spring edition is now online (PG conference edition).
FD will step down from her position as Editor in the Autumn. MW will send an advert for a new Editor to AK for the Autumn edition of ASIB (deadline for applications – 1 January 2011). This role will be aimed at late stage PGs/early career scholars with a fixed three-year term. MC will stand in as Acting Editor until a new editor is appointed. It must be stated clearly on the advert that the Editor is expected to attend the Annual BAAS conference and the BAAS PG conference.

Website

The new BAAS website went live on 27 May. MC noted thanks to CM and to Simon Gregory at C&C.
MC and CM attended website training on 17 May and both can update materials on the site. MC requested that colleagues send events information directly to him.
MC is investigating how we might organise new membership through the website, including PayPal and changes to the Standing Orders. This will mean that TS can monitor information more easily and process membership more quickly. Simon Gregory has quoted £240+VAT for this. MC will investigate the costs of Photoshop training.
The UCLAN BAAS link now works; HOTCUS has been added as affiliated organisation.
MC is looking into ways of archiving old events and linking them into the architecture of the site. He noted that it is important to keep records of all BAAS-supported events (and e-posters for the BAAS conference) as this would be a way of monitoring BAAS’s impact.

9. Conference Subcommittee (GL reporting)

GL noted official thanks to Tom Ruys Smith and his team at UEA. The UEA accounts are being formalised and once the Treasurer has confirmed the UEA accounts have been closed, TRS will receive the conference secretary’s honorarium of £500.
GL reported that the subcom had looked at UEA in terms of improvements that might be made at future BAAS events. The subcom are considering various ideas which might have a greater capture for the AGM. There was universal praise for the pared-down version of prize giving. GL noted that there had been a small technical hitch in processing the payment for the CUP speaker. TS is working on this.
The conference poster for UCLAN is now on the website and will go out in the BAAS mailbase. Hotel accommodation is based at The Legacy and the Preston Holiday Inn (10-15 minute walk from the conference venue) and it is hoped that lack of shuttle bus provision will bring the costs down. TS will explore the possibilities of using the UCLAN mobility bus for delegates who may not wish to walk those distances. We can book a maximum of 90 rooms in advance. The subcom suggested that BAAS pay for 40 rooms in advance and then book a further 90. GL noted that UEA used 120-130 rooms and had 250 delegates across the whole conference. The conference banquet will be held at the Deepdale Football Club. Friday night will be a free night again (due to success of this at UEA). A list of restaurants will be provided in the conference pack. An auto-reply to paper submission has been set up and abstracts online will be handled by the conference organiser.
GL will write to invite the following organisations to offer panel sessions: HOTCUS; BrANCH; NAN; APG; BACS; SLAS; BGEAH; APC; MSG; and possibly WISP.
GL suggested that it might be interesting to think about panels organised around various anniversaries such as 10th anniversary of 9/11; Civil Rights; the JFK inauguration; Tulsa Riots; 50 years Freedom Rights; and 160 years since publication Moby Dick. IM noted that 2011 would mark the 50th anniversary of ‘The Twist’.
GL reported that the subcom had also discussed various ways of involving local schools in the conference. TS will put UCLAN’s teaching liaison officer, Bernard Quinn, in touch with the BAAS teachers’ rep.
The plenary speakers for UCLAN 2011 are all confirmed: Heidi Macpherson (UCLAN plenary); John Howard (JAS plenary); Nigel Bowles (ECCLES plenary). Given that the JAS speaker will be UK-based, the cost of the flight will not be required. DE wondered if this money could be used for postgraduate travel grants. MH will make enquiries with Martine Walsh.
GL formally thanked Sarah MacLachlan for the hard work that she put in during her six years on the sub-committee, and for her often unseen work in ensuring that so many past BAAS conferences ran smoothly and successfully.

10. Awards Subcommittee (IB reporting)

IB was pleased to announce that the New Hampshire TA-Ship has come through for the forthcoming year. A panel had selected Laura Crean from the University of Glasgow to take the place from August. He mentioned that Ms Crean had asked about the possibility of deferring her place. The Exec agreed that given the rolling nature of TA-ship this would not be possible. IB will advise the candidate.
IB noted that the posters for next tranche of awards will be distributed over the summer. He asked CM to look into the cost of producing the posters with C&C.
IB enquired about the new Arthur Miller First Book Prize. He asked if there were any strict rules about whether candidates could apply for both the BAAS Book Prize and the new Arthur Miller Award. The committee agreed that given the amount of work involved in the adjudication of these prizes candidates could apply for only one or the other award. IB will make enquiries with Chris Bigsby about who forms the adjudicating committee (BAAS or UEA) and he will also ascertain the prize amount. This information needs to be reported back to the Treasurer.
IB raised the matter of posters for schools prizes. The current list of schools contacts is far too long and unmanageable in terms of the distribution of posters. CB will advise on which schools to target (CM will forward the current lists to CB).

11. Libraries and Resources Committee (DE reporting)

DE noted that the next meeting of BLARs will take place on 16 July.
DE noted that the subcom are still pursuing ideas regarding resources sharing and will present a paper to the Exec at the September meeting.
DE mentioned that BLARs were keen to engage with MC and JF regarding the website.

12. EAAS

There was no new EAAS news since April.

13. Any Other Business

In response to an ACSS/ESRC forum, IM has written to about 20 individuals in the Social Sciences to briefly indicate the impact of their work as they see it. He is hoping to compile a database that might be used at short notice to flag significant work in the Social Sciences area. He is hoping to have heard back from all those contacted by the end of July.
JF circulated a letter from Michael Kelly regarding the role of LLAS and the 40% they are facing. The letter requested support from organisations. MH agreed to write, on behalf of BAAS, to the head of the HEA. JF also mentioned that the LLAS produces a monthly bulletin which he will, in future, summarise and circulate to the Exec.
JF raised the issue of voting at the AGM and wondered if there were different ways of organising the voting. DE suggested that we could move to hustings, debates, questions, etc, which could go out as podcasts prior to the AGM. The Exec agreed to revisit this issue at the next meeting.
MH mentioned that Tim Lynch from the ISA was looking for information about the ISA to include in his Chair’s Report, which will be printed in the next ASIB.
DE mentioned that Dr Steve Hewitt (Birmingham) met with the Queen in an advisory capacity prior to her recent visit to Canada.
The Secretary raised the matter of future meeting dates, noting that it would be useful to set out dates well in advance. The Exec agreed that this was a sensible idea and agreed to meet on 17 September at the University of Leicester, 14 January 2011 at the University of Manchester, and on 14 April 2011 at the University of Central Lancashire.

14. Date of next meeting

The next Executive Committee meeting will be held at the University of Leicester on Friday 17 September. Subcoms will commence at 10.30am.

Dr. Catherine Morley

email: catherine.morley@leicester.ac.uk

Office Phone: (0116) 223 1068

AGM 2010

BAAS AGM 2010

The 2010 AGM of BAAS was held on Friday 9 April at the University of East Anglia at 4.00pm.

Elections:

Chair Martin Halliwell (to 2013)

Committee Ian Bell (to 2013)*
George Lewis (to 2013)*
Thomas Ruys Smith (to 2013)
Michael Collins (to 2012)

PG Rep Zalfa Feghali (to 2012)*

*Not eligible for re-election to this position.

The Secretary asked the membership to consider the motion raised in the AGM 2010 Notice (published in the Spring issue of American Studies in Britain) regarding the addition of the JAS Associate Editor as an ex-officio member of the BAAS Executive Committee. This entails a change to the BAAS Standing Orders, which must be approved by the membership at the AGM. The Secretary explained that this change was necessary to ensure that JAS was always represented at BAAS Executive Committee meetings. Heidi Macpherson (DeMontfort) proposed the acceptance of the motion; Will Kaufman (UCLAN) seconded it, and it was carried unanimously.

The Treasurer circulated copies of the Trustees’ Report and the draft audited accounts, which she asked the AGM to approve. Dick Ellis (Birmingham) proposed that the accounts be approved; Nick Selby (UEA) seconded the motion, and it was carried unanimously.

The Treasurer noted that the bank accounts (as at 6 April 2010) were as follows: General Deposit, £26,819.70; Short Term Awards, £1882.46; Current, £3903.31; making a total of £32,605.47. The amount in the RBS Jersey is £15,474.61 and the US Dollar Account has $9,448.51.

TS also reported on membership figures. There are currently 294 fully paid up members (118 of which are Postgraduates), which compares to 462 (including 160 Postgraduates) at this time last year. When those who have not updated their Standing Orders are included, this number rises to 481 in total (with 171 Postgraduates). With the addition of those who have not renewed for 2010 (i.e. those who pay by cheque) the numbers rise to 600 members (including 238 Postgraduates). TS reminded the AGM of the need to update Standing Orders (to inform the bank of the new BAAS membership fees) as those who have not done so are not full members and therefore are not entitled to vote in the elections. This failure to update Standing Orders is the reason behind the dip in membership numbers.

In terms of the accounts, TS noted a healthy deficit again this year. She informed the AGM that BAAS had appointed new accountants to clarify some procedural points and save money. She also drew attention to the increased resources of £13,000 due to additional funds from Nottingham and the Eccles Centre.

The Chair offered a comprehensive verbal report, in which she reflected on the last three years during her tenure as BAAS Chair and on the last decade as it is exactly a decade that she served the community on the BAAS Executive Committee. The Chair noted that she was first elected at the conference in Swansea in April 2000, became Secretary at Oxford in 2002, and Chair at Leicester in 2007. During that decade, undergraduate programmes in American Studies have come and gone, patterns of recruitment at postgraduate level have changed, two RAEs have assessed our research capacity and strength, the Institute for the Study of the Americas was born which puts American Studies into a hemispheric context, alongside Latin American Studies, Caribbean Studies, and Canadian Studies, and the BAAS committee has extended its support of American Studies activities exponentially, with new awards such as the BAAS book prize, the Eccles Centre fellowships, the Founders’ Awards, and the Ambassador’s Awards.

HM noted that at last year’s AGM in Nottingham, she offered an upbeat portrait of American Studies, and added that while that vision was subsequently criticized, she stands by her assessment of the strength of our community. A list of the achievements and awards of individual members and those affiliated with BAAS surely indicates as much. David Brauner was made Reader at Reading this year, as was Jacqueline Fear-Segal at UEA. Steve Burman was awarded a Chair at Sussex. Tony Badger was selected to lead the Kennedy Memorial Trust. Professor Sir David Watson was awarded the THE Lord Dearing Lifetime Achievement Award.

A number of BAAS members have received substantial grants or fellowships: Alan Rice from UCLAN received a £4000 grant for his work on a dramatic tableau of the slave trade, Lee Sartain from Portsmouth received a British Academy grant for £4000. George Lewis from Leicester received a British Academy Research Development Award worth £111,404 over 3 years. Jo Gill from Exeter received an AHRC award for her project “The Poetics of the American Suburbs”, worth over £23,000. Kasia Boddy (UCL) received a Leverhulme Research Fellowship of £45,000 for her project “The Great American Novel”.

Sam Edwards received Fulbright Distinguished Scholar Award. Stephanie Lewthwaite from Nottingham was awarded a Bill and Rita Clements Research Fellowship in the US. Simon Newman was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship.

BAAS members have also won prizes. Tim Lynch was awarded the 2009 Richard E. Neustadt Book Prize for After Bush: The Case for Continuity in American Foreign Policy, which he co-authored with Robert Singh at Birkbeck. John Ashworth from Nottingham was awarded the Southern Historical Association’s James A. Rawley Book Award. Peter Messent has received the American Studies Network Book Prize for his book Mark Twain and Male Friendship book (the prize is to be split between him and UEA’s Christopher Bigsby).

And in terms BAAS’s impact, the Chair noted that our members offer public lectures, speak on radio and television, and some even go so far as to offer their services to Glastonbury as folk singers. All of this is evidence of the high esteem in which American Studies colleagues are held, and the prominence of the research we undertake.

HM noted that we have also lost friends and colleagues this year: Albert Gordon, Allan Lloyd Smith, who was a former Treasurer of BAAS, and Jack Pole, who many will remember as a long-time conference attendee.

On behalf of BAAS, the Chair attended a number of events this year, including REF meetings, Institute for the Study of the Americas events including book launches, the Journal of American Studies board meeting, and the annual 4th of July barbeque at the US Ambassador’s House. HM was invited to attend a number of other events, including inaugural lectures for Tim Woods and Douglas Tallack, regional meetings and association meetings, many of which were attended by others on the committee when HM had a diary conflict.

HM reminded the membership that, on behalf of BAAS, the officers and members of the Executive Committee work extremely hard to protect and enhance American Studies in the UK. The Executive Committee aims to ensure that the voice of American Studies is heard as universities, funding bodies and the government make their decisions, writing to Vice Chancellors and Deans when made aware of potential course closures, and with some success. BAAS fought for American Studies provision at Liverpool, the ASRC, and at King’s College London, and certainly an earlier decision at King’s has been re-examined, with a consultation on closure extended until the end of this month, with some very hopeful signs. This year, Wolverhampton announced the closure of its American Studies provision due to falling student numbers, and Northampton also decided to close its programme though much of the provision will remain in other arenas. Sussex has restructured its provision. At the same time, a new American Studies programme has been validated at the University of Ulster (Magee campus) and other colleagues reported record admissions figures in the autumn and high application figures in the spring.

In addition to the work the Executive Committee undertakes to protect American Studies provision, it also responds to a variety of consultation exercises, often with little notice. Over the last year, this has included responding to the following:

AHRC Future Directions Consultation
The Research Councils UK Knowledge Transfer Consultation
The RIN consultation on the use of blogs, wikis and Web 2.0
Academy of Social Sciences’ project, “Making the case for the social sciences”
And vitally, of course, the REF consultation.

The Chair noted that the Annual Heads of American Studies meeting took place on 16 June 2009, with a good number of attendees, who offered a positive response to the upcoming REF; the meeting featured an informed discussion led by Professor Paul Cammack, chair of the previous RAE panel. Subsequent to this, in the late autumn, Prof. Cammack and HM arranged a meeting in Manchester for Area Studies colleagues to discuss their submissions to the consultation. The Chair submitted BAAS’s response to the REF consultation documentation, on the 10th of December and urged colleagues to continue to engage positively with HEFCE regarding their plans. One of the ways in which BAAS is taking a leading role is with the implementation of a Media contacts database, which has been organized by Mark Whalan and to which she encouraged the membership to submit details as this is an excellent way to demonstrate impact in preparation for the REF.

The Chair reported that in the past year she also undertook to assess the CD-rom project, to which BAAS contributed substantial funds for the benefit of our members, and noted that the project appears to be a success. The BAAS Executive is working actively with the Schools Liaison member, Chris Bates. BAAS has opened a dialogue with Michael Macy, Cultural Attaché to India, who was formerly based in London, about international links, and works closely as part of EAAS as well.

The Chair noted that BAAS offers many important services to the community. This year alone, BAAS will award 31 prizes worth a total of over £39,150, not including the support and funding offered to conference organizers. The Chair gratefully acknowledged the assistance of the US Embassy and also of individual BAAS members who regularly contribute to the Short Term Travel Award funds or who donate anonymously in other ways. HM also acknowledged the support and professionalism of a number of executive member and other members in judging these awards, which is carried out anonymously.

The Chair thanked all of the members of the BAAS Executive Committee, past and present, who have served during her term as Chair, including Chris Bates, Ian Bell, Paul Blackburn, Susan Castillo, Richard Crockatt, Jude Davies, Philip Davies, Martin Halliwell, Will Kaufman, Andrew Lawson George Lewis, Sarah MacLachlan, Robert Mason, Jo Metcalf, Catherine Morley, Theresa Saxon, Ian Scott, Graham Thompson, and Mark Whalan. In addition to thanking our postgraduate member, Michael Collins, she congratulated him on successfully passed his viva recently. To the other officers of the committee, HM extended particular thanks, for their good humour, their collegiate attitude, and their willingness to get involved and to work so hard on behalf of BAAS. She reminded the membership to look at the Executive Committee not as the whole sum of BAAS, but as conduits; BAAS is much larger than its thirteen-strong elected representation but can only be truly effective if the community engages fully with the Association.

HM concluded by introducing the new BAAS website and noting that BAAS conferences remain just as engaging and stimulating as the first she attended in 1993 at Sunderland, as a postgraduate. These conferences are vital to Britain’s American Studies community, and they succeed because of a tremendous amount of preparation and hard work. The Chair noted her thanks to Dr Thomas Ruys Smith and his colleagues at UEA, for organizing such an excellent conference. She noted her confidence in the strength of the committee and the strength of the American Studies community in the twenty-first century.

Conferences:

Sarah MacLachlan began her report by acknowledging what a huge success the UEA conference had been so far, and offered public congratulations to Thomas Ruys Smith and his team at UEA for the hard work they had put in before and during the conference. SM noted that this year she had visited the 2011 conference site at UCLAN with Theresa Saxon, the 2011 conference organiser. The conference will be based the University of Central Lancashire (14-17 April 2011) and preparations are already well underway. She noted that the call for papers was available in conference packs and members were asked to consider submitting proposals early to allow for planning.

The 2012 conference will be held at the University of Manchester, organized by Ian Scott, with the University of Exeter hosting the conference in 2013, and the University of Birmingham taking on the conference in 2014. Finally, SM invited suggestions for future conferences.

Publications:

Martin Halliwell began his verbal report by reminding the AGM that the minutes of all meetings are published on the BAAS website, so that individuals may keep updated about current activities. He then reported on some of the highlights of the year in relation to the Publications subcommittee. In relation to BRRAM (British Records Relating to America in Microform), Ken Morgan (Brunel) and Roderic Vassie (MAP) have been very active in developing the BRRAM catalogue. Microform Academic Publishers has now launched its online gateway, British Online Archives, which includes a selection of eight BRRAM titles under the series title ‘British Records on the Atlantic World, 1700-1850’ (www.britishonlinearchives.co.uk). This initiative was publicized in the last issue of ASIB, including details of a special one-year institutional access to these eight BRRAM titles. Future titles are underway based on material at the Rhodes House Library, Oxford; the University of London Archives; and Bangor University. Ken Morgan is looking to expand the series and would welcome any suggestions of new papers for the collection.

In relation to the BAAS EUP series, the series editors, Simon Newman and Carol Smith and EUP Commissioning Editors Nicola Ramsey/James Dale have been busy throughout the year. Kasia Boddy’s book on The American Short Story is now in press and will be published soon and Theresa Saxon’s monograph on American Theatre will be by the end of the summer. MH also reported that sales figures of recent and back catalogue books in the series are strong.

MH reported that the Editor of JAS, Susan Castillo, Associate Editor, Scott Lucas and CUP representative Martine Walsh have been working very hard in 2009-10 to streamline and develop JAS. This year JAS moved to four issues per year with a page length of 240 pp. per issue, supplemented by extra features available in the online version. The digital archive of JAS going back to 1967 is now available through JSTOR Version 5, with plans to make the JAS forerunner, the British Association for American Studies Bulletin, available as well. MH noted that he have given a presentation in March at an ‘American Studies in the 21st Century’ Conference in Hyderabad (sponsored by the US Embassy) and the delegates were very interested to learn about JSTOR availability – it was also a good opportunity to promote the journal to Asian academics. The CUP First View facility which has now been introduced to JAS means that articles are now available online ahead of the print publication date. MH welcomed the following as new editorial board members: Brian Ward (Manchester), Wai Chee Dimock (Yale), Giles Scott Smith (Middelburg, Holland) and Susan Currell (Sussex). MH also announced the new editorial team for JAS (with a start date of 1 January 2011):

Editor: Scott Lucas (Birmingham)
Associate Editor – Reviews: Celeste Marie Bernier (Nottingham)
Associate Editor – Media: Bevan Sewell (Nottingham)

(4 year terms for Editor and Reviews Editor; 2 year term for Media Editor).

MH concluded this section of his report by thanking the current Editor, Susan Castillo, for her enormous amount of work in enhancing the journal’s reputation and maintaining the high standards of JAS.

In relation to other publications, Dr alison Kelly has produced two fine issues of ASIB (American Studies in Britain) in 2009-10, issues 101 and 102. Alison comes to the end of her editorship of ASIB this year. MH announced that Kaleem Ashraf (Sheffield) will take over as Editor in the early autumn for a 3-year term. MH offered congratulations to Kaleem and many thanks to Alison for her highly professional work as outgoing editor of ASIB.

Felicity Donohoe (Glasgow) has done a very good job in publicizing US Studies Online and in preparing new issues, which are available as an e-zine and also through the BAAS website. MH reminded the membership to look out for the Spring/Summer 2010 issue which will have papers from the BAAS PG Conference held at Northumbria University in November 2009.

MH mentioned the BAAS website and thanked the Secretary for her work in developing the site. He concluded his report by thanking colleagues on the Publications subcommittee for their work in 2009-10 – particularly Susan Castillo and Alison Kelly as they approach the end of their terms of office. MH mentioned specific thanks to the Chair who, he noted, had been an integral part of American Studies in the UK for the past 15 years.

Development:

Will Kaufman began his report by seconding MH’s thanks to the Chair, who has been a active member of the Development subcommittee for the past three years of her BAAS tenure. He noted that the Development subcommittee has had two major concerns in the past year: schools liaison and the continued support of conference organisation, particularly with regard to postgraduates. In terms of schools liaison, the subcommittee has been particularly happy to welcome Mr Chris Bates as the new Schools Liaison officer, and—as an important guest of the subcommittee—Dr Bella Adams of the American Studies Resource Centre (ASRC). He thanked David Forster of the ASRC for his assistance in developing an extensive database of schools contacts.

Chris Bates has been proactive in formalising BAAS’s schools liaison agenda, having conducted a survey of the current curriculum for American Studies components, targeting outreach and support. His extensive recommendations have included the development of hubs or regional representatives at school level and the construction of a schools portal on the BAAS website, which is now in progress. Other foci of BAAS’s strategy will be to link the REF and American Studies research to the wider community through our schools liaison, distribute subject expertise to students and teachers and to extend subject opportunities for sixth-form students. BAAS have been active in encouraging an American Studies presence in schools through contact with the postgraduates on the Marshall Scholarships programme. The Development subcommittee will develop our links with American Studies postgraduates for schools visits, particularly in the areas of History, Politics, and English. The aim will be to target sixth formers whilst not ruling out other years. WK drew the AGM’s attention to the ‘What America Means to Me’ project spearheaded by UEA’s Wendy McMahon and her postgraduate students, Catherine Barter and Lucien Giordano. This collection of schoolchildren’s creative prose and artwork was included in the conference packs. The project was partially funded by BAAS and is just the sort of project that BAAS seeks to encourage to get young people thinking about American Studies.

WK noted an increase in the number of BAAS conference funding requests. Given this rise, subcommittee discussions have focused increasingly on the prioritisation of postgraduate provision and opportunities. He added that this will be a topic of extensive debate in the subcommittee and is likely to have an impact on the rubric for future BAAS funding for conference organisation.

WK concluded his report by expressing thanks to the US Embassy for the substantial grants they have provided year on year. Thanks to this support, in the past year BAAS has been able to contribute funds for the organisation of conferences on Culture and the Canada-US Border, Transatlantic Music, the William James Centenary, Postwar American Poetry and Painting, the American Politics Group Colloquium, Contemporary American Literature and Its Contexts, American Literature and Culture after 9/11, Afromodernisms, Scottish-American Studies, Twentieth-Century American History. Decisions are pending on two further conferences—the postgraduate conference, “Understanding America and Its Relationship with the World,” and the Nottingham Poetry Postgraduate Conference, “I Am an American Poet.”

All members of the Development subcommittee were thanked for their contributions during the year.

Awards:

Ian Bell began his report by thanking the anonymous judges who contributed to the successful business of the Awards subcommittee. He thanked his predecessor Ian Scott (Manchester) for the successful handover of the Awards portfolio and the Secretary for her assistance in streamlining the Awards timeline.

This year, again, BAAS will award substantial number of awards worth in excess of £39,000. He noted that the Eccles Centre had increased Awards funding. IB also reported that there had been some complications with the administration of the teaching assistantships, meaning that this year’s New Hampshire award would be delayed. Finally, IB thanked the US Embassy for their support, as well as the individual members of BAAS who donate funds to support the Short Term Travel Awards.

Libraries and Resources:

Dick Ellis reported that the subcommittee had dealt with six main items over the past year. Firstly, the subcommittee was pleased to assist with composition of a guide for AS students regarding the use of the internet for scholarly research. This is published by INTUTE (while INTUTE has been discontinued, the site is live and still usable). He thanked Dr Bella Adams for writing the guide. The second major item of business was the BLARs journal, Resources in American Studies, which continues through the financial support of the US Embassy and the work of Dr Matthew Shaw. The last issue was disseminated with the Autumn edition of ASIB. BLARs are hoping to start up a significant acquisitions section on the Resources page of the new BAAS website and he asked the membership to contribute to this. Looking ahead to next year’s conference at UCLAN, BLARs will run a session on social networking. DE noted that the subcommittee’s major initiative for the coming year is to audit the position of American Studies in libraries to assess the possibility of sharing resources on a regional basis. BLARs will table a paper on this initiative in the coming year. DE concluded his report by officially welcoming Ms Anna Girvan to the subcommittee and thanking all members of BLARs, especially Jayne Kelly and Matthew Shaw.

EAAS:

Phil Davies reported on the recent EAAS biannual conference in Dublin. He noted that there had been approximately 20 members of UK faculty on programme. He reflected on the high quality of these participants but thought the number of UK-based delegates was possibly a little low. PD noted the two EAAS Book Prize winners: Professor Chris Bigsby and Professor Peter Messent. He also noted that two of the plenary lectures where delivered by UK-based academics, Professor Susan Castillo and Professor Simon Newman.

PD reported that EAAS had encountered serious management issues over the past year. For various bureaucratic reasons Austria had cancelled EAAS’s legal existence. The current chair, Professor Hans-Jürgen Grabbe has worked very hard to re-establish the organisation, encountering many bureaucratic obstacles along the way. The EAAS Vice Chair has resigned due to illness and has been replaced by the Turkish representative, Meldan Tanrisal. Hans- Jürgen Grabbe has redesigned the EAAS website. PD noted that BAAS is the fourth largest national association within EAAS, following Germany, France and Spain. BAAS constitutes 11% of total membership Europe-wide. He added that finances look healthy for the coming year (EAAS made a slight surplus last year), noting the existence of a trust fund which, in time, can be used for subsidies. The EAAS online journal is going very well (41,000 consultations in 2009, three times as many as 2008). He urged the membership to consult the EAAS website and use it as an outlet for future publications. He concluded by noting that the next conference will be in Izmir (Turkey) in 2012 and theme is ‘The Health of the Nation’. EAAS 2014 will be held in Romania.

AOB:

There was no AOB.

The AGM concluded at 5.15pm.

Issue 102 Spring 2010

Editorial

The dramatic events in Massachusetts in late January, when Scott Brown recaptured a Senate seat for the Republicans after more than half a century, reminded me that it is exactly twenty years since I moved to Massachusetts and became an interested observer of America. In late 1990 the USA was deeply embroiled in the Gulf War – and it wasn’t just Washington and the military that were embroiled, but the public in general. Press, radio, television and conversation were dominated by Desert Shield and Desert Storm, to the point where neighbours in our building in Cambridge, appalled that we owned no TV, hauled us in for an evening of CNN war coverage (which wasn’t much to our taste) and dialled-up pizza (which, to be honest, wasn’t either). Our circle of friends – mostly publishers and academics, and mainly liberal – was not notable for bellicosity, but Greater Boston did have its flag-flying pickups and macho bumper stickers. Then as now, as Scott Brown’s General Motors truck has demonstrated, vehicles had cultural meanings.

Also then as now, the residents of Massachusetts were wary of anyone who seemed likely to dip a hand too far into their pockets. This applied largely across the board, whether people were red-leaning or blue-leaning, native or (like us) alien – so long as they were taxpayers. ‘What do you think of Governor Dukakis?’ my husband asked a cab driver on the way in from Logan. He glanced at us in the rearview mirror and snorted. ‘What, Doo-tax-us?’

US politics is grist to the mill of Americanists across the disciplinary spectrum, and today’s developments are tomorrow’s PhDs, books and articles. Scott Brown’s victory and Martha Coakley’s defeat have been and will continue to be analysed from all sorts of angles. I wouldn’t be surprised to find some discussion of baseball-team allegiance, American Idol and Cosmopolitan – not to mention the infamous truck – making its way into this year’s BAAS annual conference papers. Every time I paste the conference programme into the spring issue of ASIB I am awestruck by the richness and diversity of our subject community’s research interests. The University of East Anglia was one of the cradles of American Studies in this country so it will be exciting for us to convene there for our annual exchange of ideas this April. The new BAAS website will be unveiled at the AGM, and there will be an opportunity for members to become deeply involved in the work of the association by seeking election to one of the vacancies on the Executive Committee. Nomination forms at the end of this newsletter.

Staying with conferences, congratulations to Helen Mitchell for hosting a vibrant postgraduate conference at Northumbria University last November. Her report in these pages makes lively reading. The venue for the 2010 postgraduate conference remains to be decided; contact the postgraduate representative, Michael Collins, if you are interested in taking up the challenge – and reaping the satisfaction – of organising this vital event in the BAAS calendar.

Among our new members this time round it is very nice to welcome an A-level student, Robert Viles, at St Edmund’s School, Canterbury. To help BAAS extend its vital connections among this age group, members are invited to volunteer as schools liaison speakers.

Copy deadline for issue 103: 30 July 2010

Dr Alison Kelly, alisonjkelly@btinternet.com

55th Annual Conference

School of American Studies, University of East Anglia

Thursday April 8 – Sunday April 11

Provisional programme – subject to change

Thursday 8 April

2pm-4pm – Conference Registration / Coffee & Tea in the Hive

A shuttle bus will be available to transport delegates staying at Norwich City Centre Travelodge from the campus to their accommodation throughout the registration period. At other times, coaches will be available every morning and evening, as indicated in the programme. However, delegates should also note that the university is served by an excellent bus service which will take them from campus to city centre at very regular intervals throughout the day and into the night.

3.15pm-4.45pm – Library Session

5.00pm-6.00pm – Journal of American Studies Lecture: Professor Wai-Chee Dimock (Yale University)

6.10pm – Reception sponsored by the University of East Anglia to commemorate the opening of the Thomas Paine Study Centre

6.10pm – Trevor Griffiths (author of A New World: A Life of Thomas Paine) in conversation with Professor Chris Bigsby (University of East Anglia)
6.50pm – Plaque Unveiling
6.55pm – Drinks Reception

7.45pm – Conference Dinner in the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts

Post-dinner – UEA Bar

11.00pm – Coaches for delegates staying at Norwich City Centre Travelodge

Friday 9 April

7.30am – Coaches to campus for delegates staying at Norwich City Centre Travelodge

7am-9am – Conference Breakfast in Zest

9.00am-11.00am – Session 1

Writing Jewish-American Lives
Rachael McLennan, University of East Anglia
Paul Auster and Anne Frank: Autobiography as Defacement in The Invention of Solitude
Nina Fischer, University of Constance/Germany
“History and Memory”: Reading Ruth Klüger’s Still Alive as a Jewish-American Autobiography
Katrin Korkalainen, University of Oulu/Finland
Narratives of Lost Youth: Jewish-American Immigrant Children in History and Fiction
Lewis Ward, University of Plymouth
Empathy, the Holocaust and Philip Roth’s narrative persona in The Plot Against America.
Barack Obama in American Culture
Erik Nielson, University of Sheffield
The Obamafication of Rap?
Rachel Mizsei-Ward, University of East Anglia
Politics, Race and Political Fly Billing: Meanings behind the Depiction of Barack Obama as the Joker
George Lewis, University of Leicester
Barack Hussein Obama: The Use of History in the Creation of an ‘American’ President
Aaron T. Walter, Vysoká škola manažmentu/City University of Seattle
The Use of New Media in Campaigns: Fireside Chats with Barack Obama

Radicals and Reactionaries in the Twentieth Century
Victoria Kingham, Modernist Magazines Project/De Montfort University
Oppenheim, New York Modernism, and Socialism 1910-1917
Michael Dennis, Acadia University
More Than They Bargained For: The Little Steel Strike and the Popular Front in Chicago
Ariane Knüsel
McCarthyism before McCarthy: Anticommunism and American Culture in the 1930s and 1940s
Nadja Janssen
“The Tribe of the Wicked Son”: The Neoconservative Critique of Jewish Radicalism, 1945-1976
Writing American Wars
Jenna Pitchford, Nottingham Trent University
MyWarStory.com: War Narratives in Cyberspace
Simon Turner
‘I have no words to speak of war’: Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet, and the trouble with war poetry
Alison Stanley, King’s College, London
A Glass for the Promised Land: Old Testament Models and Morals in 17th Century Accounts of King Philip’s War
Katharina Worch, Institut für England- und Amerikastudien / Goethe-Universität
Being Wounded in the Korean War as major biographical cut: Comparing Indignation by Philip Roth and The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
Religion in American Culture
Paulina Napierała, Institute of American Studies and Polish Diaspora / Jagiellonian University
Constitutional controversies around Faith-Based Initiatives Policy and Its Future under the Obama Administration
Luke Ferretter, Baylor University
‘What Girl Ever Flourished in Such Company?’: Sylvia Plath’s Religion
Andrea Borella, University of Turin
The Amish: an American Religion?
Abbes Zouache, French Institute of Oriental Archeology in Cairo.
America and the Crusades: Between History and Memory
Cold War Cultures
Karen Heath, St. Anne’s College, Oxford
The Conservative Arts Movement and the Origins of the Culture Wars
Lisa Felstead, University of Portsmouth
Male Friendships in Cold-War America: James Dickey’s Deliverance and Homosocial Desire
Christine Bianco, Oxford Brookes University
Amateur Art v. Paint-By-Number: Artistic Hobbies and Cultural Hierarchies in the 1950s
Helen Bury, University of St. Andrews
Nelson Rockefeller, the Quantico Panel and the Origins of the Missile Gap, 1955 to 1961

Apocalypse & Armageddon
Paul Williams, University of Exeter
Fear of a Black Planet? Race, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Representing Nuclear War and its Aftermath
Jennie Chapman, University of Manchester
Jim Crow at the End of History: The Spectre of Segregation in Apocalyptic Christian Fiction
John Wills, University of Kent
The Armageddon Experiment: Doom Town USA and the Nuking of Suburbia
Arianna Casali, Università di Roma
American post-apocalypse in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

11.00am – 11.30am – Coffee and Tea in the Hive

11.30am – 12.30am – Session 2

Constructing and Deconstructing Celebrity
Erwin Feyersinger, University of Innsbruck
Daffy Duck’s Multiple Personalities: The Construction and Deconstruction of an Animated Studio Star
Lisa Rull, University of Nottingham
Fables and Fictions of the First/Third Person: The Pleasures and Problems of Performed Identity for Biography

Raymond Carver
Sandra Lee Kleppe, Hedmark University College, Norway
’Carver Country’ on the Screen: Robert Altman’s Short Cuts and Ray Lawrence’s Jindabyn
Andy Munzer, University of York
Populating ‘Carver Country’: ‘Biographical Geographies’ in the Poetry of Raymond Carver

Broadway & the Blacklist
K. Kevyne Baar, Tamiment Library, New York University
The Name on the Marquee: Working on Broadway in the Shadow of the Blacklist
Erica Sheen, Dept. of English and Related Literatures, University of York
‘The need to sin’: Broadway, Hollywood and HUAC

Democracy & Power
Daniel Marrone, Farmingdale State College
America’s Greatest Mayor: Fiorello H. La Guardia
Tim H. Blessing, Alvernia University
A One-and-a-Half Party Nation? Voter Preferences and Assigned Roles for Parties in Presidential Elections

Whitman & History
Jason Stacy, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
Washington’s Tears: Sentimental Anecdote and Walt Whitman’s Battle of Long Island
Amir Safari, University of Tehran, Iran
Whitman and the “Myth of Origin”

12.30pm-2pm – Lunch in Zest

1pm-2pm – Working Lunch Discussion Group

Curriculum Development in American Studies: The Temple-UEA Project

2pm-3.30pm – Session 3

Nations & Borderlands
Bonnie Craig, King’s College, London
“That Country inside my Head”: Rewriting the American Nation in Isabel Allende’s My Invented Country (Mi País Inventado)
Alana Jackson, University of Lleida, Catalonia
Chicano/a Literature and the Response of Young Readers: Insights into Identity Formation of University Students in California
Zalfa Feghali, University of Nottingham
Travelling Theory and the Work of Gloria Anzaldúa

Consumption & Consumerism
Tim Jelfs, King’s College London
The Depiction of Objects in 1980s U.S. Fiction (Provisional)
Laila Haidarali, Essex University
The Body Browned: Colour, Contour, Beauty and African American Womanhood in early postwar consumer magazines
Sangjun Jeong, Seoul National University
Consumption Communities and Consumer Citizenship

Cinema, Identity & Representation
Liz Powell, University of East Anglia
Big Boys Don’t Cry: Talk Therapy and Masculinity in Reign Over Me
Su Mee Lee, Saekyung International College
Through the White Man’s Gaze: Japanese American Presence in Snow Falling on Cedars
Niamh Doheny, National University of Ireland, Galway
Oscar Micheaux and 1970s Black American Cinema: Negotiating the Terms of a Black American Cinema

Nineteenth-Century West
Leslie Powner, Keele University
Gertrude Atherton and the “California Pastoral”
Henry Knight, University of Sussex
The First Tropical Land Which Our Race Has Thoroughly Mastered: The Semi-Tropical Visions of California, 1873-1900
Karen Jones, University of Kent
‘No Woman Would Ever Do Such a Thing’: Hunting, Gender and Performance in the American West

Postmodernism
Theophilus Savvas, Essex University
Pynchon Plays Dice: Mason & Dixon and Quantum History
Chris Witter, Lancaster University
Writing Everyday Life: Donald Barthelme and Short Fiction of the 1960s and 70s
Mark Troy
Virtually McElroy

(Re)writing History
Phil Langran, University of Lincoln
Tim Gautreaux: Music, the Mississippi and The Missing
Stephanie Brown, Ohio State University
“No such account was ever published”: White Writers, Black History and Philip Gerard’s Cape Fear Rising
Penny Woollard, University of Essex
Re-imagining United States’ Slavery: Derek Walcott’s Reading of the Black Abolitionist, David Walker

Hawthorne & Melville
John Ronan, Kutztown University of Pennsylvania
Hawthorne’s Puritanism without Christ
Ashna Bhagwanani, University of Waterloo
The Scarlet Letter: Deviance and the Construction of the Collective American Identity
Kate Kirwan, University College, Cork
“He was a futurist long before futurism found paint ”: Herman Melville and Historiographic Metafiction

Forced Movement of Non-White People in Antebellum America

Calvin Schermerhorn, Arizona State University
Great American Forced Migrations: Public and Private Means in the Trail of Tears and the Domestic Slave Trade
Steven Deyle, University of Houston
Coded Words: Concepts of Honor and the Reading of Southern Slave Trader Advertisements
Ben Schiller, University of East Anglia
“I feel no fear at all of the Natives”: African American Encounters in Colonial Liberia

Urban Black Community in Post-Civil Rights America
Malcolm McLaughlin, University of East Anglia
Martin X and the Afro-Asian Bookshop: Black Entrepreneurialism, Political Militancy, and Community in Buffalo, NY, 1964-1967
Joe Street, University of Northumbria
The Historiography of the Black Panther Party
William Turner, University of Manchester
Violence, Revolution and Spectacle in Chester Himes’s Harlem

Documentary Aesthetic After/Against New Deal Photography
Rebecca Cobby, School of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham.
“Visions, dreams and a few nightmares”: Roy DeCarava’s Aesthetics and the Documentary Mode
John Fagg, School of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham
Documentary Road Trips Revisited: Ben Shahn and William Gropper after the Thirties
Sara Wood, Department of American and Canadian Studies, University of Birmingham.
‘Abstract Truths’: African American Art and the Legacy of the 1930s

Contemporary Militia Movement
Robert H. Churchill
“The Militias Are Coming”: Demonization and Violence in the Age of Anti-Terrorism
Darren Mulloy, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Challenging History: Remembrance and Contestation in the American Militia Movement
Amy Cooter
Coded Response to the USA’s First Black President: the Michigan Militia as a case study of Lower-Middle Class White Males

3.30pm-4pm – Coffee and Tea in the Hive

4pm – 5.30pm – BAAS Annual General Meeting

5.30pm – Coaches to Norwich City Centre for Civic Reception at The Forum

6.00pm – Drinks reception sponsored by the University of Central Lancashire

6.45pm – Opening address by the Lord Mayor of Norwich

7pm – Plenary Lecture by Professor Bruce Michelson (University of Illinois), sponsored by the School of American Studies, University of East Anglia

8pm – Free evening in Norwich

8pm – Coaches to campus for delegates staying on campus (and / or those preferring to eat on campus)

Saturday 10 April

7.30am – Coaches to campus for delegates staying at Norwich City Centre Travelodge

7am-9am – Conference Breakfast in Zest

9am-11am – Session 4

Paul Auster
Jesús Ángel González, University of Cantabria, Spain
Alternative Americas in Paul Auster’s Later Fiction
Aliki Varvogli, University of Dundee
Paul Auster and 21st-Century Authorship
Stefania Ciocia, Canterbury Christ Church University
A Doomed Romance? The Demise of the donna angelicata in Paul Auster’s Post-9/11 Novels
Anne Rutledge, Trinity College Dublin
Roads to Where: Self and Destination in the Novels of Paul Auster
Jaroslav Kušnír, The University of Prešov, Slovakia
Border Crossing: American Dreams, Illusions and Fictions in Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark

Transatlantic Nineteenth Century
Kirsten Harris, University of Sheffield
‘Have the elder races halted?’: Fin de Siècle British Socialist Readings of Walt Whitman’s ‘Pioneers! O Pioneers!’
Tom F. Wright, University of Cambridge
Listening to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘England’ at Clinton Hall, 1850
Louisa Hodgson, University of Leeds
Nursing, Nation and Narrative: Representations of Nurse in Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches (1863), Work (1872), and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853)
Adam Hallett, University of Exeter
City Upon a Hill?: British Commentaries on Washington in the Nineteenth Century

Slashers, Gangsters & Cops: Genre Film & TV
Helen Oakley, University of Nottingham
Dissecting the Darkness of Dexter
Richard Nowell, University of East Anglia
“There’s more than one way to lose your heart”: The American Film Industry, Early Teen Slasher Films and Female Youth
Carl Wilson, Brunel University
‘The Sopranos’ and the Development of the Gangster Genre
Sarah Wharton, University of Liverpool
“You Wanted to Save Everyone”: The Saw Franchise and Post-9/11 America

After 9/11
Kathryn Olmsted, University of California, Davis
Cabal of Soccer Moms: The ‘Jersey Girls’ and 9/11 Conspiracy Theories
Eid Mohamed, The George Washington University, Washington DC
US Image in Post 9/11 Arab Media
Helena Wahlström, Uppsala universitet
The Orphan and the Family, Post-9/11: Sentimentality and Quest in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Michele Gemelos, Clare College, Cambridge
Games People Play : Community and Alienation in Contemporary New York Writing

American Homes, American Families
Antonella Palmieri, University of East Anglia
Father Knows Best: Fatherhood, Ethnicity and Masculinity in A Bronx Tale
Claire Jenkins, University of Warwick
Family Entertainment: Images of the American family in contemporary Hollywood
Maria Holmgren Troy, Karlstad University
Re-membering the Family in Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling
Eleanor Alexander, Georgia Institute of Technology
African American Middle-Class Homes at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: Focal Points of Social Negotiation

American Influence Abroad
Daniel Guedes
Domestic Politics and Regional Trade Agreements: How the United States Bargains
Sue Peng Ng, University of Nottingham
Juggling the Two Chinas: The Nixon Administration’s Policy towards the Republic of China
Martin Russell, Clinton Institute for American Studies, University College Dublin
Irish-America, Northern Ireland and U.S. Foreign Policy: Transforming Memory and Lesson Learning
Professor Anton Cooray, City University of Hong Kong
American Influence on Constitutional Developments in Sri Lanka

Twentieth Century War and American Cultural Memory: Transatlantic Exchanges
David W. Seitz, University of Pittsburgh
Fading Memories of a Peculiar National Shrine: Brookwood American Cemetery and the Remembrance of “Doughboys”
Sam Edwards, University of Pittsburgh
Remembering the “Friendly Invasion”: Monuments, Memories and the Presence of the Past
Vernon L. Williams, Abilene Christian University
Crucible of Change: Race and the Shifting American Landscape in World War II England, 1942-1945
Simon Topping, University of Plymouth
African American Troops in Northern Ireland during the Second World War

Modernist Poetry and its Afterlife
Niall Munro, Oxford Brookes University
Hart Crane’s Genetics
Petar Penda, University of Banja Luka
The Aesthetic of Nothingness: T. S. Eliot’s Poetics of Disorderly Order in The Waste Land
Alex Runchman, Trinity College Dublin
Delmore Schwartz’s ‘international consciousness’: Genesis and the American Dream
Naming and Anonymity in Charles Reznikoff’s Documentary Works
Sharon McCann, St John’s College, Cambridge

Reading Short Stories

Kaleem Ashraf, University of Sheffield
A Literary-Linguistic Approach to Dialect Representation in Hurston’s John Redding Goes to Sea
Tim Foster, University of Nottingham
Interpreting Unaccustomed Suburbia: Jhumpa Lahiri’s Short Fiction
Mohammad Heidari, University of Tehran, Iran
Conspiracy Theory in the American Imagination
Nikolett Gyöngyösi, University of Szeged, Hungary
Subverting Our Notion of the Human: A Liminal Humanity in Joyce Carol Oates’ “Feral”

Representing American ‘Others’

Chiou-Rung Deng, Center for Humanities Research, National Science Council, Taiwan
Sympathetic Liaison: Nation-Making, Female Subjectivity, and Racial Difference in Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok
Bridget Bennett, University of Leeds
Early Modern Captivity and Places of Home
Natasha Picot, University of St. Andrews
The ‘Indian’ as Hero and Outsider in nineteenth-century Mexican
and North American Art
Soad M. Nigm, Newcastle University
The Native Americans in Barlow’s Columbiad

11am-11.30am – Coffee and Tea in the Hive

11.30am-12.30pm – Session 5

Beat Generation
Joanna Freer, University of Sussex
“Whither goes thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?”: Navigating the Anti-Structural Realm in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.
Gordon J. Marshall, Haliç University
Rethinking the Margin: The Beat Generation and the Occupation of Ethnic and Racial Spaces in Postwar America

Social & Political Body
Emma Staniland, University of Leicester
An Exploration of Nothingness: La nada cotidiana by Zoé Valdés (1995) (trans., Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada (1999))
Linda Toocaram, King’s College London
Cherríe Moraga’s Pesadilla: Internalised Racism and Homophobia amongst Women of Color

Dance
Hannah Durkin, University of Nottingham
Katherine Dunham and African American Dance Authorship in 1940s Hollywood
Holly Maples, University of East Anglia
Embodying Resistance: Gendering Public Space in the 1913 Dance Craze

The 1924 Immigration Act
Cheryl Hudson, Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford
The Chicago School and the Framing of the 1924 Immigration Act
Kevin Yuill, University of Sunderland
Labor and the 1924 Immigration Act

Poetry, Selfhood & Identity

Reena Sastri, University of Oxford
Contemporary American Poetry and the Lyric ‘I’
Ruth Hawthorn, Glasgow University.
“Come back to that calm country”: The Limits of Nostalgia in Randall Jarrell’s Lost World

Imagining American Cities

Lauren Jade Thompson, University of Warwick
Modernism, Modernity and Contemporary Comedies of Displacement in New York City
Victoria Kennefick, University College, Cork
No Urban Cowboy: Charles Bukowski’s Idiosyncratic Imagining of Los Angeles

12.30pm-1.30pm – Lunch in Zest

1pm-2.00pm – Working Lunch Discussion Group:

Bella Adams and Ross Dawson (Liverpool John Moores University)
American Studies and (Anti-) Racist Pedagogy: Critical Race Theory and the Teaching of Whiteness

2.00pm-3.30pm – Session 6

Popular Music and Society

Oliver Gruner, University of East Anglia
“Welcome Back to the Age of Jive”: Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen and Madonna “remember” the Sixties
Nicholas Gebhardt, Lancaster University
Rethinking American Vaudeville: Popular Music, Entertainment and ‘the People’
Will Kaufman, University of Central Lancashire
‘Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People’

Hollywood & Post-War Politics
Kathryn Cramer Brownell, Boston University
Ronald Reagan and the Motion Picture Industrial Council (1948-1959)
Jindriska Blahova, University of East Anglia
‘Let the best Athlete Win’: Eric Johnston, Hollywood and the Conquest of Eastern Europe
Matthew Alford
A Propaganda Model for Hollywood
The Antebellum South
Sergio Lussana, University of Warwick
‘In dem days … nearly every man would get drunk’: Drinking and Enslaved Masculinity in the Antebellum South.
Lydia J. Plath, University of Warwick
Performing Honour: Notions of Manhood and the Lynching of the Gamblers at Vicksburg
Huw David, Lincoln College, Oxford
Cankers to the Riches of a Country? Transatlantic absenteeism in colonial South Carolina

Staging Race, Staging Protest
Eman Al Attar, College of Basic Education/PAAET- Kuwait
Bridging Latino Diaspora: Examining The Cultural Canon in José Rivera’s Marisol
Elizabeth Orr, Cornell University
Rethinking Protest: Alice Childress and Richard Wright
Yasser Fouad A. Selim, Sohag University, Egypt
Staging Arab America in Betty Shamieh’s Roar and The Black Eyed

Contemporary Native Writing
Jennifer Ladino, Universitetet i Bergen
Face-ing the Old West and Birthing the New: Sherman Alexie’s Forward-Looking Nostalgia
Gillian Hugh, University of Nottingham
Call Me Ishmael: The Politics of Colonization and Cultural Re-Invention in Erdrich’s Love Medicine
Catherine Barter, University of East Anglia
Adolescent Trauma in Alexie’s Flight and True Diary

Irish-American Identities
Sinéad Moynihan, University of Nottingham
Joining the Winners, Wallowing with the Losers: Irish-American Whiteness and Jay McInerney’s The Last of the Savages
Tara Stubbs, St. Peter’s College, Oxford
John Steinbeck, Ireland, and Autobiography
Louise Walsh, Clinton Institute of American Studies
Transatlantic Tricksters: Camouflage and Challenge in the Harlem and Irish Renaissances

William Faulkner
Taylor Hagood, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Darl Bundren and Narrative’s Dependency on Disability in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying
Clare Hayes-Brady, Trinity College Dublin
The Silent Centre: Mute Women in Faulkner and Wallace
Sascha Morrell, Cambridge University (Trinity College)
Dark (Br)Others and Interracial ‘Marriage’ in the Fiction of Herman Melville and William Faulkner

Visual Cultures
Owen Clayton, University of Leeds
Performing the Abyss: Jack London’s ‘Photographies’
Richard Ings, Independent Scholar
The Marvellous in the Familiar: Robert Bechtle, Everyday Vulture and the Californian Lifestyle
Andrew Jones, University of Texas at Austin
A Here and a There: Creative Camera and Anglo-American Photography

Intertextuality & Influence

Katy Masuga, University of Washington, Seattle
Henry Miller’s Adventures in Wonderland
Barbara Wyllie, University College London
My Age of Innocence Girl: Chaplin’s Lita and Nabokov’s Lo
Joel Daehnke, University of Northern Colorado
“Whoever Saw a Dairymaid on the Big Blackfoot River?”: Pastoral and the Specter of The Compleat Angler in Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It

3.30pm-3.45pm – Coffee and Tea in the Hive

3.45pm-5.15pm – Session 7

Linda Hogan
Liz Kella, Södertörn University, Sweden
Critical Relations: Indian Orphans Move Back Home in Works by Leslie Marmon Silko and Linda Hogan
Fella Benabed, Badji Mokhtar University, Annaba, Algeria
Ecofeminist Activism for Environmental Justice in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms
Ana Maria Cotelo Cancela, Universidade da Coruña, Research Unit CLEU
“The Cries and Moans of the Earth” in Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit

Poetic Enactments & Engagements
Veitch, University of Sussex
‘Singing is the Work of Many Voices’: Reading Genevieve Taggard in the Context of the New Masses
Sanjeev Kumar, Government P.G. College, Karnal (Haryana)
Conflict as a Means to Reconciliation in the Poetry of Langston Hughes
Doaa Hamada, University of Leicester
Feminism in Margaret Walker’s Later Poetry

Comic Books
Ian Gordon, National University of Singapore
Fans, Discursive Communities and the Political Economy of Superman
Mihaela Precup, University of Bucharest
Frames of Mourning: Spaces of Invisibility and Post-traumatic Dialogue in a Selection of American Autobiographical Comics
Alex Hobbs, Anglia Ruskin University
Attempting to ‘out-Gentile the Gentiles’: Jewish American Superheroes in Contemporary Fiction and Comic Books

Homosexuality on the Screen
Guillermo G. Caliendo, Hofstra University
Disciplining Sexuality: Milk, Homonormativity, and the Discursive Enactment of Cultural Amnesia
Nikolai Endres, Western Kentucky University
American Studs: Cowboys in Love in Brokeback Mountain
Charles J. Shindo, Louisiana State University
“So what we got now is Brokeback Mountain”: Wilderness, Westerns, and Western History

Visual Cultures of the American West
John Beck, Newcastle University
Western Landscape Photography: A Vertical Perspective
Neil Campbell, University of Derby
The Posthumous and the Post-Western: Theorising the Modern Cinematic West through John Sturges’ Bad Day at Black Rock
Martin Padget, Aberystwyth University
Remapping the West through Native American Film

American Theatricality

Teresa Botelho

Staging mythologies of belonging in David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face and Nilo Cruz’s Ana in the Tropics

Lisa Merrill

Seeing and Reading Bodies on the Antebellum American Stage

Theresa Saxon, University of Central Lancashire

Racial Impersonation and Colonial Masquerade: The Politics of Spectacle in Early Colonial Performances

Ann Walsh

“The Day of Terror”: American Militarism and Lowell’s The Old Glory

Stop Press: This panel has now been rescheduled for Friday morning

American Remakes of British Television
Carlen Lavigne, Red Deer College
‘All Those Hopes Down The Drain’: Blackpool, Viva Laughlin, and the Failed Mechanics of Americanization
Heather Marcovitch, Red Deer College
Mad, In a Coma, or Travelled Back in Time: How the British and American Versions of Life on Mars Address the Question of Memory
Jeanette Steemers, University of Westminster
British Television in the American Marketplace

Women in Atlantic Slave Societies
Rebecca Fraser, University of East Anglia
‘No more Sarah Hicks’: A Reconfiguration of Antebellum Time and Space for an Elite White Woman
Neal Millikan, University of South Carolina
Eliza Lucas Pinckney and Harriott Pinckney Horry: Widowed Plantation Mistresses in a Lowcountry South Carolina Slave Society
Brooke Newman, Gilder Lehrman Center, Yale University
An Aberrant Femininity?: The Spectre of the White West Indian Woman during the Age of Slavery

Lorrie Moore
Heidi Macpherson, De Montfort University
“Escape from the Invasion of the Love-Killers”: Lorrie Moore’s Metafictional Feminism
David Brauner, University of Reading
“A Little Ethnic Kink is Always Good to See”: Jewishness in the Fiction of Lorrie Moore
Alison Kelly, University of Reading
“The Fastest Way to the White House”: Lorrie Moore as a Political Writer

Catholics & Protestants
David Mislin, Boston University
“The Right Kind of Catholic”: Strikes, Unions, and the Remaking of Catholic-Protestant Relations in America, 1885-1910
Louis J. Kern
The “Increasing Disregard for Law,” “Wild and Furious Passions,” and “Worse Than Savage Mobs”: Anti-Catholicism, Collective Violence, and Nativism in Jacksonian American Literature
Shona Johnston, Georgetown University
Catholic Cosmopolitanism? Navigating Anglo-Spanish Relations in the Early English Atlantic World

5.30pm-6.30pm – Eccles Centre Lecture: Professor David Reynolds (Christ’s College, University of Cambridge)

6.30pm – Drinks Reception sponsored by Edinburgh University Press to mark the completion of the publication of “Twentieth Century American Culture“

7.30pm – Conference Banquet in the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts

Post-Banquet – UEA Bar

11.00pm – Coaches for delegates staying at Norwich City Centre Travelodge

Sunday 11th April

8am – Coaches to campus for delegates staying at Norwich City Centre Travelodge

7am-9am – Conference Breakfast in Zest

9am-10.30am – Session 8

Revolution & Post-Revolution
William L. Chew III, Vesalius College, Brussels, Belgium
The ‘Journée du Dix Août’ as Witnessed by a Yankee Merchant
Juhani Rudanko, University of Tampere
How a Freedom Was Born: Freedom of Speech and the War of 1812
Daniel E. Clinkman, University of Edinburgh
The King of Contradictions: Thomas Jefferson and the Summary View

Broadway Musicals
Kay Williams, Abilene Christian University
The Cowboy Composer: David Guion’s Journey from the Bunkhouse to Broadway
Laura Pollard, University of East Anglia
“Another Hundred People Just Got Off Of The Train”: New York City as a Site for the Pursuit of Success in 1970s Broadway Musicals
Roy Pierce-Jones, University of Worcester
The Demise of the Broadway Musical?

Fin de Siècle Fiction
Lorna Piatti-Farnell, Bishop Grosseteste University College, Lincoln
Home Sweet Home: Reading Domesticity and the Everyday in Kate Chopin’s Fiction
Elisabeth Bayley, Catholic University of Leuven
The Circling of Consumerism and Desire in the Early 20th Century: Flawed Notions of Totality Depicted in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth
Mita Bose, University of Delhi
Henry James – the Perspicacious American

Going to the Movies
Johannes Mahlknecht, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Three Words to Tell a Story – The History and Rhetoric of the Movie Tagline
Richard Hayes, Waterford Institute of Technology
Tennessee Williams and the Cinema: Some Examples of Influence
Dean Conrad, The University at Hull
Picture Palaces: The American Movie Theatre and its Love Affair with Old-World Architecture

Aspects of Modernism
Will Norman, University of Kent
Grosz, Steinberg and the Construction of Cultural Register
John F. Moe, The Ohio State University
Defining America and Sherwood Anderson’s Midwestern “Winesburg”: Story, Narrative, and the Emergence of American Modernism
Laura Bekeris, University of Manchester
Face Value: Representations of Money in Robert Herrick’s The Common Lot

Understanding the Twentieth-Century South
Vivien Miller, University of Nottingham
“A Beast in Human Form”: Child-Kidnapping and Community Rage in Late 1930s South Florida
Mark Newman, University of Edinburgh
The Catholic Diocese of Savannah and Desegregation, 1945-1973
Maarten Zwiers, University of Groningen, the Netherlands
Conspiracy and Compromise in Segregationist Ideology: Senator James Eastland and the Cold War South

American Cities in Context
Jiaying Cai, University of Nottingham
Crime and Corruption: A Comparison of the Representation of New York and Shanghai through Qiu Xiaolong and Linda Fairstein
Douglas Muzzio/Thomas Halper, Baruch College, CUNY
Menaces and Laundrettes: The American and British City in Movies, 1980-2005
Julieann Galloway, The Clinton Institute for American Studies, University College Dublin
Selling Innovation: An Analysis of Framing and Identity in the Cities of Austin, Texas, and Dublin, Ireland

Queering Gender and Sexuality
Anja Milde, Heidelberg University, Germany
“Pansies,” “Dykes,” and Panthers: New Dimensions of Social Movement Intersectionality
Iwona Rentflejsz, Culture – Camp – Identity: Resistance and Multiplicity as the Grounds for the Establishment of Queer Identity/ies
Susan Smith, University of Leicester
‘Not Being A Man’: Deconstructing Masculinity in Marge Piercy’s He, She and It (1991)

Civil War

Sarah Lahey, Northwestern University

Choosing Sides: Native Americans and the Civil War
William Van Vugt, Calvin College
Race and Gender in the Civil War: A Scottish Woman in the Deep South
Andrea L. Volpe, Harvard University
Clinical Sentimentality: James H. Armsby’s Carte de Visite Albums at the Army Medical Museum

10.30am-11.00am – Coffee and Tea in the Hive

11.00am-12.30pm – Session 9

Food & Identity
Paula Torreiro Pazo, University of A Coruña, Spain
Food, Self and Community: The Trope of Food as an Identity Formant in Diana Abu-Jaber’s The Language of Baklava
Rowland Hughes, University of Hertfordshire
Food, Race and the Consuming Body in A Narrative of John Tanner (1830) and The Life of Black Hawk (1833)
Eva von Wyl, University of Zurich
Rationalization, Self-Service and American Way of Life: American Eating Habits in Postwar Switzerland (1950-1970)

American Internationalism, 1895-1947

Charlie Laderman, University of Cambridge
Roosevelt and the Humanitarian Tradition in American Internationalism
Katharina Rietzler, University College London
Internationalism as Regionalism: Alejandro Álvarez, James Brown Scott and the Promise of Pan-Americanism
Waqar Zaidi, Imperial College London
James T. Shotwell and the Struggle for Atomic Internationalism, 1945-1947
Colonial Architecture
David Leviatin
From Crucks to Balloons: The Democratization of Craftsmanship Construction and Culture in Early America
David Yeoman
Paul Wainwright
Photographing Colonial Meetinghouses

Community in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Debbie Lelekis, University of Missouri
Realism and the Bonds of Community
Maureen Martin, William Patterson University
Fairytales and Nightmares: Jewett’s “A White Heron” and the Community of Innocence
Josephene Kealey, University of Ottawa, Canada
The Role of the Metropolitan Narrator in Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs

Jazz (Auto)Biography
Emily Petermann, University of Konstanz, Germany
Life Calls, the Text Responds: The Fictional Jazz Biography as Greatest Hits Album
Mario Dunkel, TU University of Dortmund, Germany
History as Constant Composition: Charles Mingus’s Beneath the Underdog
Stefan Schlensag, TU University of Dortmund, Germany
The Hipster Talks: A Story of Jazz According to Babs Gonzales

American Paranoid Cinema
Michael Ahmed, University of East Anglia
Kennedy, Conspiracies and Shadow Corporations: Mediating National Trauma through an Alternative Cinematic Aesthetic
Wickham Clayton, Roehampton University
America’s Adventures through the Looking Glass: the Aesthetics and Deviant Intertextuality of JFK
Gareth James, University of Exeter
‘Must Security and Safety Come at the Price of Freedom?’ The Disappearance of Strip Search, HBO and Post 9/11 Commentary

Toni Morrison
Anjali Patwardhan-Kulkarni, Nasik, Maharashtra India
The Speak of the Meek: Language of Irony in Toni Morrison’s Fiction
Jennifer Terry, University of Durham
‘All water has a perfect memory’: Sailors, Seas and Shorelines in the Fiction of Toni Morrison
Janine Bradbury, University of Sheffield
Oprah Winfrey and Toni Morrison: A ‘Beloved’ Relationship?

African Americans & Politics in the 20th Century
Benjamin Houston, Newcastle upon Tyne University
The Social Remapping of a City: Race, Interstate 40, and Urban Renewal in Nashville and America
Jeffrey A. Johnson, Providence College
“How Many Socialist Are Among Us?” Revisiting Blacks and the Socialist Party
G. Derek Musgrove, University of the District of Columbia
The Thin Line between Oppositional History and Conspiracism: The Frumenshcen Affidavit and the “Selective Prosecution” of Black Elected Officials in the 1980s

12.30 – Coaches for delegates staying at Norwich City Centre Travelodge

End of Conference

More information and registration: http://www.uea.ac.uk/ams/baas2010

Contact: baas2010@uea.ac.uk

Dr Thomas Ruys Smith,

Conference Organiser

http://american-studies-uea.blogspot.com

‘Continuities and Changes’: Report of the British Association for American Studies Annual Postgraduate Conference

Northumbria University, 14 November 2009

Northumbria University hosted the BAAS Postgraduate Conference on Saturday 14 November 2009. There were 25 papers submitted for presentation at the event within our theme of ‘Continuities and Changes’. With an audience of over 50 people the day was certainly busy and with delegates from all over the UK as well as those from as far away as Germany and Nigeria, there was an incredible richness to the variety of topics under discussion.

Some of the individual papers were ‘Conservative or Radical: Toni Morrison and Oprah Winfrey’s Literary Relationship’, ‘Robert Frost, American Poetry and Memory’ and ‘Monstrous Plots: Elizabeth Gaskell and Louisa May Alcott’s Witchcraft Narratives’. These papers, among other excellent contributions in the fields of history, literature, culture and politics in the individual sessions, stimulated interesting debate which was carried forward into the various breaks throughout the day as delegates exploited the opportunity for networking and engaging with fellow postgraduates in a more informal environment. By late afternoon the wine and conversation was flowing and the delegates were engaged in lively exchange as the nerves of conference speaking eased. For me as conference organiser, this was particularly gratifying and I hope those who stayed in the city overnight enjoyed their time here.

Our plenary speaker, Professor Sara Evans from the University of Minnesota, undertook a long and tiring journey to be with us for the day and delighted us all by singing during her keynote, ‘Women and the American Presidency: From Victoria Woodhull to Hillary Clinton’. I have to say that the experience of hearing the audience singing along with her will stay with me for a very long time! I am sure all who witnessed this would agree that it was a truly excellent conference plenary and was pitched perfectly for the audience.

I would like to thank BAAS for the opportunity of organising the conference, which I personally found to be an incredibly rewarding experience. I would highly recommend fellow postgraduates to seriously consider hosting this most worthwhile and satisfying venture. I would also like to thank the US Embassy and Northumbria University for their very generous financial support, without which we would not have been able to provide this very valuable experience for young researchers. There are numerous others who contributed to the day’s proceedings and thanks go to them all, not least the delegates themselves, but especially to my own PhD supervisor, Dr. Sylvia Ellis, for her unerring support.

Helen Mitchell

BAAS Postgraduate Conference 2010: Call to all Postgraduates

If you would like your institution to be considered to hold the next BAAS Postgraduate Conference (November 2010), could you please contact the BAAS Postgraduate Representative Michael Collins (aaxmc1@nottingham.ac.uk) before 31 March 2010 to register interest. This year there is a £50 stipend for the lead organiser as well as a small amount of additional funding ringfenced for the conference.

Many thanks,

Michael Collins

BAAS Requests and Notices

Media Contacts Database: Call for Information

As the plans for the REF take shape, it is clear that evaluating the impact of our research will be an increasingly important criterion in the assessment of research activity. Accordingly, BAAS hopes to improve and make more systematic its role as an information gateway for external agencies—especially media—who are seeking to contact experts in British American Studies for the purpose of drawing on their research expertise. We hope to establish a contacts database listing research specialisms and key publications for UK American Studies academics, which will allow media organisations, NGOs, schools, and arts and culture institutions better access to details of the range and location of American studies expertise in the UK.

To that end, we are sending out a call for information to be held by BAAS, and in due course to be made available on our website and in our publications. If you are interested in BAAS passing on your details to such external agencies as a way of helping disseminate your research, please could you respond to Mark Whalan (m.whalan@exeter.ac.uk) with the following information:

name, title and academic institution
list of 4-5 research specialisms (e.g. American modernist literature; the history of the civil rights movement; contemporary US sitcoms)
list of 2-4 key publications
your phone number, e-mail, and website URL if available

Many thanks,

Mark Whalan

BAAS Database of Schools Liaison Personnel

Again with the REF and our impact beyond the academic community in mind, BAAS is keen to increase members’ interaction with schools. Accordingly, we hope to establish a contacts database listing details of academic staff and postgraduate students who would be willing to speak to school groups on American Studies topics.

We are therefore issuing a call for information to be held by BAAS, and in due course to be made available on our website. If you are interested in BAAS passing on your details to schools, please write to the BAAS Secretary, Catherine Morley (catherine.morley@leicester.ac.uk), with the following information:

name and title
affiliation with complete contact details including address, telephone, fax, and email
list of 4–5 research specialisms

By providing this information, you agree to it being passed on to schools who are seeking a speaker on American Studies or a related discipline.

BAAS Database of External Examiners

The Secretary of BAAS, Catherine Morley, holds a list of potential external examiners. If individuals would like to put their names forward for this list, please email her at cm260@le.ac.uk. Include the following information, in list form if possible:

name and title
affiliation with complete contact details including address, telephone, fax, and email externalling experience (with dates if appropriate)
current externalling positions (with end dates)
research interests (short descriptions only)

By providing this information, you agree to it being passed on to universities who are seeking an external for American Studies or a related discipline. Should you wish your name to be removed or your details updated in the future, please contact the Secretary.

Any university representative interested in receiving the list should also contact the Secretary. BAAS only acts as a holder of the list; it does not ‘matchmake’.

Paper copies can also be requested by sending a letter to:

Dr Catherine Morley

Centre for American Studies

University of Leicester

University Road

Leicester, LE1 7RH

Travel Award Reports

Abraham Lincoln Short-Term Travel Award

My doctoral research explores relationships between early women’s periodicals, antebellum print culture and the characteristics of periodical print as a genre. It focuses primarily on the ways in which women editors of the 1830s used time in their editorial rhetoric as a means of reflecting on their periodicals’ cultural role, their own editorial work and the periodicals’ textual qualities. Access to sources unavailable in the UK is of crucial importance to the breadth of my project and my range of reference. Thanks to the generosity of the BAAS Abraham Lincoln Short-Term Travel Award 2009-10, I was able to spend two chilly December weeks conducting research at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts.

I covered a lot of ground in my fortnight at the archive. I consulted over a dozen periodicals, including women-edited titles such as The Bower of Taste (1828-1830) and the Microcosm, or the Little World of Home (1834-1836). One of the most interesting periodicals I looked at was The Friend of Virtue (1838-1858), which acted as an organ for the New England Female Moral Reform Society. Although I had been aware of women-edited reform periodicals before my trip, I had not been able to consult an example first-hand. The Friend of Virtue raised a number of new and interesting questions for me concerning how time was construed by women collectively as well as the different uses women editors made of their periodicals.

In addition to examining these periodicals, I pursued a second strand to my research at the AAS to support the chapter which I am currently writing. This particular chapter explores the field of women’s periodicals in the broader context of antebellum print culture and seeks to position them in relation to other forms of writing popular during the antebellum era – for instance, annuals, almanacs, letters and diaries. I was directed to some interesting chapbooks and albums owned by women of the 1830s. The hand-written poetry and pencilled messages contained within these beautiful pages spoke of a culture of remembrance and anxiety over time passing, and demonstrated a particularly rich socio-literary experience recently written about by Ronald and Mary Zboray. Reading these unique and individual titles alongside women-edited periodicals helped me to draw links between magazines, journals and pamphlets and this broader literary culture.

The final strand to my research consisted of a day spent deciphering letters contained in the Gilman Family Papers, an archive of letters concerning Caroline Gilman, editor of the Rose magazines (1832-1839) of Charleston, South Carolina. These letters gave a fascinating insight into Gilman’s editorial work and added an extra dimension to a chapter I have written on temporality in the Rose magazines.

I wish to extend my thanks to the staff and resident fellows at the AAS, who were helpful, generous with their knowledge and welcoming. The collegial atmosphere of the Society made a very productive research trip into an enjoyable experience – it was the welcoming nature of the Society as well as the archive itself that has made me determined to return in the future. Although, inevitably, I could while away many more days, weeks (months even!) doing productive work at the AAS, my comparatively short time in Worcester has been of immeasurably larger benefit to my research.

My thanks once again to BAAS for awarding me the Abraham Lincoln Short-Term Travel Award, to which I owe this fantastic experience.

Anna Luker, King’s College London

Barringer Award

The news of receiving the Barringer Award for 2009 came as a shock, partly because I’d not won an award since I was twelve but largely because of excitement at the scale of the award and opportunity. Being a fellow at the Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, Virginia and able to study my favoured themes in American revolutionary history and early constitutional development was a privilege and thrill. Some serious preparation was needed to make the most of the two weeks I had. Narrowing my theme to the relationship between Jefferson and Marshall as a vehicle for broader issues of federalism, judicial review and constitutional development was the first step. Secondly, preparatory reading and basic research of what was available at the Jefferson Library set up the background and direction. When arriving at the library for the first time I met two American Barringers from Washington State who were finishing their visit. Their advice was prescient. Time would fly. Be focused. Visit the University of Virginia special collections. Enjoy the experience and beautiful settings of the Library and Monticello itself. I tried to stick to this during a stimulating, reviving, demanding and thoroughly enjoyable two weeks immersed in American revolutionary and constitutional history in Charlottesville by the Blue Ridge mountains in western Virginia.

Finding my way round the library resources on shelves and online took the first day, learning not to be too diverted onto new routes along the way. As a relative novice in this field of American history I soaked up knowledge and understanding, partly from the reading I was able to do, partly from the first hand experiences of visiting sights (the presidential homes of Monticello, Montpelier, Ash Lawn Highland locally and Williamsburg, Jamestown and Lexington further afield), but mostly through conversations with the scholars working at the library, who were understanding about my occasional naivety and rawness of questioning but very supportive of my projects. Their scholarly outlook and academic expertise was a deep well from which to draw knowledge and inspiration. My particular thanks go to Marie-Jean Rossignol, Michelle Oriole, Bill Merkel, Trevor Burnard of Warwick and Director of the ICJS, Andrew Jackson O’Shaugnessy.

My immediate project was preparation of lessons on the relationship between Jefferson and John Marshall 1801-9 as a vehicle for understanding some key constitutional issues of the early republic. Secondly, I wanted to lay the groundwork for a new A level course I would be teaching, and my final objective was some quality research time for an article on constitutionalism.

Through reading, browsing, thinking, discussing and writing I now more fully appreciate the divisiveness of the leaders in the early years of the new republic. This was not just during the Constitutional Convention but the legacy thereafter and the aggressive factionalism of the Federalist-Republican divide in the 1790s, epitomised by the Jefferson-Marshall conflict. Getting to grips with the Jeffersonian, Hamiltonian, Madisonian and Marshall perspectives on politics and the constitution was a task achieved and well-worthwhile. Focused work on the election of 1800 and backward and forward referencing illuminated the political complexities of the early republic and severe internal disagreements that at times threatened to split the union. In comparing Jefferson with Marshall intriguing similarities and connections emerged whilst not obscuring the prominent and heartfelt mutual distrust and detestation of both men.

My first thanks go to the BAAS awarding committee for giving me this wonderful opportunity and experience. Secondly, thanks to Theresa Saxon for the invaluable organisational help with the award, answering all my pestering emails and getting me out to the Old Dominion of Virginia to start with. Especial thanks go to Joan Hairfield, Mary Scott-Fleming and Andrew O’Shaugnessy alongside the other visiting fellows for providing such a welcoming and intellectually stimulating environment for this particular Barringer Brit. Finally, I cannot thank the Barringer Foundation enough for their great generosity in funding this excellent programme and the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies for hosting me so warmly and generously. I would recommend it to any and every teacher of American history and politics. In my application I talked about academic, professional and personal reasons for applying for the award. All my hopes were handsomely fulfilled.

Chris Bates, Kimbolton School, Cambridgeshire

Founders’ Award

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the British Association for American Studies for the Founders’ Award presented to me at the Nottingham conference in 2009. I used this award, in conjunction with an award from my faculty at the University of Hull, to spend two very productive weeks in September 2009 working at the National Archives Records Administration in College Park, Maryland and the Library of Congress in Washington DC.

It was essential to my ongoing work on the US Army chaplains in World War II that I visit these two repositories in order to complete a large section of the overall project. While at the archives I was able to consult the monthly reports of various chaplains in order to ascertain how frequently, if at all, they reported problems with moral issues to the Chief of Chaplains’ office in Washington DC. Thanks to previous visits to the archives and the Library of Congress I was able to approach my search systematically, armed with a list of chaplains whose letters, memoirs and/or diaries I had previously consulted. The record groups I accessed on this trip widened the investigation beyond the records of the Chief of Chaplains’ office itself. The archivists were extremely helpful and genuinely interested in the topic. I left the NARA with a clearer understanding of the workings of the chaplains corps and the working life of the chaplains themselves.

At the Library of Congress I located several more first-hand accounts written by chaplains and accessed the library’s holdings on pulp magazines of the 1930s and 1940s. The Chief of Chaplains himself worked to have various magazines banned from the postal system and the Library of Congress had several of these titles. Both Argosy and True Story Magazine roused the Chief of Chaplains’ concern because of their implied sexual content. I was also able to look at copies of Esquire from the same period and for the same reasons.

BAAS plays an essential role in promoting research within the American Studies community through its travel awards. A great deal can be accomplished with even a small grant. So again, I thank BAAS and the American Embassy for their continued and unflagging support of our community.

Jenel Virden, University of Hull

Malcolm Bradbury Award

I am very grateful to BAAS for a Malcolm Bradbury Short Term Travel Award which enabled me to visit the Harry Ransom Center (HRC) at the University of Texas, Austin to research the archive of the subject of my PhD study, the American writer James Agee, who died in 1955 and the centenary of whose birth it is this year.

A few months ago there was a BBC Radio 4 programme about the HRC, which was, according to the views rehearsed, voracious in its appetite for writers’ collections at the expense of less wealthy institutions, or a lifeline for impecunious writers, who will their fragments to the HRC and are thus endowed to pursue their calling.

Such considerations are germane to the career of James Agee, who was, perhaps, profligate with his gifts, and who might have been more (pardon the pun) collected. On my first day at the HRC I shook from an envelope a receipt from a hotel in Greensboro, Alabama, evidence of Agee’s stay there in 1936 and his passage towards what would become his greatest achievement, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Everybody knows the photographs by Walker Evans that introduce this work and form part of the collective memory of the Depression, but the book itself is unread, or misread, or perhaps read with impatience, since such a gulf seems to divide Agee’s exhaustive prose from Evans’s confident, uncaptioned photographs.

The staff at the HRC were exceptionally welcoming and helpful, especially Molly Schwartzburg, the curator of the American collection. Reading manuscripts and drafts generated a visceral as well as an intellectual rush; it was particularly poignant to see Agee’s tiny, sometimes indecipherable, pencil-writing, which was generally the medium of his first thoughts and impressions, and which seems expressive of all that is hesitant in his work. The surviving elements of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men were tantalising pages numbered in the high three hundreds: where, I asked, were the others? In due course I was shown a manifest from a rare book dealer: ‘The original manuscript [of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men] was given by Agee to Evans in December 1938 but has since disappeared.’

Thus my hope that the archive would furnish conclusive evidence that Agee was the kind of (modernist) writer I believed him to be was only partly fulfilled. Agee’s notebook, in which he recorded his intentions, made his false starts, and revised and revised, reminded me that the aesthetic realisation of his subjects was necessarily incomplete; so too, although my knowledge of Agee was deepened by my research, I was not to ‘get’ him.

In this respect perhaps it is significant that, amongst the drafts that did not achieve published form, but which were to have a secondary ‘found’ life in the archive, two speak to what was provisional between the writer and his material, analogous somehow to one’s burrowing among those not-quite-reaching-fruition words: the first – ‘this volume was made in defiance of its nominal subject’ – anticipated the second and accounts, in large part, for what might be called his critical reception: ‘The parentheses, colons and question marks are intended to indicate what it seemed that words could not as well …’

The unearthing of these and other treasures will be of enormous value to the development of my thesis, and I again extend my thanks to BAAS.

Philip Stogdon

Royal Holloway, University of London

Short-Term Travel Award

I would like to express my deepest thanks to BAAS for a short-term travel award for a vital research trip to the United States between September and November 2009. The key objective of my PhD is to rethink the careers of African American dancers Josephine Baker (1906-1975) and Katherine Dunham (1909-2006) as dynamic sites of identity construction, especially in relation to notions of ‘race’ and ‘gender’. Despite both figures’ centrality to the evolution of twentieth-century dance practices and wider notions of ‘racial’ beauty, the dancing body’s role in identity formation remains an under-explored critical field. My project seeks to rectify this by scrutinising the performative images generated within these artists’ films and writings.

My visit comprised five weeks at different archival locations from the Midwest to New England. My principal purpose was to view ‘Katherine Dunham: Beyond the Dance’, a rare exhibition of original performance material and memorabilia at the Missouri History Museum in St Louis to mark the centenary of Dunham’s birth. The many performance outfits on display included Dunham’s costume from Cabin in the Sky, the 1940 Broadway show that launched her career. Other exhibits were devoted to Dunham’s long-running professional and personal relationship with Haiti, as well as to rehearsal and performance footage, including extracts from the 1980 recording of one of her key works, Rites de passage (1941). The exhibition’s display of a large section from the 22-feet-tall forest backdrop of Rites de passage drew attention to the ambition of Dunham’s artistry. Designed by her husband, John Pratt (1911-1985), the costumes and settings for Dunham’s performances sought to emphasise the aesthetic qualities of her choreography, and thus secure cultural recognition for African diasporic dance forms. Dunham’s extensive collection of anthropological artefacts, collected during her professional travels, brought to light the impact of ethnographic materials on her choreography.

The Missouri History Museum’s Library and Research Center holds a large portion of Katherine Dunham archives, and my biggest finds here included The Minefield, an unpublished memoir documenting her early performance career (currently under copyright), as well as lengthy correspondence between Dunham and the first president of Senegal, Léopold Sédar Senghor, concerning the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar in 1966. Senior Curator Shannon Berry also kindly showed me surviving performance costumes not on display in the exhibition. Whilst deteriorating rapidly, these costumes illuminated Dunham’s careful attention to glamour and elegance in her efforts to counteract minstrelsy-derived representations of African diasporic dance histories.

My next visit was to the University of South Illinois, Carbondale, where most of the material relating to Dunham’s early life and career is held. Much of Dunham’s choreography was based on her experiences as an anthropologist, particularly her fascination with the ritual function of dance forms. At Carbondale I was able to explore Dunham’s notes as a social anthropology student at Chicago University during the 1930s, correspondence between Dunham and her anthropological mentor, Melville Herskovits, and early writings on Haiti, where Dunham undertook most of her scientific fieldwork. These included an original student notebook and a 1938 Chicago Sunday Times article. Dunham’s personal papers are currently restricted under copyright laws, but I was able to access her business papers, including letters and contracts between Dunham and Hollywood producers, which revealed her efforts to challenge racist treatments of African American performers in 1940s Hollywood by attempting to negotiate dignified film roles and retain artistic control over her performances.

The Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University in Atlanta provided access to the Josephine Baker Papers, comprising 1,200 items of personal correspondences and newspaper clippings from around the world. Letters from Baker to the French government and other heads of state revealed her crusade against racism and her determination to establish her own home and adopted family as a symbol of ‘International Brotherhood’. Other letters expressed her suspicion of biographers and disappointments with their efforts to represent her life. I was met with delight by the Curator of African American Collections, Randall K. Burkett, as one of the first researchers to access these papers, others having been put off by the fact that most of them are in French. I also found time to explore the Ada Beatrice ‘Bricktop’ Smith papers, 1894-1984, a collection of letters and photographs relating to an African American nightclub owner in Jazz Age Paris. In the Michel Fabre archives of African American arts and letters, 1910-2003, I found original programmes and playbills relating to key performances by both Dunham and Baker in the 1930s and 1940s. Finally, a quick search through the African American Cinema Collection, 1907-2001, yielded large parts of the original pressbook for Stormy Weather (1943), a film on which Dunham worked as both choreographer and dance star.

The Motion Picture & Television Reading Room at the Library of Congress kindly permitted me to view more than forty video sources relating to Dunham’s career, including first-hand interviews, dance seminars, edited footage from the film Mambo (1954), and anthropological fieldwork footage from the Caribbean and elsewhere. In the African American Historical Newspapers collection in the Newspaper & Current Periodical Reading Room I explored scores of articles relating to the careers of Dunham, Baker, and Baker’s main theatrical rival in 1920s Europe, Florence Mills (1896-1927). Strikingly, articles from the 1920s and 1930s revealed that, whilst largely unmentioned by mainstream American newspapers following her relocation to Paris in 1925, Baker continued to hold an important place in the African American popular consciousness throughout the 1930s and 1940s.

The Beinecke Library at Yale University provided access to the Henry Hurford Janes-Josephine Baker Collection and the Josephine Baker Papers, both containing personal letters, scrapbooks and unpublished notes by Baker. The latter also held French newspaper reviews and commemorative programmes dating back to Baker’s first performance in Paris in 1925. Programmes and theatre playbills relating to Dunham’s career, as well as an autobiography by Dunham’s promoter, Sol Hurok, revealed a clash between Dunham’s pursuit of artistic dignity and external attempts to market her work as ‘exotic’ entertainment. Surprisingly given her continued exclusion from the modern dance canon, I also found a 1949 book on modern dance, Margaret Lloyd’s Borzoi Book of Modern Dance, which devoted significant attention to Dunham’s work.

I am immensely grateful to all these institutions for allowing me to access their archives, and to the many individual archivists for their hard work, expertise and incredible kindness. Thanks to the funding from BAAS, my PhD has gained an invaluable international dimension and increased scholarly depth and originality.

Hannah Durkin

University of Nottingham

Short-Term Travel Award

In summer 2009, BAAS’s generous award of a Short-Term Travel Grant made it possible for me to research the Saul Bellow Papers which are deposited in the Special Collections Research Center of the Joseph Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago.

My PhD thesis is provisionally entitled ‘The Politics of Fiction: Saul Bellow and Partisan Review, 1941-53’. It was necessary for me to research the political origins of Bellow’s career and his affiliation to the anti-Stalinist Partisan Review circle of New York intellectuals. As a Trotskyist during the 1930s, Bellow had written short pieces of political fiction and radical commentary for his high school newspaper and university socialist clubs, but it was Partisan Review which introduced him to a left-minded national audience in 1941. His connection to the influential magazine afforded him sponsorship and editorial assistance; many of the New York intellectuals not only became his friends but his patrons also.

In the Regenstein I was able to research those letters, papers and manuscripts which grew out of the author’s association with Partisan Review. Armed with permissions granted by Janis Bellow, I was given unrestricted access to the editorial notes and correspondence between Bellow and Partisan Review’s editors-in-chief, William Phillips, Philip Rahv and Dwight Macdonald. This helped me to situate the author and his fiction within the context of the magazine’s politico-cultural debates. In addition, access to Bellow’s personal and professional correspondence with other intellectuals such as Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin and Norman Podhoretz enabled me to chart the author’s early political trajectory, both as a public literary figure and as a private US citizen. Access to this primary source material means that I am now able to assess the extent to which the ideological perspective of the putative author coincides with the politics of the private individual.

I feel privileged to have been given the opportunity to consult these correspondence materials, every piece of which will prove crucial to the successful completion of my primary research.

By most standards, the Bellow Papers archive is enormous. Despite superb, long-term efforts made by the excellent staff of the Regenstein’s Special Collection Research Center, the boxes and folders of material contained with the collection remain largely uncatalogued and unprocessed. (The still rudimentary itinerary created by the center’s archivists runs to over 180 pages.) Consequently, the task of retrieving every piece of pertinent correspondence proved to be a little time-consuming. Having said this, I could not have asked to work alongside a more professional, generous and obliging team of archivists than those who assisted me during my time in the Regenstein. With their help, I was able to amass a huge amount of material, a good deal of which I hope to put to use in the preliminary stages of my post-doctoral research.

The research trip means that I am now able to situate Bellow confidently within the New York intellectuals’ milieu during some of the most intriguing and turbulent years of American politics.

In conclusion, I wish to offer my thanks to BAAS for providing me with this invaluable opportunity to visit the US and make use of the vast resources of the University of Chicago’s Regenstein library. I should also express my appreciation to the School of Cultural Studies of Leeds Metropolitan University for awarding a full-time studentship and to the University of Chicago for providing me with additional funds in the form of a Special Collections Research Fellowship. I am confident that the materials I have been able to collect as a result of the BAAS award will provide an impressive core for my thesis, and I look forward to making further research trips to the US in the future.

Richard O’Brien

Leeds Metropolitan University

Short-Term Travel Award

I feel very honoured to have received a BAAS short-term travel award to support my research towards an MA in History, Film and Television. The award made possible a trip to Texas in 2009 which altered the focus of my dissertation and brought me into contact with people who were invaluable to my work.

I embarked on my dissertation in early October 2008 with the intention of exploring the work in Los Angeles of early 20th century architect John Parkinson. He is unknown by many these days outside the study of architecture, but I have a family connection to him (he is my great-great-great uncle on my father’s side) and had researched the family history using available sources in the UK. I became interested in Parkinson’s role in the evolution of architecture, both early in his life in England and later in the USA. Parkinson’s Los Angeles firm was under his control between 1894 and 1935, so his architectural career spans the late Victorian and early Art Deco periods. It was this era that I wanted to focus on, using textual analysis and interviews with historians, combined with my own photography, to try and pinpoint the changes in architecture around that time. Parkinson’s work is acknowledged only relatively briefly in any of the books that I could find in the UK or even the USA, and so it was also my aim to try and fill in as much background information about his work as possible.

I used my travel award to buy a flight to Houston, Texas, so that I could visit the archive of the Parkinson firm, now housed at Scott Field’s company premises in Galveston. After a long journey and a warm welcome in Texas I started to try and piece together the scale of the archive. I had already researched the various eras of the Parkinsons (John Parkinson had worked with business partners before bringing his son, Donald, on board in the 1920s), but on joining the firm in the 1990s Scott had rescued many drawings, sketches, photographs and artefacts that help tell the story of the firm, and which only a visit in person would allow me to appreciate. These included original architect’s drawings, as well as supporting artefacts such as photographs and postcards that fill in some of the buildings’ histories and reveal how they were used and adapted. I was also able to view original furniture and brickwork on site, and had the background to the most important Parkinson projects explained to me.

After four days in Galveston it was time for me to move on by plane to LA. I had allowed roughly two weeks there so as to visit numerous Parkinson-designed buildings, mostly in the Downtown area. I arrived by coach from the airport in the oldest area of the city, at Union Station, one of John Parkinson’s last projects, and stayed in a hostel in the old financial district. My time in L.A. was spent visiting each of the landmarks in John Parkinson’s Los Angeles legacy, and speaking with experts with a professional knowledge of each project. Large-scale projects such as City Hall weren’t difficult to find, but other less prominent residential buildings might have proved more elusive had I not been put in touch with local realtor and photographer Michael Locke, who showed me some of Parkinson’s gems out in the suburbs. Meeting the properties’ current owners turned out to be an unexpected highlight, revealing at first hand about how fit-for-purpose they were. The small scale of the early Los Angeles city plan meant that if a particular appointment fell through I was able to put the allotted time to profitable use at another nearby site. None of my interviewees had met John Parkinson personally but they more than made up for this through their passion for his designs (especially the Art Deco ones).

In order to compare the buildings with images of them from the period, and with prominent trends in architecture at that time, I took notes, photographs and video footage. These constructed a personal document of my research trip to reflect on later and compare with other first-hand accounts and secondary sources. The LA conservancy were very helpful, giving me access to their library and allowing me to record their ‘docent-led’ tours of Downtown LA. Similarly, local resident and playwright Walt Klappert accompanied me on tours of the Old Bank District by day and also in the evening, when once a month the art galleries open late and several Parkinson buildings play host to hundreds of visitors. A few of the contacts I had made through the University of Southern California (whose campus Parkinson had designed) delivered more than I had bargained for by kindly granting me second appointments and access to their libraries.

In summary, my project collated personal findings about the history of Parkinson design with existing studies. Without the financial support of the travel award I would not have been able to assemble such a comprehensive body of research, so once again I would like to thank everyone involved and extend my gratitude and best wishes to BAAS and its members.

Jamie Ryan-Ainslie

Birmingham University

Funding Reports

Mapping the Lost Highway: New Perspectives on David Lynch

Few film directors can claim to have influenced contemporary culture as much as David Lynch. The creator of such definitive works as Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive, Lynch’s presence can be sensed within a vast range of recent art, film and literature. Not for nothing is the slippery term ‘Lynchian’ now firmly embedded in critical parlance – in American Studies and beyond.

In October 2009, a £300 grant from BAAS contributed to the costs of the largest conference to have explored this Lynchian landscape of uncanny encounters and absurd humour. The central symposium saw leading academics, artists and writers from Britain and America gather in Tate Modern’s Starr Auditorium to discuss Lynch’s career. Four attendant film screenings – two at the Birkbeck Cinema and two at Tate Modern – were also organised. All the events sold out in advance, with over 700 people attending in total.

The symposium began with two investigations into the strangeness and deformity of the Lynchian universe, from Professor Roger Luckhurst (Birkbeck) and the writer and artist Tom McCarthy. Their papers – which discussed Lynch in the context of American ‘weird’ fiction and a logic of prosthetics – were followed by presentations from three artists who have explored similar terrain to Lynch: Gregory Crewdson, Daria Martin and Louise Wilson. Later, Lynch’s most recent film, Inland Empire, was the subject of a paper from Parveen Adams, a Fellow of the London Consortium, and a joint presentation by the psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster and Simon Critchley, Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. The final session of the day featured the screening of a specially commissioned video, composed in his own unique fashion, by David Lynch himself, followed by a wide-ranging debate led by filmmaker Chris Rodley and Dr Sarah Churchwell (University of East Anglia).

The conference and screenings were a collaborative project between Tate Modern and the London Consortium – a multi-disciplinary postgraduate programme involving the Architectural Association, Birkbeck, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Science Museum and Tate. In addition to BAAS’s generous support, the events received additional funding from the London Consortium and the London Centre for Arts and Cultural Exchange (LCACE). Footage from the symposium should be available on the Tate Modern website shortly.

Richard Martin

London Consortium

New Clear Forms

‘New Clear Forms: American Poetry and Cold War Culture’ took place on 11 and 12 September 2009 at the University of Glasgow. Taking as its starting point Randall Jarrell’s controversial 1950 proclamation that the new advert-ridden consumer media had ‘destroyed, in a great many people, even the capacity for understanding real poetry, real art of any kind’, the conference aimed to encourage debate and exchange in an effort to further understand the complex relationships between poetics and politics; propaganda and private consciousness; rebellion and art; nation and self during this divisive period of American history. The Cold War was interpreted both as a political context and an historical timeframe for scholars of American poetry to engage with, and the resulting papers were diverse and original. We were delighted by the contributions of all who took part.

The conference brought together an array of postgraduates and established scholars from as far a field as Australia, North America, Taiwan and Spain, ensuring that Glasgow was host to a truly international event. We had three plenary lectures from experts in the field, which were varied in both their subject matter and critical approach:

Professor Michael Schmidt (University of Glasgow), ‘Resisting the Contemporary Reader’
Professor Geoff Ward (Royal Holloway University), ‘“I announce a new world/ I announce the death of Orpheus”: Poetry and the Rift’
Professor Adam Piette (University of Sheffield), ‘Cold War Dissent: Grace Paley, Denise Levertov, Anne Waldman’

The documentary filmmaker Colin Still provided a change of pace with his screening and discussion of clips from his acclaimed Modern American Poets series, and the premiere of Abstract Alchemist of Flesh, a film on the colourful Michael McClure. The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa’s energetic and poignant reading of poems from his Vietnam selection provided an excellent conclusion to the two days of lively discussion.

Panels covered such themes as poetry’s links to other art forms; war and elegy; urban and rural spaces; nuclear anxiety and consumerism. The papers were very well received, met with incisive questions and were supported by substantial and animated discussions.

The organisers would like to thank BAAS for their generous contribution, which allowed us to offer a heavily discounted rate for postgraduate delegates, a number of whom now have their papers under review for publication in US Studies Online.

Ruth Hawthorn

University of Glasgow

Toni Morrison: New Directions

‘Toni Morrison: New Directions’ took place at Durham University on Thursday 25 June 2009. Co-organised by Dr Kathryn Nicol (University College Dublin) and Dr Jennifer Terry (University of Durham), the symposium brought together scholars from the fields of American politics and culture, modern literature and African American studies.During the day’s programme, thirty-one delegates from institutions across seven countries heard ten speakers and took part in discussion sessions. Panels on ‘New Literary Histories’, ‘Revision, Reception and Dissemination’ and on Morrison’s very recent fiction were bookended by two entertaining and stimulating keynote lectures. These were from Professor Justine Tally (Universidad de la Laguna), speaking on the topic of ‘Contextualising Toni Morrison’s Latest Novel: What Mercy? Why Now?’, and Dr Alan Rice (University of Central Lancashire), whose lecture was titled ‘“Summoning the Presences and Recollecting the Absences of Forgotten Peoples”: Toni Morrison’s Fictional and Non-Fictional Works, Memorialisation and African Atlantic Visual and Musical Arts 1970-2008’.

The event had been envisaged as creating an opportunity for fresh appraisal of the position and contribution of the contemporary US novelist and critic Toni Morrison, with particular emphasis on her twenty-first-century publications, her non-fiction and children’s literature, as well as new scholarly approaches to her body of work. The panels and keynote lectures provoked lively discussion and the atmosphere throughout was of a focused yet open forum that allowed crucial space for debate within Morrison studies. One particular feature of the symposium was the presence of several ‘generations’ of Morrison scholars, including a number of postgraduate students, and as a result it offered an invaluable opportunity to reflect on and historicise Morrison criticism itself, both within the specialist field and in relation to its wider subject areas. Debates around Morrison’s public persona and self-fashioning, as well as her potential political legacies in the US and the UK, were particularly thought-provoking. The event also provided a chance for scholars from a number of countries to connect, and it is hoped that the dialogue among delegates will be ongoing. A selection of papers will also feature in a forthcoming Special Issue of MELUS early in 2011. The day was concluded by a public reading by Black British author Laura Fish, from her novels Flight of Black Swans (1995) and Strange Music (2008).

The event received financial support from the British Association for American Studies, the Clinton Institute for American Studies at University College Dublin, and the Department of English Studies and the Faculty of Arts and Humanities Research Fund, University of Durham. The organisers were most grateful for the contribution from BAAS, which funded Professor Tally’s return travel to Durham from Tenerife.

Transatlantic Routes of American Roots Music Conference

University of Worcester, 12 September 2009

The aim of the conference was to bring together academics from the US and the UK, and leading writers/researchers from the public sphere, to discuss the transatlantic movement of roots music (folk, blues, country) between Britain and the United States. In the first year of office of the first black president of the United States, it was particularly auspicious that the musical relationships between the two countries should form the focus of this event, especially with regard to the significant emphasis on the African American contribution which forms part of this dialogue and renewed optimism about British/US relationships.

Three keynote speakers were invited to present to the conference on transatlantic aspects of the blues, country music and British soul respectively. Each of the speakers is exceptionally distinguished in the academic sphere, the public sphere or both.

Professor Paul Oliver’s first book, Bessie Smith, was published in 1959. His second, Blues Fell This Morning, appeared in 1960, accompanied by an LP containing fourteen rare recordings of southern blues singers made between 1927 and 1940. Field recordings and interviews in the South contributed to his Conversation with the Blues (1965). Further books and LPs followed through the 1970s and 1980s and his most recent book, Yonder Come the Blues, was published in 2001. Professor Oliver is also Emeritus Professor of Vernacular Architecture at Oxford Brookes University. In his conference keynote, he examined the early years of the transatlantic connection in examples of blues recordings which illustrated his talk.

Tony Russell is an eminent music historian and ‘roots’ music authority who is in high demand as a researcher, writer and presenter for radio and TV documentaries on music. He has written on country music, blues and jazz in a wide variety of publications and is author of the seminal books Blacks, Whites and the Blues and The Blues from Robert Johnson to Robert Cray. He produced the encyclopaedic Country Music Records, A Discography and his recent book, Country Music Originals: The Legends and the Lost won the Association for Recorded Sound Collection 2008 Award for Best Research in Recorded Music. Tony Russell delivered a plenary lecture on the reception in Britain of hillbilly and country music figures from the 20s and 30s, illustrated with original music recordings.

Professor Brian Ward is Professor of American History at the University of Manchester and is Director of the AHRC network (Understanding the South, Understanding America). From 2003 to 2006 he was Chair of the Department of History at the University of Florida. His publications include the prize winning Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights in the South (2004) and Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness and Race Relations (1998). His latest book, The 1960s: A Documentary Reader, is to be published later this year. Professor Ward delivered the final plenary of the conference and drew on issues that had been interrogated by speakers throughout the day to make connections with his own paper on the singer Eric Burdon and his band The Animals. Professor Ward explored how ideas about the American South and race relations shaped the repertoire, music, lyrics and racial attitudes of British performers, fans and critics in 1960s British blues.

Other speakers at the conference were drawn from a distinguished range of US and UK scholars. Delegates were particularly excited to have the opportunity to hear the sought-after speaker Elijah Wald talking about Josh White. Wald is the recipient of many awards for his books and recorded productions, and attended the conference in the course of a book tour for his celebrated new book, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll: An Alternative History of Popular Music (2009). It was also a particular honour to welcome Professor Ronald Cohen from Indiana University. Cohen is the author several books on the US folk movement, has published the selected writings of the ethnomusicologist, folk collector and broadcaster Alan Lomax 1934-97 (2003), and is currently editing letters (1935-45) from the Alan Lomax collection at the Library of Congress. Cohen spoke on the role of Alan Lomax’s BBC radio shows in introducing a British audience to American folk music.

The day’s proceedings were followed by an American themed supper at the nearby Fold Eco-Café with performances by internationally acclaimed musicians who had attended the conference. Tickets were made available to the general public in collaboration with The Fold (a not for profit organisation) and a full house enjoyed performances by:

Will Kaufman – performing a part of his ‘tour’ around Woody Guthrie’s America

Duck Baker – fingerstyle guitarist performing US music of Scots-Irish ancestry

Michael Roach – from Washington, DC, performing traditional East Coast blues

Funding from the United States Embassy contributed to speaker expenses and made possible a reduction in postgraduate fees, and generous funding from the British Association of American Studies contributed to musicians’ fees. Dr Jill Terry (Divisional Head of English and Cultural Studies, Institute of Humanities and Creative Arts, University of Worcester) was supported in convening the conference by Professor Neil Wynn of the University of Gloucestershire with whom she is co-editing a collection of papers from the conference for publication. A film of the event is currently in production by UoW Digital Film Production students.

Reports from Eccles Centre Fellows

Brooke Newman, University of Aberdeen

In the summer of 2009 I spent a month surveying the Caribbean collections at the British Library on an Eccles Centre Fellowship sponsored by BAAS. The fellowship enabled me to conduct research on a wide variety of sources ranging from manuscripts and watercolour drawings to printed material relating to the British West Indian islands during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Archival research in the British Library’s exceptional Caribbean collections made it possible to complete an article entitled ‘Gender, Sexuality, and the Formation of Racial Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Caribbean World’, Gender and History 22:3, Special Issue, ‘Historicizing Gender and Sexuality’ (forthcoming, November 2010) as well as to further the revisions on my book manuscript, ‘Mastery and Empire: Metropolitan Culture and Slaveholding in the British Caribbean, 1685–1785’. I was also able to acquire sources needed for a book chapter on Black-Caribs and racial mixture on the islands of St. Vincent and Grenada during the late eighteenth century.

I examined a large number of manuscript sources related to the slave societies of the Anglo-Caribbean during my time at the British Library. The most important of these collections to my own research are the Leeds Papers; the Egmont Papers; the Papers of Edward Long; the Correspondence of the Families of Ricketts and Jervis; the Royal Society Papers; the Sir Hans Sloane Collections; the Papers of Charles Jenkinson; the Holland House Papers; a Collection of Papers Relating to English Affairs in the West Indies; the King’s Manuscripts; the Thomas Clarkson Papers; and abstracts of miscellaneous West Indian wills, letters, testimonies and public monuments. These personal and state letters, plantation accounts, journals, and assorted miscellaneous documents reveal the brutalities and uncertainties of life in mature British Caribbean slave societies prior to emancipation. They also detail the difficulties faced by Britons who attempted to replicate – or expected to find – the familiar social, political, religious, and familial institutions of the metropolis in the West Indies.

Of particular utility to my research has been the Papers of Edward Long. Long’s papers are invaluable to researchers interested in Caribbean history in general as well as in issues relating to notions of slavery and racial difference in Britain, and the debate surrounding the late-eighteenth-century abolition movement. For my own work, the Long papers demonstrate the importance of changing understandings of race, gender and social order to Caribbean plantation society. The confusing blur of racial and national distinctions that Long described in his numerous hand-written diaries, and his annotated History of Jamaica (1774), epitomise how the eighteenth-century Caribbean made concepts like benevolent mastery seem essential to order and efficiency and, at the same time, exceedingly difficult to implement.

During my time at the British Library, I also consulted a large number of printed volumes from the seventeenth through the eighteenth century. These sources include plays such as Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko (1696) and Richard Cumberland’s The West Indian (1771); poems like John Singleton’s A General Description of the West-Indian Islands (1767); early novels ranging from John Hill’s Adventures of Mr George Edwards, A Creole (1751) and Sarah Scott’s History of Sir George Ellison (1765) to Charlotte Smith’s Desmond (1792) and The Wanderings of Warwick (1794); occasional verses like Timothy Touchstone’s Tea and Sugar, or the Nabob and the Creole (1792); and colonial histories such as William Beckford’s Descriptive Account of Jamaica (1790) and Bryan Edwards’ The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British West Indies (1793). These and many other printed sources add important historical detail about British metropolitan perceptions of plantation slave society in the Caribbean. Indeed, such texts complement the manuscript sources that I have studied by revealing how Britain was increasingly constructed as an ordered, civilised and refined space, whereas the British Caribbean was caricatured as a den of sin, death, and racial mixture and pollution.

In an age when more and more British men and women were literate and concerned about the implications of so-called colonial degeneracy on the metropole, such discursive representations had important implications for emergent notions of national identity. Critical representations of the West Indian colonies – and of tyrannical and licentious masters and overseers in particular – also helped shape the tenor of the slavery debate in Britain after the American Revolution. In fact, as numerous contemporary political caricatures, plays, and novels make plain, it was slavery in the Caribbean sugar islands, rather than the lost American colonies, that would pervade the public imagination in the decades leading up the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire in 1807/08. In addition to the immense wealth generated by the Caribbean colonies, their importance to the slavery debate in and of itself necessitates the centrality of the Caribbean collections to British history and, consequently, to the British Library and its users.

I am very grateful to the British Association for American Studies, the Canadian Association for American Studies, and the Eccles Centre at the British Library for the wonderful opportunity afforded by my receipt of a 2009 Visiting Fellowship at the Eccles Centre. Additionally, I look forward to spreading the word about the Eccles Centre and its many events and to thanking BAAS, the Eccles Centre, and the British Library for their generous support in future publications.

Crandall Shifflett, Department of History, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA

In Summer 2009 I was in residence at the British Library as the Eccles Centre Visiting Professor in North American Studies. My research project, entitled ‘“The Death of My People Thrice”: Indians and English in Early America and the World They Made’”, is a study of English and Indian encounters between 1585 and 1700. In these haunting words, Powhatan characterised the contacts between the Powhatan Indians and strangers to John Smith in 1608. The major research issue is how encounters and the resulting exchanges may be ‘read’ as understandings of one another during what Richard White has termed ‘a process of cultural production’. The British Library holds a wealth of materials – textual, cartographical, and graphical – on English–Indian relations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But during the course of the fellowship I broadened my research to include comparative work on French, English, Dutch and Spanish interactions with native peoples.

At the British Library I researched many collections, a sample of which includes:

Drawings of native peoples in Sloane Manuscript (Add 5253)
‘The Original draughts of habits, towns, customs…’ (Sloane 5270)
‘Chronicles of the Indians of North America From the Earliest Accounts of them to the present time. 1492-1836’ (Add 25699)
Documents Relating to the Foundation of the Colony in Virginia, 1609. British Library (Add 21993)
‘The manner how to bringe the Indianss into subjection, without making an utter exterpation of them together with the reasons’ (Add 12496)
‘An Account of the present State and Government of Virginia, by Henry Hartwell, James Blair, and E. Chilton’ (Add. 27382)
The Present State of New-England Being a Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New-England… by Walter Hubbard
A Description of the Island of Jamaica with the Other Isles and Territories in America, to which the English are Related…(Rare Books and Music)
Grasset de Saint-Sauveur, Jacques. Encyclopedie des Voyages…. 1259.b, Vol. 17.
Weekly statistics of burials in London from the plague and otherwise, 24 Dec. 1602 – Dec. 1603, and 6 Jan. – 22 Dec. 1625
Journal of Batts and Fallam in Their Discovery of the Western Parts of Virginia in 1671 (Add 4432)
Narratives of Ralph Hamor, William Strachey, and Thomas Hariot

In addition the collections of the British Museum (especially Prints and Drawings and the Centre for Anthropology), the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Gallery, the National Archives and Kew Gardens provided valuable resources.

While based at the Eccles Centre I also participated in the conference at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, 8–10 July 2009, on ‘Indigenous Bodies: Reviewing, Relocating, Reclaiming’. And at the ‘Electronic Visualization and the Arts’ conference, British Computer Society, 6–8 July 2009, I presented a paper on my work on the Indian Village of Paspahegh that was published in the conference proceedings: Paspahegh: visualizing a seventeenth-century Algonquian Indian village in the Virginia Chesapeake.

This research has caused me to rethink and perhaps reconceptualise my initial project on the Chesapeake Algonquians. I foresee a more comprehensive, comparative and thematic approach to the study of colonisation and native peoples. Encounters and outcomes took different forms in colonies settled under Puritan, Jesuit, Catholic, and Anglican domination. Religion shaped understandings of the ‘other’ and influenced the intensity, intolerance and general tenor of relations between colonisers and the colonised. Praying towns, trading posts, missions, and reserves sprang from a combination of religious and economic motivations that had different consequences for native peoples. This is only one example of how this research may shape my future work. Regardless of the direction, my study will take a holistic approach. All related works should be considered, whether cartographical, archaeological, textual, visual, ethnographical or ecological. The final result will likely lead to a reinterpretation of colonisation from the perspective of native peoples.

At the British Library Carole Holden and Matthew Shaw could not have been more helpful. They pointed out collections that I might find useful and were always eager to answer questions and make suggestions to facilitate my research. I want to say how thankful I am to have been an Eccles scholar and for this terrific experience. The gift of free time for research and writing is the most precious commodity any scholar can receive. To combine that with the compensation that covered most of the expense is a dream. I look forward to publications as a result of the Eccles fellowship, which I will gratefully acknowledge.

Eccles Centre Postgraduate Travel Grants

Laura Inglis, Brasenose College, University of Oxford

In autumn 2009 an Eccles Centre Postgraduate Fellowship enabled me to commute between Oxford and London in order to conduct research at the British Library. I had a very productive time, and was able to consult some important primary sources that are not available in Oxford.

I am working on the early history of substantive due process, a legal doctrine that allows the U.S. Supreme Court to create new constitutional rights at will. This doctrine was invented by the courts of New York State in the early to mid-19th century. Substantive due process developed in New York because the jurists in that state were unusually suspicious of legislative authority. This distrust was especially evident at the constitutional convention of 1777 and 1821. At the Library, I was able to consult the records of these conventions. The information I gathered enabled me to complete a chapter of my dissertation and finish the research for a second chapter.

This fellowship has been very significant in the progress of my doctorate, and I am deeply grateful to the Eccles Centre and BAAS for making it possible.

Will Smith, School of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham

In August 2009 I conducted research towards my PhD thesis at the British Library funded by the Eccles Centre Postgraduate Award in North American Studies. Taking advantage of prolonged access to the library collections, I was able to view materials on contemporary Canadian literature unavailable elsewhere in the UK. Using the extensive general collection of Canadian publications, I was able to survey a range of critical studies, literary works and journals. With time on my side, I also found unexpected sources of information which I believe will prove invaluable to my research.

My PhD thesis is provisionally entitled ‘Contemporary Literary Narratives of Toronto’, and examines how contemporary literature situated in Toronto functions as a ‘representational space’. This is approached by two interlinked perspectives, focusing both on literary form and narrative space. My initial impulse was to survey the amount of critical work in contemporary periodicals being devoted to space and place in Canadian literature. Moreover, I sought to develop an appreciation of the kinds of methodologies being developed by current scholars. However, with Canadian periodicals often straddling creative work and critical studies, and a parallel interest in contemporary creative practice, my survey broadened to include a number of periodicals, such as Queen’s Quarterly, English Studies in Canada, University of Toronto Quarterly, Open Letter, BRICK, ARIEL, The Dalhousie Review and TOPIA. Such a survey is obviously expansive, but was often illuminating as articles referenced new critical publications and book reviews offered new critical perspectives on pertinent academic studies. Of particular note was Patrick Coleman’s review of Downtown Canada in the Spring 2008 issue of TOPIA. The scope of the British Library’s collection allowed this survey to develop into a targeted study of particular critical works, such as Priscila Uppal’s recent study of the English-Canadian elegy, We Are What We Mourn (2009), and past studies of Canadian literary landscapes such as David Staines’ edited collection The Canadian Imagination (1977).

The British Library enabled me to review early career poetry by two figures key to my study, namely Michael Redhill and Maggie Helwig, which would have otherwise been unavailable to me. I was also able to view several early twentieth-century works of literature set in Toronto such as Isabelle Hughes’ Serpent’s Tooth (1947) and Morley Callaghan’s Strange Fugitive (1911). Viewing these primary texts alongside the coeval literary critical discussions greatly increased the synthesis of my research. The extent of Canadian literary texts and periodicals held by the library was remarkable and a prolonged period of study at the library enabled my research to gain much breadth and depth.

I am extremely grateful to the Eccles Centre and BAAS for the funding which made this invaluable research period possible.

Nicholas Witham, University of Nottingham

I was lucky enough to receive an Eccles Centre postgraduate award to support research undertaken at the British Library during July and August 2009. My doctoral project, entitled ‘After the New Left: Cultures of Anti-Imperialism in Late Cold War America’, considers the intellectual and cultural history of Left anti-imperialism during the late Cold War (1973-1991), particularly in relation to US involvement in Latin America. Chapter 3 of the thesis focuses on The Nation magazine, a significant point of reference for the mainstream Left throughout the period, and a journalistic institution that has received scant scholarly attention.

Nottingham furnishes limited access to this resource but the British Library holds the entire collection. My Eccles Centre award therefore provided the opportunity to examine the particular brand of anti-imperialism put forward in the regular columns of Alexander Cockburn and Christopher Hitchens, as well as in editorials, longer articles by guest authors, book reviews, and advertisements for anti-imperialist books, films and political organisations. Contact with hard copies of each and every issue of The Nation published between 1973 and 1991 allowed me to carefully examine its broad editorial framework, as well as to focus on specific articles and journalists.

The process enabled me to collect information that expensive online access through the magazine’s website or inter library loan photocopies would not. The work I undertook with the help of an award therefore significantly bolstered the originality of my project, giving me a chance to map the political and intellectual coordinates of a critical institution in the development of anti-imperialist print culture during the late Cold War.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the members of BAAS and the staff at the Eccles Centre for giving me this valuable opportunity.

Awards and Fellowship Opportunities

Eccles Centre Visiting Professorships, Fellowships and Postgraduate Awards 2010

Applications are invited several awards in 2010 to help support scholars who need to visit London to use the British Library’s collections relating to North America.

Eccles Centre Visiting Professor in North American Studies 2010

One award to be made to post-doctoral scholar resident in the USA or Canada whose research, in any field of North American Studies, entails the use of the British Library collection. The award holder must plan to be in research residence at the British Library for a minimum of three months. The Eccles Centre Visiting Professor will be entitled to an award of £6,000 for travel and other expenses connected with the research visit to London. The award holder will have privileged access to the collections and the curatorial expertise of the British Library. It is anticipated that the Eccles Visiting Professor is likely to be on research sabbatical from his/her university/college in North America, and that the award will supplement other research funds in order to help the professor undertake a period of research at the British Library.

Eccles Centre Visiting Fellows in North American Studies 2010

Three awards to be made to post-doctoral scholars normally resident in the UK (based outside the M25) whose research, in any field of North American Studies, entails the use of the British Library collection. The award holder must plan to be in research residence at the British Library for a minimum of one month. Each Eccles Centre Visiting Fellow will be entitled to an award of £2000 for travel and other expenses connected with the research visit to London. The award holder will have privileged access to the collections and the curatorial expertise of the British Library.

Eccles Centre Postgraduate Awards in North American Studies 2010

Five awards to be made to graduate students normally resident in the UK (outside the M25) whose research, in any field of North American Studies, entails the use of the British Library collection. The Eccles Centre Postgraduate Fellows will be entitled to an award of £500 for travel and other expenses connected with the research visit to London.

Eccles Centre Visiting European Fellow in North American Studies 2010

One award to be made to a post-doctoral scholar normally resident outside the UK, in a European country that has membership in the European Association for American Studies, whose research, in any field of North American Studies, entails the use of the British Library collection. The award holder must plan to be in research residence at the British Library for a minimum of one month. Each Eccles Centre Visiting European Fellow will be entitled to an award of £2,200 for travel and other expenses connected with the research visit to London. The award holder will have privileged access to the collections and the curatorial expertise of the British Library.

Eccles Centre European Postgraduate Awards in North American Studies 2010

Two awards will be made to graduate students normally resident outside the UK, in a European country that has membership in the European Association for American Studies, whose research, in any field of North American Studies, entails the use of the British Library collection. The Eccles Centre European Postgraduate Fellows will be entitled to an award of £700 for travel and other expenses connected with the research visit to London.

Further information

The British Library website, including public access to the catalogues, can be found at http://www.bl.uk. Enquiries regarding the British Library’s North American holdings can be directed in the first instance to Dr Matthew Shaw (US curator) Matthew.Sahw@bl.ac.uk, Philip Hatfield (Canadian curator) Philip.Hatfield@bl.uk or to the Eccles CentreEccles-Centre@bl.uk.The Eccles Centre does not house a collection separate to that of the British Library, and the bibliographies on the Eccles Centre webpages give only a snapshot of some of the items in the British Library collection. For details of Eccles Centre activities see http://www.bl.uk/ecclescentre.

General terms and conditions

Research visits should take place in the period April 2010 – September 2011. The detailed administration of the awards will be managed by the British Association for American Studies. All award holders will be required to submit a financial report on their visit to the Treasurer of the British Association for American Studies, Dr Theresa Saxon (tsaxon@uclan.ac.uk). All award holders will also be required to submit a short report on their visit to the British Association for American Studies and to the Eccles Centre. This report will be published in American Studies in Britain or in an Eccles Centre publication. All award holders will agree to acknowledge the support provided by the Eccles Centre in any publication resulting from this research visit, and to inform the Eccles Centre of any such publications. If the opportunity arises, it is expected that the award holders will present their work at an appropriate Eccles Centre/British Library seminar or conference. No extra funding will be available. Candidates must ensure that they have sufficient funds to cover their own needs and the needs of any dependants during their stay. Award holders from outside the UK are individually responsible for fulfilling any regulatory requirements to enter the UK. None of the organisations or individuals connected with this award is in a position to arrange travel or organise accommodation for award holders.

Applications

Applications should be in the form of a brief CV (no more than two pages), and a document explaining the nature of the North American Studies research being proposed at the British Library (no more than two pages). Four copies of the application must be submitted in hard copy. Applications by fax will not be accepted. Applications should be sent to:

Professor Ian Bell

Chair, BAAS Awards Sub-Committee

American Studies

Keele University

Keele, Staffs ST5 5BG

i.f.a.bell@ams.keele.ac.uk

Closing date: 5 p.m. on 28 February 2010

BAAS Monticello Teachers’ Fellowships

The British Association for American Studies (BAAS), in conjunction with the Thomas Jefferson Foundation (TJF) and the International Center for Jefferson Studies (ICJS), is delighted to announce an award, now in its fourth year, for teachers with at least three years’ experience who cover the American Revolution, the Constitution and related materials in their A level or Advanced Higher teaching of history and politics. It is expected that the award will be of particular interest to teachers interested in the new Edexcel History Paper ‘From Colonies to Nation 1763-87′, as well as to those teaching other 18th century history and American politics topics at A level, such as the American Revolution, slavery and the development of American constitutional government.

Closing date for applications: 26 February 2010

Newberry Library Fellowships in the Humanities, 2010-11

The Newberry’s fellowships support humanities research in our collections. Our collections are wide-ranging, rich, and sometimes a little eccentric. If you study the humanities, chances are good we have something for you. We promise you remarkable collections; a lively interdisciplinary community of researchers; individual consultations on your research with staff curators, librarians, and scholars; and an array of scholarly and public programs. The deadline for long-term fellowships has passed but there is still time to apply for short-term fellowships.

SHORT-TERM FELLOWSHIPS

Ph.D. candidates and scholars with a doctorate are eligible for short-term travel-to-collections fellowships. Short-term fellowships are usually awarded for a period of one month. Most are restricted to scholars who live and work outside the Chicago area. Stipends are $1600 per month.

NEW: We invite short-term fellowship applications from teams of two or three scholars who plan to collaborate intensively on a single, substantive project. $1600 per fellow per month. Teams should submit a single application, including cover sheets and CVs from each member.

Deadline: 1 March 2010

For more information or to download application materials, visit our website at: http://www.newberry.org/research/felshp/fellowshome.html

Or contact:

Research and Education

The Newberry Library

60 West Walton Street

Chicago, IL 60610

312.255.3666

research@newberry.org

MA and PhD Scholarships in the School of American Studies, UEA

i) MA Studentships 2010-11

Following our successful bid for AHRC studentships for 2009-13, the Faculty of Arts and Humanities is pleased to announce that it will be nominating 7 AHRC MA studentships starting in September/ October 2010. For UK residents awards consist of fees and maintenance and for EU residents awards are on a fees only basis.

AHRC awards are available to UK/EU residents in the following subjects:

Film Studies and Television Studies
History
History of Art, Architecture and Design
Interpreting and Translation
Librarianship, Archives, Record Management and Information Science (MA in Film Archiving)
Music
Museum Studies

The Faculty is also pleased to offer a number of MA scholarships available to students from within or outside the EU in the subjects listed above and also:

American Studies
Literature and Creative Writing
Language and Communication Studies
Philosophy
Political, Social and International Studies.

Application deadline is 1 March 2010 (please quote ref: Guardian10).

More information and details of how to apply can be found at:

www.uea.ac.uk/hum/postgraduatescholarships

Alternatively please contact the Admissions Office

e-mail: pgt.hum.admiss@uea.ac.uk or Tel: (01603) 592154

ii) PhD Studentships 2010-11

Following our successful bid for AHRC studentships for 2009-13, the Faculty of Arts and Humanities is pleased to announce that it will be nominating 8 AHRC PhD studentships starting in October 2010. For UK residents awards consist of fees and maintenance and for EU residents awards are on a fees only basis.

AHRC awards are available to UK/EU residents in the following subjects:

Creative Writing
English Language and Literature
Film Studies and Television Studies
History
History of Art, Architecture and Design

The Faculty is also pleased to offer a total of 24 additional University-funded PhD studentships available to students from within or outside the EU. Schools of study:

American Studies
Film and Television Studies
History
Literature and Creative Writing
Language and Communication Studies
Music
Philosophy
Political, Social and International Studies
World Art Studies and Museology

Application deadline is 1 March 2010 (please quote ref: Guardian10).

More information and details of how to apply can be found at:

www.uea.ac.uk/hum/postgraduatescholarships

Alternatively please contact the Postgraduate Research Office

e-mail: pgr.hum.admiss@uea.ac.uk or Tel: (01603) 592546

Rothermere American Institute Fellowships

A Senior Visiting Fellowship and three Visiting Fellowships are available at Rothermere American Institute (RAI), University of Oxford. The RAI is a centre for interdisciplinary research in the fields of American politics, history, literature and culture. It houses the Vere Harmsworth Library, with specialist collections of American materials.

The following Fellowships are available:

1. Senior Visiting Fellow, September 2010 – August 2011

2. Visiting Fellow, September – December (Michaelmas Term) 2010

3. Visiting Fellow, January – April (Hilary Term) 2011

4. Visiting Fellow May – August (Trinity Term) 2011

Each fellow is provided with a fully equipped, modern office right in the heart of Oxford. In addition, every fellow has access to the University’s Bodleian and other libraries. No stipends are offered but the RAI provides a £200 per term travel grant for research purposes. The Senior Visiting Fellow also has the opportunity to become a member of a College Senior Common Room.

For more details of the posts and how to apply, please visit the Fellowship page at www.rai.ox.ac.uk or contact enquiries@rai.ox.ac.uk

The Arthur Miller Centre Prize

The Arthur Miller Centre Prize of £500.00 is awarded annually by the American Studies Sector at the University of East Anglia for the best journal-length article on any American Studies topic in the preceding calendar year by a United Kingdom citizen based at home or abroad or by a non-UK citizen who publishes their essay in a United Kingdom journal, providing that the entrant is a member of the British Association for American Studies in the year of submission.

Those interested in entering an article for consideration should submit three copies of the essay, including publication details, to: The Arthur Miller Centre Prize Committee School of English and American Studies University of East Anglia Norwich NR4 7TJ UK.

Deadline: 1 March in the year for which they wish to be considered for the Prize.

The Awarding Committee includes a representative from the American Studies Sector at UEA and the Chair of BAAS. In years which include an entry from a member of the UEA faculty, a past winner or BAAS Chair will be invited to take the place of the UEA representative. The winner will be announced at the British Association for American Studies annual conference. The Awarding Committee is unable to notify unsuccessful applicants or to return copies of articles submitted for consideration.

Publication Opportunities

CFP: Borderlands issue, Journal of American History

The Journal of American History is calling for papers that exemplify recent and important trends in North American borderlands history—broadly construed to include indigenous, imperial, transnational, interracial, and/or continental perspectives (time period open). We especially welcome research-based articles that expand the field’s conceptual, methodological, or disciplinary frameworks. Selected articles will appear in the September 2011 issue. To be considered for publication, manuscripts must be received by 4 June 2010 and should not exceed 10,000 words (including notes). See http://www.journalofamericanhistory.org/submit/stylesheet.html

for journal formatting style.

Two hard copies of submissions (with abstract pages) included should be mailed to:

Borderlands Issue

Journal of American History

1215 East Atwater Avenue

Bloomington, Indiana 47401-3703

USA

An electronic version should also be sent to: coeditor@indiana.edu

Please indicate in the e-subject line that your submission is for the ‘Borderlands Issue’.

Call for Book Reviews: American Studies Today

We are seeking book reviews for American Studies Today and American Studies Today On-Line. The journal is an accessible collection of essays, articles and book reviews by students and academics affiliated with the subject of American Studies. Print copies are sent to 800 schools, colleges and universities in the UK and abroad, whilst the website has had over 18 million visitors. The readership of the magazine and website is wide-ranging; it includes teachers and lecturers as well as college/A-level, undergraduate and postgraduate students. As such we request that the review’s tone and style should be comprehensible to this audience, as well as to general readers.

Books for review are available in the areas of cultural studies/cultural theory, history, literature and arts, film/media and politics. Books are sent out on a first come, first served basis, to be returned at reviewers’ discretion.

If you would like to review a book, or would simply like more information, please contact the Editorial Assistants, Caroline Russell & Nick Williams by your preferred method.

E-mail:N.Williams@2007.ljmu.ac.uk

Tel./Fax: 0151-231-3241

Post: Aldham Robarts LRC, Maryland Street, Liverpool, L1 9DE

New Members

Jonathan Mark Beeley is a second-year PhD student at Sheffield Hallam University, studying the impact of President Carter’s human rights policies on US national security, with a specific focus on Central America. His work has benefited from research periods at the Department of State in Washington DC and the Jimmy Carter Library in Atlanta.

Lucy Bond is a first-year doctoral student at Goldsmiths, University of London, researching the commemoration of 9/11. She is interested in all aspects of American memorial culture, and its intersections with international commemorative practices. Her research particularly focuses upon literary and architectural aspects of remembrance, and she is keen to analyse the political uses to which ideologised and mythologised memory has been put in the aftermath of 9/11. Lucy holds a BA in English from the University of Cambridge, and an MA in cultural memory from the IGRS, University of London in 2008.

Nicola Brindley is a PhD student in American Studies at Keele University. Her research addresses the representation of complex systems and the posthuman within contemporary American fiction, with a particular focus upon the novels of Richard Powers.

James Callanan is a teaching fellow in the history department at Durham University. He specialises in US foreign and defence policy, with a particular focus on the role played by the American intelligence community in advancing/impeding those policies from World War II to the end of the Cold War. His forthcoming book, Covert Action in the Cold War: US Policy, Intelligence and CIA Operations, is based on research at the Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy presidential libraries and the National Archives in Washington DC. James has previously taught as a visiting lecturer at the universities of Durham, Newcastle and Sunderland.

Ian Cowlishaw is head of history at King Edward VII and Queen Mary School in Lytham, Lancashire, where sixth formers undertake studies of African American Civil Rights 1950-68 and US foreign policy 1890-1991.

Paula Dalziel is studying for a PhD at Edge Hill University. Her thesis title is ‘America’s construction of otherness in religion and identity politics, post 9/11’, and her research focuses on how the US president utilises American religious myths to promote patriotism following 9/11. Her project also highlights the significance of 9/11 cultural epistemology and she envisions a future path of continued research concentrating on American culture/politics/identity.

Daniel Geary is the Mark Pigott Lecturer in US history at Trinity College, Dublin. From 2005 to 2008 he was a lecturer in American Studies at the University of Nottingham, having received his PhD in history from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2004. He is the author of Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought (2009).

Ashley Harper is in the first year of a PhD on American and Canadian First World War fiction in the English Department at the University of Strathclyde.

Laura Helyer is a graduate of the MLitt in creative writing at the University of St Andrews and is an associate lecturer with the Open University. Her current research interests include the relationship between American lyric poetry and epistolary practice, ecopoetics, Elizabeth Bishop, Lorine Niedecker, Louise Bogan, Wallace Stevens and Charles Wright. She is also working on a first collection of poems and a novel.

Tim Jelfs is a PhD student and graduate instructor in the American Studies department at King’s College London. His research focuses on the depiction of material culture in US literature and his doctoral thesis explores representations of objects and their consumption in American fiction of the 1980s.

Emeline Jouve is an assistant lecturer in the Department of Anglo-Saxon Studies at the University of Toulouse II-Le Mirail, France. She obtained her agrégation in 2007. Her master’s thesis, entitled ‘Susan Glaspell’s doll’s houses: a drama of threshold’, examined the symbolic dramatization of space in Glaspell’s plays. Emeline is currently doing doctoral research on the theatre of Susan Glaspell under the direction of Professor Aurélie Guillain, Toulouse University, and Professor Matthew Roudané, Georgia State University. She is a member of the Susan Glaspell Society and has participated in several international conferences.

Karen Karbiener received her PhD from Columbia University and teaches at New York University. A scholar of nineteenth-century American literature and culture specialising in Walt Whitman, she is a New York City public scholar who has created and developed several events (such as New York’s annual ‘Song of Myself’ marathon and a 2005 exhibition entitled ‘Whitman and the Promise of America’ at the South Street Seaport Museum). The editor of Leaves of Grass: First and Death-bed Editions (Barnes & Noble Classics, 2005), she is currently at work on Walt Whitman and New York: The Urban Roots of Leaves of Grass.

Victoria Kearley holds a BA in film and English and an MA in film studies from the University of Southampton, where she is currently studying part-time for a PhD in film. Her thesis evaluates the representation of Hispanic masculinity in contemporary Hollywood cinema, with reference to genre, stardom and machismo. Her wider research interests include screen representations of ethnicity and gender in contemporary US film and television, popular film genres such as the action-adventure film and the biopic, and the films of Robert Rodriquez

Adrian McBreen is enrolled on the combined MPhil/DPhil programme at the University of Sussex. His research interests are in the social impacts of the rise of religious conservatism in US culture. In particular, he plans to examine the effect of apocalyptic imagery on the American collective consciousness from the time of the Founding Fathers to the present moment.

Ewa Morawska is Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex. Her specialisation is comparative-historical sociology of international migration and ethnicity, focusing on patterns of incorporation into the host society, transnational engagements, and forms of coexistence between these two processes among immigrants in the United States. She is author of A Sociology of Immigration: (Re)Making Multifaceted America (2009) and Insecure Prosperity: Jews in Small-town Industrial America, 1890-1940 (1996), and is co-editor, with M. Bommes, of International Migration Research: Constructions, Omissions, and Promises of Interdisciplinarity (2005). She is currently working on: a comparative examination of the ideas and practices of democracy among East European immigrants in Berlin and New York; and a study of changing images of America in Europe from the American Revolution to the present day.

Irene Musumeci is a PhD student in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex, researching post-9/11 American cinema and visual culture. Her research interests range across American narrative cinema an documentary film; Shakespeare on film; early modern drama; performance theory and practice; directing and dramaturgy; popular culture; graphic novels and illustration, and children’s literature.

Alexander Runchman is in the second year of a PhD at Trinity College Dublin. His research re-evaluates the oeuvre of Delmore Schwartz, with particular regard to his international consciousness and his unique sense of the American dream. Alexander did his BA in English at the University of Oxford and gained an MPhil in American literature from Cambridge in 2004. He contributed an essay entitled ‘Berryman, Lowell and the Twentieth-Century American Sonnet’ to Philip Coleman and Philip McGowan (eds), After Thirty Falls: New Essays on John Berryman, and has pieces on Schwartz forthcoming in the Irish Journal of American Studies and the online poetry journal, POST.

Mark Shanahan is a mid-career writer and editor and a mature research student in the Department of Politics and History at Brunel University. His doctoral research studies the impact of the media on the formulation and implementation of US space policy from the Sputnik crisis to the last man on the moon.

Dorette Sobolewski received a BA in American Studies in English from the University of Dundee. An undergraduate literature, history and culture which was reflected in her undergraduate dissertation on ‘Race, Class and the Southern Plantation Mansion in William Faulkner’s Fiction’. She is currently doing an MLitt in American Studies at the University of Glasgow.

Ellie Stedall read English at Oxford and then completed an MPhil in American literature at Cambridge, with a dissertation on the sea stories of Herman Melville. She is currently working towards a comparative DPhil on Melville and Joseph Conrad at St John’s College, Cambridge.

Theodore Sweeting is a first-year PhD student in the Department of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham. The focus of his research is on the interaction between liberalism and radicalism at the close of the 1960s, with particular regard to the representation of student radicalism within intellectual and cultural history.

Robert Vile is studying for A-levels at St Edmund’s School, Canterbury.

Rachel Mizsei Ward is a postgraduate research student in the School of Film and Television, University of East Anglia, working on the connections between tabletop role-playing games and film. Her other research interests include blaxploitation, computer games, transnational cinema, Asian film and Asian stars in the West.

Eva von Wyl received an MA in contemporary and modern history and journalism at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) in 2008 and is now enrolled on the PhD programme at the University of Zurich. Her research concerns American influence on the Swiss diet after World War II within the context of broader interests in the cultural influence of North American on postwar Switzerland, mass consumption and Swiss culture in the 1950s and 1960s.

Members’ News

Karen Karbiener has won awards to research two new publications. As a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress from February to July 2010, Karbiener will continue work on Walt Whitman and New York: The Urban Roots of Leaves of Grass. The book reconstructs Whitman’s life and career through his most productive and yet most obscure period: 1842-1862, when he was living in and writing about his beloved Brooklyn and ‘Mannahatta’. Karbiener has also been awarded a Fulbright Scholar grant at the University of Novi Sad, Serbia. She will be working on a literary biography of her family, survivors of a largely untold ethnic genocide in postwar Yugoslavia. She will also be teaching a Master’s class on Whitman which will be documented on an NEH-supported blog. Keep track of her whereabouts, progress and discoveries at: http://karbiener.lookingforwhitman.org