Midwestern Literature

Source: PMLA Vol 124.6 November 2009

DIVISION MEETINGS

American Indian Literatures

213. Languages in American Indian Literatures

“Oshknishinaabezhibiigejig/New Anishinaabe Writers and Why We Need Them,” Janis Fairbanks, Michigan State University.

526. American Indian Literature and Traditional Ecological Literature

“Anishinabe Ecology in Louise Erdrich’s Master Butcher’s Singing Club,” Marie Satya McDonough, University of Chicago.

Black American Literature and Culture

650. Reading and Race in the Obama Era

“The Obama Phenomenon, Race, and Liberalism,” Justin Leroy, New York University.

“From Ellison to Obama: Dreams of Ultraraciality,” Christopher Powers, University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez.

Gay Studies

472. Critical Exuberance

“The Curious Queer Politics of a ‘Post’-racial Obama Nation,” Marlon Bryan Ross, University of Virginia.

“The Neo-New Deal and Why Obama Doesn’t Want to Think about Sex,” Janet R. Jakobsen, Barnard College.

“States of Crisis: Economic Pain and Political Hope in the Age of Obama,” Lisa Duggan, New York University.

Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century American Literature

14. Protomodernisms

“What Did Hamlin Garland Mean by ‘Modernism’?” Christine L. Holbo, Arizona State University.

“The Experimental Realism of William Dean Howells,” Brian McGrath, Rutgers University, New Brunswick.

“Oz’s Colorful Pedagogy; or Modernism in the Kindergarten,” Nicholas Gaskill, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Nineteenth Century American Literature

570. Time after History

“Space into Time: Ambrose Bierce’s Phenomenological Reduction of History,” Jonathan Elmer, Indiana University, Bloomington.

Non-Fiction Prose Studies, Excluding Biography and Autobiography

22. The Open Letter

“The Open Letter from Phyllis Wheatley to Langston Hughes,”  James D. B. McCorkle, Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

Poetry

567.  Poetry and Publics

“Walt Whitman and the Death of Lincoln,” Michael Cohen, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge.

Prose Fiction

96. Justice

“Something Rogue: Justice and Commensurability in Toni Morrison’s Later Fiction,” Megan L. Sweeney, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Sociological Approaches to Literature

352. Futures of Collectivity

“Susan Glaspell’s Stages of Thought,” Katherine Biers, Columbia University.

ALLIED AND AFFILIATE ORGANIZATION MEETINGS

American Theatre and Drama Society http://www.atds.org/

281. Drama and Lincoln

“Not-So-Civil War: Lincoln’s Image as Presented in Confederate and Copperhead Drama, 1861-63,” Scott Irelan, Augustana College

“Augustin Daly’s ‘Republic of Suffering’: Catharsis for the Middle Class after the Civil War,” Celia Braxton, Graduate Center, City University of New York.

“From Broadway to Gettysburg: Forrest and Lincoln Perform Politics,” David J. Carlyon, Larchmont, NY.

“Suzan-Lori Parks’s Lincoln: An Interrogation Revisited,” Jayne Austin Williams, University of California-Irvine.

750. Presidents and Plays

“’Damn Job’s a Pain in the Ass’: President ‘Chuck’ Smith, Lesbians, and International Adoption in David Mamet’s November,” Robert Vorlicky, New York University.

College English Association http://www2.widener.edu/~cea/

169. The Profane Prairie: Controversial Stories from the Upper Midwest

“Bianca’s Body,” Teresa Milbrodt, Western State College.

“Twin Jack,” Stephen Powers, Gordon College.

“Expect Major Delays,” Zeke Jarvis, Eureka College.

Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society http://www.hemingwaysociety.org

59. The Hemingway Letters Project: The Making of the Cambridge Edition of the Collected Letters.

Sandra Spanier, Penn State University, University Park; Michael Dubose, Penn State University, University Park; Linda P. Miller, Penn State University, Abington; Robert Trogdon, Kent State University, Kent, OH. 59

698. Hemingway and African American Writers: New Readings and Teachings

“The Unlikely Couple: Ernest Hemingway and Alice Walker (with a few words on Toni Morrison),”Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, University of Notre Dame 698

“Ellison, Hemingway, Wright: Tracing relations inside the Transparent Jug,” Gary Holcomb, Ohio University, Athens.

“Ernest Hemingway and James Baldwin: American Masculinity in Crisis,” Jessica Kent, Boston University

Langston Hughes Society http://www.langstonhughessociety.org/

38. Langston Hughes and Transnational Liberation: Aesthetic Overtures

“Literary Migrations: Transnationalism in the Poetry of Langston Hughes,” Sharon Lynette Jones, Wright State University

“Black Transnationalism and the Political Aesthetics of Ask Your Mama,” John t. Lowney, Saint John’s University, NY

“Langston Hughes and the stereo Acoustics of Global Black Solidarity,” Tsitsi Jaji, University of Pennsylvania.

737. Langston Hughes and Transnational Liberation: Ideological Underpinnings

“Langston Hughes: The Father of a World Black Consciousness Movement,” Tara T. Green, University of North Carolina, Greensboro

“James Mercer Langston Hughes: ‘Poet Laureate,’ ‘Dean of Black American Writers, a Self-Proclaimed ‘Literary Sharecropper,’ ‘Radical Socialist,’ ‘Cultural Ambassador,’ and ‘Possibly One of America’s Earliest Postcolonial Thinkers,” Karima K. Jeffrey, Hampton University

“Engagement in the antifascist Movement and the transnational Liberation of Minorities in the Literary Works of Langston Hughes,” Char Prieto, California State University, Chico

Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature http://www.ssml.org/

67.  Sex, Literature, and the Midwest

“Babbitt’s Fairychild,” Marcella Frydman, Harvard University

“ ‘A Fresh Green breast of the New World’: The Great Gatsby and Lolita,” John Rohrkemper, Elizabethtown College

“ ‘It Might Be Something Awful’: The Movement of Sex in the Plays of William Inge,” Michael S. Schwartz, Widener University

“ ‘I’m Fine. I Just Got the Plains’: Geography and Sex in Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County,” Marilyn Judith Atlas, Ohio University, Athens

725. Midwestern Literature: Explorations of Nature and the Natural

“Hamlin Garland and the Landscapes of American Populism,” Jonathan Berliner, University of Southern California

“Familiar with Walden: Gene Stratton-Porter’s Plunge into Indiana’s Swamps,” Carol Elizabeth Dietrich, DeVry University, OH

“Ecology and the National Identity in Lockridge’s Raintree County,” Frederick Oswin Waage, East Tennessee State University

“James Wright, Franz Wright, and Blessing of Compost,” Beverly J. Hogue, Marietta College

Mark Twain Circle of America http://www.honors.illinois.edu/files/mtcircle/

579. Mark Twain in the New Millennium

“Staying Power: Twain’s Place in the Twenty-First-Century Classroom and Beyond,” Jocelyn Ann Chadwick, Discovery Education

“The Reading Group in Huckleberry Finn,” Anthony Joseph beret, Saint Joseph’s University

“Science Fiction’s Modest Witness: Ethical Consciousness and the Narration of Destruction and Creation of A Connecticut Yankee,” Juliana Chow, University of California, Berkeley

For abstracts, visit www.honors,uiuc.edu/files/mtcircle

765.  Mark Twain’s Nineteenth-Century Context

“Race, Liberalism, and Huckleberry Finn,” Philip Goldstein, University of Delaware, Wilmington

“Never the Twain Shall Meet: Travel and Double-Consciousness in the Works of Mark Twain and James Weldon Johnson,” Richard Hardack, University of Delaware, Wilmington

“The Persecution and Comfort of Mark Twain’s Fan Letters,” Courtney Bates, Washington University