Thursday 2/19: Chapter workshop with Prof. Julian Levinson

Please join the American Studies Consortium for a book chapter workshop and lunch with Prof. Julian Levinson:

"'The Seventh Angel Woke Me': 

Adah Isaacs Menken 

and the Return of Israelite Prophecy"

Thursday, February 19

3241 Angell Hall

12 PM

Lunch will be provided. RSVP to logansch@umich.edu by Tuesday, February 17.

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This chapter is part of my current book project, tentatively titled New World Israelites: Reshaping Jewish Identity in Protestant America. The book considers emblematic instances where Jewish and Christian cultural works have engaged with prevailing religious discourses, establishing specifically American ways of reading Jewishness. In particular, the book traces the lines of influence connecting Protestant biblio-centrism to ideas about modern Jews. From this perspective, modern Jewishness comes to be modeled on the image of the “Old Testament prophet” – a figure imbued with a divine mission to correct the world’s moral failings and to strengthen the bonds uniting the “chosen people,” however defined.

The chapter under discussion, “’The Seventh Angel Woke Me’: Adah Isaacs Menken and the Return of Israelite Prophecy,” explores an emblematic case of these cultural and religious dynamics. Here I explore the prophetic-Jewish self-invention of a Baptist-born woman who became the nation’s most celebrated and notorious stage performer of the 1860s. Drawing on discourses ranging from Reform Judaism, sentimental Protestant poetics, and Whitmanian poetic forms, Menken wrote a series of free-verse poems from the perspective of a “prophet of Israel.” These works establish a model of modern Jewish identity that will be picked up in numerous subsequent works by Jews in America.

October 20: Workshop and Lecture with Prof. Joanna Brooks

The American Studies Consortium welcomes

Joanna Brooks

Professor of English and Comparative Literature, San Diego State University

author of The Book of Mormon Girl

"When Storytelling is Movement Building:

Putting American Studies to Work in the World of Mormonism."

Monday, October 20

3222 Angell Hall

4 PM

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Interested graduate students and faculty are also warmly invited to attend a workshop of Professor Brooks’s draft introduction to Mormon Feminist Thought: Classic Writings from Forty Years of the Movement (Oxford UP, forthcoming 2015).

Monday, October 20

3241 Angell Hall

12:30 PM

The workshop file is available on the American Studies Consortium website.

A light lunch will be served. RSVP to Emily Waples (emiwap@umich.edu).

Joanna Brooks is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University, and a national voice on religion in American public life.  Author of The Book of Mormon Girl: A Memoir of An American Faith (Simon & Schuster, 2012) and the blog “Ask Mormon Girl” (www.askmormongirl.com), her work been featured in the Washington Post, Huffington Post, Tablet, Salon, and the Michigan Quarterly Review; she has also appeared as a guest on MSNBC, NPR, & The Daily Show.  A senior correspondent for ReligionDispatches.org, she has been named one of “50 Politicos to Watch” by Politico.org, and one of “13 Religious Women to Watch” by Center for American Progress.

Professor Brooks is also the author or editor of five scholarly books, including American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures (Oxford, 2003), Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions (Oxford 2012), and Why We Left: Untold Stories and Songs of America's First Immigrants (University of Minnesota, 2013). Her scholarship on race, gender, and religion in early American literature has received support and commendation by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Association, and the Modern Language Association.

Dissertation Chapter Workshop and Discussion with Alistair Chetwynd

Please join the United States Literatures & Cultures Consortium for our final dissertation chapter workshop and discussion of the year with

Alistair Chetwynd

PhD Candidate, English Language and Literature

Monday, April 21

3241 Angell Hall

4:10-5:30pm

Daniel's Travesty, Doctorow's Satire: A Reconsideration of the Politics of Postmodern Parody

Abstract:

E L Doctorow's The Book of Daniel is one of the foundational texts for our dominant account of the politics of postmodern fiction's form: Linda Hutcheon's claim that postmodern fiction privileges parody as a way of drawing power away from the hegemonic discourses that constitute official history.  In this paper I treat the novel instead as a pre-emptive critique of the idea that mere language-games or mere discursification have any value for the recuperation of historical possibility.  I then examine how this critique yet offers grounds for optimism about non-mimetic fiction's ability to help us do that recuperation.

Snacks provided!

Drafts are available for download at the USists website:

https://sitemaker.umich.edu/usists/the_workshop_files

or from Google Drive here:

https://drive.google.com/a/umich.edu/file/d/0B3FAAv0dKLHXU081blFFNWoyWm8/edit?usp=sharing

Dissertation Chapter Workshop and Discussion with Sony Coráñez Bolton

Please join the United States Literatures & Cultures Consortium for a chapter workshop and discussion with

Sony Coráñez Bolton

Doctoral Student in American Culture,

Asia/Pacific Islander American Studies,

Southeast Asian Studies

Monday, March 17

3241 Angell Hall

4:10-5:30pm

Queer Entanglements and Homotransnationalisms: Reading Queer Enlightenments and Queer Diasporas in Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado and the “Philippine Gay Situation”

Snacks provided!

Drafts are available for download at the USists website:
https://sitemaker.umich.edu/usists/the_workshop_files

Dissertation Chapter Workshop and Discussion with Konstantina Karageorgos

Please join the United States Literatures & Cultures Consortium for a chapter workshop and discussion with

Konstantina Karageorgos

PhD Candidate in English

Monday, February 24

3241 Angell Hall

4:10-5:30pm

"Richard Wright's Marxism: The Outsider and the Making of a Postwar Aesthetic"

“Richard Wright’s Marxism: The Outsider and the Making of a Postwar Aesthetic” is the second consecutive chapter on Richard Wright in my dissertation, Beyond the Blueprint: Episodes of African-American Literary Marxism in the Period of the Cold War. Mobilized by a provocative claim—that Wright became a Marxist only after leaving the Communist Party—this chapter revisits the thirteen year interim between Native Son (1940) and The Outsider (1953), during which time Wright shifted his focus away from political and cultural Marxism to the principle texts of Marx’s thought. By recovering this lost period in Wright’s Marxist evolution, I restore a pivotal context to The Outsider, Wright’s most misunderstood novel, which reopens his postwar work to fresh political, theoretical, and formal readings.

Snacks provided!

Drafts are available for download at the USist website:

https://sitemaker.umich.edu/usists/the_workshop_files

Please email Kathryne Bevilacqua (bevilacq@umich.edu) with any questions about this event.

Dissertation Chapter Workshop and Discussion with Kya Mangrum and Liz Rodrigues

Please join the United States Literatures & Cultures Consortium for a chapter workshop and discussion with Kya Mangrum and Liz Rodrigues. 

 

Monday, October 21

3154 Angell Hall

4:10-5:30pm

 

Snacks provided!

 

Drafts are available for download at the USist website:

https://sitemaker.umich.edu/usists/the_workshop_files

 

Please email Kathryne Bevilacqua (bevilacq@umich.edu) with any questions about this event.

 

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Chapter synopses:

 

Kya Mangrum, "Fictions of Progress: The Visual Slave Narratives of the Civil War"

In "Fictions" I argue that mechanically reproducible photographs of former slaves inspired a new sub-genre of the slave narrative.  This new genre was comprised of two contradictory impulses---a need to affirm the freedman's fitness for battle contrasted against a desire to disqualify his full claims for citizenship.

 

Liz Rodrigues, "W.E.B. Du Bois, Data, and the Re-assemblage Race and Self"

This chapter demonstrates how data collection—as a conceptual framework for empirical reality, as a method of sociological inquiry, and as a representational form—enables Du Bois to tell new stories about African American life and selfhood. I locate Du Bois's methodological interventions in sociology as engagements with the concept of data and trace how those engagements continue to surface in a series of his later, multi-formal collective works of autobiographical, literary, and sociological-historical writings. 

Dissertation Chapter Workshop: Dina Karageorgos

December 10th, 2012 - 4:10-5:30p, Room 3154 Angell Hall

Dina Karageorgos, "Richard Wright's Search for a Method"

Chapter One is organized around Richard Wright’s poetic revaluation of Marx. Opening with Wright’s provocative statement in which he professes his allegiance to “Marx as a poet” rather than political philosopher, this chapter uses Wright’s Delphic utterance—so far unexplored by critics—to construct a narrative account of his development of a non-objective Marxist aesthetic. The focus here is on the early stages of Wright’s development, beginning with his reading of Kenneth Burke, from whom he appropriates, virtually in name alone, the idea of a “poetic” Marx, to his deployment of this principle in his “poetic revision” of Native Son. Following these discussions, I will look backward. Both “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” (1937) Wright’s earliest articulation of Marx’s relationship to literary form, and “Between Laughter and Tears,” (1937) Wright’s rebuke of an African American literary folk sensibility, anticipate Wright’s development of a dialectical literary sensibility. Although they remain somewhat outside our primary narrative, they too are essential coordinates in our inquiry into the origins of Wright’s style.

Though the narrative does not always proceed chronologically, it reaches a definite historical end in 1946, the year in which Wright began work on The Outsider (1953). The logic here is to provide both the theoretical and empirical foundation necessary for an historical and stylistic reappraisal of Wright’s most misunderstood novel, the subject of Chapter Two.

Dissertation Chapter Workshop: Brian Matzke

November 15, 2012, 4:10p-5:30p, Room 3184 Angell Hall

Brian Matzke, dissertation chapter draft: "'Where's Your Control?': Arrowsmith and the Ownership of Knowledge"

Sinclair Lewis’s 1925 novel Arrowsmith follows the life of a Midwestern doctor and research scientist named Martin Arrowsmith. While most of Lewis’s novels have been interpreted as satire, critics typically see Arrowsmith as providing a less biting, more sentimental take on its subject. Contrary to these interpretations, this paper seeks to underscore the satirical elements of the novel, and argues that Lewis critiques his characters’ tendency to think about science in terms of a dichotomy between “pure” and “commercial” interests.

Article Workshop: Jamie Jones

October 18, 2012, 4:10-5:30p, Room: 3241 Angell Hall

Jamie Jones, journal article draft "Built-in Obsolescence: Moby Dick and the Limits of the Whaling Industry"

Abstract: The essay draft represents my first crack at converting a dissertation chapter into a free-standing article. My American Studies dissertation explored representations of the United States whaling industry from the period of its peak production in the mid-nineteenth century through its decline, obsolescence, and commemoration in the early twentieth century. Whale oil was the energy source that lit lamps and lubricated machinery in the rapidly-industrializing United States. In the 1850s and 60s, though, oil wells in Pennsylvania began providing a cheap and relatively accessible replacement for whale oil: petroleum. Although the whaling industry declined sharply by 1900, whaling persisted as a subject for a vast and diverse body of cultural production: novels, paintings, traveling exhibitions, journalistic accounts. My dissertation discusses the ways in which these cultural texts articulate and manage anxieties about labor, technology, and obsolescence. This essay reads Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) as a text that anticipates the imminent decline of the whaling industry and the cultural, social, and ethical consequences that attend that economic phenomenon. At the same time, Moby-Dick raises a different anxiety: the extinction of whale species. By pairing an obsolete hunting industry with a rapidly-vanishing quarry, the novel articulates the limits of capitalist and imperialist expansion in two dimensions. I welcome suggestions of all kinds for the essay, and I hope that the workshop can also discuss more broadly the project of converting a dissertation chapter into an article—a topic that I hope will be relevant to everyone present.