SLSA 2013 Conference Program

SLSA 2013 Conference Program Noon—7 p.m. Registration Desk open, McKenna Hall First Floor Session 1: Thursday 2:00pm-3:30pm Session 1 (A) Something in the Air Chair: Melissa Dinsman, Notre Dame Daniel Murphy, University of Notre Dame Contesting the Flying Apparatus in Selden Rodman’s The Poetry of Flight and The Air- Men: “Flight” as an Embodied Medial Event This analysis examines understudied poet and cultural critic Selden Rodman, specifically his anthology The Poetry of Flight (1941) and his polemical four part poem The Air-Men (1941). Treating these texts on their own terms as an epistemological intervention and an argument for the renewal of poetry, this exegesis explains how the airplane, as a material correlative for “flight,” provides for Rodman a historical occasion and thematic referent suited to the regeneration of poetry. Drawing from media theorist Joseph Vogl, this essay demonstrates how “flight” itself is a self-reflexive medial technology for Rodman, one that can be separated from the “airplane” where the former connotes liberty and the latter signifies the proliferation of mechanized production and the triumph of military rationalism. Flight is here imagined to be a humanistic, heroic technology that mediates or produces “exorbital” subjectivities, just as it is a vehicular metaphor for a poetry that “moves” subjects beyond the barriers of their bodies to know the other. Rodman’s problem is to valorize the-poem-as-flight and the “airman” as a modern subject while precluding technological determinism. In the final analysis, this paper looks at the debates concerning airplane construction in the 1930s and clarifies how Rodman understands the tension of technological determinism by historicizing “flight” as a media technology and techno-social structure that can be extricated from an “ideology of metal” and its attendant subjectivies and modes of production. Kieran Murphy, University of Colorado at Boulder Electromagnetic Thought in Balzac, Poe, and Bachelard Since the discoveries of thermodynamics and electromagnetism in the 1820s, physical manifestations that were once considered supernatural began to supply new models to explore metaphysical or difficult notions such as life, cognition, and communication. Scholarship has mainly focused on the interrelation of thermodynamics and culture, but similar studies on electromagnetism remain scarce. In this paper, I will examine some of the earliest instances of electromagnetic thought in works by Balzac and Poe. I will then trace its evolution and profound impact on twentieth-century philosophy via the emergence of an electromagnetic conception of history in Gaston Bachelard’s idea of “epistemological break.” Francesca Maria Bordogna, University of Notre Dame Beyond Man: the "Man God" as a regulative ideal for post-philosophy and politics in early twentieth-century Italy SLSA 2013 Online Program Page 2 This paper examines how the modernist magazine Leonardo (Florence, Italy, 1903-1907) functioned as a tool for illustrating to an elite readership a post-philosophical way of life rooted in a pragmatist epistemology and in a wide range of techniques of self-experimentation. The magazine served as a "laboratory" for a new variety of pragmatism-- "magic pragmatism"-- by setting up a regulative ideal for the "new philosopher" and the new politician: that of the "Uomo Dio" ("Man God"). This post-Nietzschean, post-human (and masculine) figure was defined by complete control over his "inner life" -- the life of the psyche. As a result, the Uomo Dio was also in command of truth and reality, both of which the magic pragmatists viewed as largely "man-made" in the course of processes shaped by psychological self-experimentation. I will explore how, by ostensibly pursuing the ideal of the "Uomo Dio," the editors of Leonardo transformed the pragmatist philosophy-- and, specifically, pragmatist conceptions of truth and reality--into a cluster of philosophical, mystical, psychological, and rhetorical exercises, aimed to increase the philosopher's control over his mind, and help create a new, powerful political elite. I will argue that the transformation of pragmatism into a way of life ended up radically reshaping both pragmatist philosophical theories and the mystical practices, with which the magic pragmatists engaged. The result was a form of pragmatist asceticism, which ended up functioning as a resource for a new political elite in the age of fascism -- the self-styled "fascist mystics." ______________________________________________________________________________ Session 1 (B) Garbage In, Garbage Out Chair: Katy Wright-Bushman, University of Notre Dame Lindsey Dillon, University of California at Berkeley From Urban Cesspool to Nature’s Kidneys: Wetland Restoration and the Work of Nature Along San Francisco’s Industrial Waterfront The paper explores the conversion of parts of San Francisco’s industrialized waterfront into wetland habitats. Here, the “greening of brownfields” is not simply the conversion of industrial land to parks or open space, but the re-creation of salt marshes and tidelands which had characterized the Bay Area until those watery lands were diked and filled for the expanding needs of urban and industrial growth. Although these wetland projects are imagined as a restoration of the waterfront to a pre-industrial ecological space, my research foregrounds the ways they are in fact admixtures of persistent chemicals, synthetic liners, and methane diversion systems – all which are just as much part of these new wetland ecosystems as their marshy grasses and the daily inundation of the tides. The idea of these wetlands as restored nature therefore obscures their modernity. Constructed wetland habitats are also produced through multiple forms of human labor, including environmental justice campaigns for “green space” along the industrial waterfront, human health risk assessments and engineering work performed by multi-billion dollar corporations, and the constant plucking of non-native plants which maintain the notion of these wetland sites as pre-industrial natures. Foregrounding the synthetic materialities and multiple forms of human labor that constitute these postnatural wetlands can alter our ideas urban ecological life in the twenty-first century. SLSA 2013 Online Program Page 3 Lisa Walenceus, University of Notre Dame Getting the Stains Out: “The Junkman” and the EPA’s Superfund Program When President Carter signed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act into law, he established the EPA Superfund program with the authority to compel responsible parties to clean up uncontrolled hazardous waste sites or to conduct its own site clean-ups, forcing reimbursement from responsible parties. Billed as the founder and publisher of JunkScience.com, Steven Milloy is a commentator on Fox News, a writer for FoxNews.com, and an adjunct scholar for the libertarian think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). In Toxic Super Wasteful, published on the Cato Institute website on August 8, 2004, Milloy, who calls himself the Junkman, makes the following claim: “And so we come to the most important but least known of Superfund’s ‘dirty’ secrets — there has never been a single shred of evidence and not a single documented case of anyone ever becoming ill, getting cancer or dying because of contaminants at a Superfund site.” After 30 years of scientific effort and more than $32 billion in government expenditures (GAO 2008), are we in fact ignorant of any public health effects due to toxic exposures associated with hazardous waste sites in the United States? In this paper, I will explore whether or not the EPA’s Superfund program is guilty of producing what Milloy calls junk science, “exaggerated or overinterpreted science used to advance some predetermined, often politically correct, politically desired, or financially lucrative conclusion” (Milloy & Gough 1996). Milloy is an example of how anti-regulatory rhetoric has made toxic waste “invisible” in the United States. Margaret McMillan, University of Notre Dame Garbage, Garbage, Garbage: Word Recycling and Mimetic Instruction in A.R. Ammon’s long poem The emergence of literary eco-criticism heralds an attempt by the humanities to raise awareness about the larger environmental crisis that scientists have long since acknowledged. With the introduction of Environmental Criticism, English scholars continue to discover how reading and writing in general, and literary studies in particular, can participate uniquely in promoting environmental justice. Contemporary poet A.R. Ammons examines this theme in his long poem Garbage, exploring the connections between language and agency, rhetoric and value, and the limits and promises of poetic instruction. In Garbage, Ammons creates a unique way of instructing without dictating, to answer the pressing question “How can we intercede and not/ interfere: how can our love move more surroundingly,/ convincingly than our premonitory advice,” (17). He takes for his topic the trouble with trash, and attempts to provide a solution for the overbearing problem of landfill management. According to Ammons, a poem should imitate, through mimesis, how readers ought to behave. In his work, Ammons presents two landfills for the reader’s inspection, the literal garbage that the poet describes and the verbal pile that comprises the poem Garbage, wherein language circulates, is used, re-fashioned, recycled, and renewed. Within the constructed ‘word-world,’ of the poem,

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