Programme of Events
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The Organising Committee wishes to gratefully acknowledge the support of… ! School of English ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! TABLE OF CONTENTS INFORMATION FOR DELEGATES 3 Conference Location 3 Conference Dinner 3 PROGRAMME 4 ABSTRACTS & ACADEMIC BIOS 5 Panel 1 6 North American Identity 6 Panel 2 8 Consuming Gender 8 Panel 3 10 U.S. Foreign Policy & The Cold War 10 Panel 4 12 Literary Structures 12 NOTES 14
Page !2 New Wave Coming INFORMATION FOR DELEGATES ! WIFI ACCESS ! Eduroam is in operation in Trinity College Dublin. Visitors must have their wireless clients con igured to use WPA2 with AES encryption and have tested their authentication before arriving on-site. TCD’s IS Services do not provide technical support for connecting to Eduroam so you should direct any queries to your home institution and check your settings before arriving. More information on connecting to Eduroam in TCD can be found here: http://isservices.tcd.ie/network/kb/ eduroam_non_tcd_con ig.php ! PARKING & GETTING TO TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN ! There are no parking facilities for visitors to Trinity College Dublin. There are a number of multi- storey car parks close by – Fleet Street, Trinity Street, Dawson Street etc. However, these are quite expensive. There is some on-street parking around the city centre, but this is extremely limited, short-term only, and clamping is in operation. We would recommend that where possible you use public transport. TCD is extremely well-serviced by Dublin Bus. You can plan your journey here: http://www.dublinbus.ie/. If you are travelling by train and arriving into Heuston Station, the 145 bus route will drop you on Nassau Street, right outside the Arts Building where the conference is being held. If you’re arriving into Connolly Station, you can take either the 15, 14, or 32X – among others! – and these too will drop you on Nassau Street. Various other intercity bus services such as Bus Eireann, GoBus etc will drop you just a short walk from TCD. ! CONFERENCE LOCATION ! The conference will be held in the Ui Chadhain lecture theatre in the Arts Building at Trinity College. The easiest way to reach it is to enter via Nassau Street, come through the double doors at the security of ice, and walk to the end of the Arts concourse where you will ind the registration desk. All presenters must be members of the IAAS. You can join here: iaas.ie/membership-form/ ! CONFERENCE DINNER ! The Conference Dinner will be held on Saturday evening in The Kitchen on South Anne Street, which is just a short walk from Trinity College. You can have a look at their website here: www.thekitchen.ie/. Dinner will be a set menu of two courses. If you have any dietary requirements please specify this when booking your place. All those intending to come to dinner must pay in advance. The cost is €30, which can be paid when registering for the conference. If you did not register for the Conference Dinner, but would like to attend, please speak to an organiser as soon as possible. There may still be limited spaces available.
Page !3 New Wave Coming PROGRAMME ! All Panels to take place in the Uí Chadhain lecture theatre. ! ! 9:00 - 9:30 Registration
9:30 - 9:45 Conference Opening, ! with remarks by Dr. Philip McGowan, chair of the IAAS
Panel 1 North American Identity 9:45 – 11:00 Katie Ahern, University College Cork From Hester Street to Hollywood: The Many Lives of Anzia Yezierska Kate Smyth, Trinity College Dublin “No such thing as a ‘Canadian’”: Memory and Identity in Mavis Gallant’s “In Youth is Pleasure” Alexander McDonnell, Durham University American National Identity and the Incorporation of the Other in Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884)
11:00 – 11:15 Tea/Coffee Panel 2 Consuming Gender 11:15 – 12:30 Rachael Alexander, University of Strathclyde Consuming Beauty: Mass-market Magazines and Make-up in the 1920s Laura Byrne, Trinity College Dublin “She it was to whom ads were dedicated”: Materialism, Materiality and the Feminine in Nabokov’s Lolita. Rubén Cenamor, University of Barcelona Son of Depression, Man of Anxiety: Frank Wheeler’s American Patriarchal Masculinity in Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road
Lunch ! 12:30 – 1:30 A Light lunch, with tea and coffee provided, will take place in Room 4017 in the School of English ! !
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Panel 3 U.S. Foreign Policy and the Cold War 1:30 – 2:45
Geraldine Kidd, University College Cork The Limitations of Eleanor Roosevelt’s Humanitarianism Nevin Power, University College Cork A National Energy Plan as an Element of National Security: a Cold War Perspective Jacqueline Fitzgibbon, University College Cork Reagan, Afghanistan, and the Strange Case of the “Yellow Rain.”
2:45 – 3:00 Tea/Coffee Panel 4 Literary Structures 3:00 – 4:15 Jonathan Sudholt, Brandeis University They Cannot Represent Themselves: Narrative Expropriation in Herman Melville’s Clarel David Deacon, University College Dublin ‘Atheists with Souls’: Rebecca Goldstein’s 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, American (ir)religious identity and dissent. Tim Groenland, Trinity College Dublin The Cult of the Sentence: Gordon Lish’s in luence on American Fiction
4:15 – 4.25 Break
4:25 – 4:30 Presentation by the Organising Committee of IAAS 2015 Annual Conference
4:30 – 5:30 Ignite Session
Sarah Cullen, University College Dublin Agata Frymus, University of York Erin O’Sullivan, University College Dublin Aoife Dempsey, Trinity College Dublin James Hussey, Trinity College Dublin Gavin Doyle, Trinity College Dublin
5:30 – 5:40 Conference Close
6:30 Conference Dinner:! The Kitchen, South Anne Street
Page !5 New Wave Coming ABSTRACTS & ACADEMIC BIOS ! PANEL 1 NORTH AMERICAN IDENTITY ! From Hester Street to Hollywood: The Many Lives of Anzia Yezierska Katie Ahern, University College Cork Anzia Yezierska was a Jewish-American writer, most popular in the 1920s, and best known for her texts on the struggles of immigrants in America. She achieved fame for her efforts to accurately represent the Jewish ghettoes of New York, without sentimentality, caricature or condescension. Yezierska’s success as a short story writer brought her to the attention of Samuel Goldwyn, and both Salome of the Tenements and a short story collection Hungry Hearts were adapted into ilms. Samuel Goldwyn gave her a contract of $100,000, and the press hailed her the “Sweatshop Cinderella”. In the course of her writing, Yezierska drew heavily on her own life experiences, whilst her preoccupation with the central themes of her writing - the immigrant’s struggle for equality in America, their right to education and particularly the battle facing immigrant women - led her to write about them over and over again in short story form as well as in her novels. Her constant re- drafting of favourite themes and situations leads to a detailed view of the New York ghetto whilst her ictionalised accounts of her romantic relationships explore her struggles to maintain an independent sense of self even as she tried to conform to the expectations of American society. Her two marriages, and a relationship with the philanthropist John Dewey, all appear in different forms in her writing, and her many versions of the same relationships can be seen as a sort of literary collage with the reader drawing the links between the various accounts. Therefore, in this paper I propose to explore where fact and iction have merged in the writing of Yezierska- focusing primarily on her romantic relationships as most of her work is centred around such concerns- by drawing upon close readings of the text, biographical reading and archival materials. ! Katie Ahern is a inal year PhD candidate in the School of English, UCC. Her research interests include early 20th Century American iction and Native American studies. ! “No such thing as a ‘Canadian’”: Memory and Identity in Mavis Gallant’s “In Youth is Pleasure” Kate Smyth, Trinity College Dublin Mavis Gallant, despite being relatively unknown in comparison with the Nobel Prize-winning and world-renowned Alice Munro, is of fundamental importance to the Canadian short story. In fact, she published over one hundred stories in The New Yorker, as well as fourteen story collections. Using Gallant’s semi-autobiographical Linnet Muir stories, with a particular focus on “In Youth is Pleasure”, this paper will explore the integral part the short story plays in understanding how Canadian identity (or – in an effort to branch away from defunct nationalistic thinking – identities) has been constructed. The relationship between Canada and the United States of America is complex, as it is with Britain and France. Gallant explores this complexity by looking into her own past and highlighting the ways in which memory creates and re-creates identity. Gallant writes that, around the time of WWII, “there was almost no such thing as a ‘Canadian’. You were Canadian-born, and a
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British subject, too, and you had a third label with no consular reality, like the racial tag that on Soviet passports will make a German of someone who has never been to Germany” (Home Truths 220). This paper suggests that the short story is an appropriate form for this exploration of the in luence of memory on identity because, like memory, short stories are often governed by a non-linear, constructed narrative. In investigating how such narratives are created, this paper seeks to identify how essential short stories are in relation to multifaceted notions of belonging and the diversity of identities in Canada. ! Kate Smyth is a PhD candidate at Trinity College Dublin, under the supervision of Dr Philip Coleman. Having previously obtained an M.Phil in Literatures of the Americas at TCD and an MA in Writing at NUI Galway, her current research focuses on memory, identity, and place in the Canadian short story, speci ically those of Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant, and Alice Munro. ! American National Identity and the Incorporation of the Other in Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884) Alexander Mc Donnell, Durham University Writers such as Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi and Octave Mannoni have used post-colonial psychoanalysis to analyse the interrelations between the political aspects of the colonial situation and the psychological conditions of the colonisers and colonised. However, there has been little research into the development of the national ‘psyche’ of the US as a post-colonial state during the nineteenth century in relation to its own brand of imperialism, namely Indian removal. This paper draws on the recent post-colonial psychoanalytic methodology of Ranjana Khanna to extrapolate how US nineteenth-century iction dealt with the legitimacy of national expansion and the American state pertaining to Indian displacement. I will discuss Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884) in terms of its Indian reform agenda, its critique of frontier violence and its representation of Indian autonomy. I argue that Jackson’s national ideal emerges from the con licts between her assimilationist discourse, racial attitudes and her preservation of tribal sovereignty which underscores her conception of the US as a participatory, democratic state. Jackson incorporates rather than assimilates the Indian into the nation by drawing upon and repressing his otherness to de ine a sense of national community. I will propose that her conception of American subjectivity is melancholic as a result of this dissonance. ! After studying at NUI Maynooth and the University of Kent, I am now completing a PhD on representations of Native Americans in nineteenth-century American iction at Durham University. I am currently working as a tutor for modules including Introduction to the Novel and Introduction to Drama. I was also the principal organiser of the American Imperialism and National Identity conference, which was held this year at St Aidan's College in Durham university. ! ! ! ! ! !
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PANEL 2 CONSUMING GENDER ! Consuming Beauty: Mass-market Magazines and Make-up in the 1920s Rachael Alexander, University of Strathclyde In her 1996 article on the sociocultural history of make-up, Kathy Peiss comments, “In Western culture, the face, of all parts of the human body, has been marked as particularly meaningful, a unique site of expression, beauty, and character.” This view of the face re lecting character, she argues, presented a moral dilemma when considering make-up. Given that facial beauty was associated so closely with spiritual beauty or a goodness of character, to alter the face in order to improve its appearance was seen as deception. The 1920s are widely acknowledged as the golden-age of general interest magazine publishing and print advertising, and also a period in which culture was increasingly focused on the visual. While advertising, purchase, and use of cosmetics were more noticeable, the perception of make-up as dishonest and dangerous continued to hold signi icant in luence, particularly among the more reserved middle-classes. Yet, as can be seen in the Ladies’ Home Journal and Canadian Home Journal, beauty and appearance are readily apparent concerns within titles aimed at middle-class, primarily domestic demographics. From articles to adverts, these texts encourage self-improvement in the direction of the visually idealised versions of femininity presented. As collaborative texts, magazines contain a myriad of disparate features which in luence and, at times, contradict each other. This paper will consider two of these features, advice columns and adverts, and the representation of make-up and beauty products therein. Through analysis of both editorial and commercial content, this paper will bring together literary perspectives with aspects of consumer culture theory, and in doing so; examine the ways in which beauty was positioned as achievable through consumption, how the quest for beauty was reconciled with prevailing attitudes towards make-up and vanity, and the extent to which visual ideals and their attainment were nationally speci ic. ! Rachael Alexander is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. Her research focuses on a comparative study of American and Canadian mass-market magazines in the 1920s, considering them as both collaborative texts and cultural artefacts and bringing together literary perspectives with aspects of Consumer Culture Theory. She is also the current Postgraduate Representative for the British Association for American Studies. ! “She it was to whom ads were dedicated”: Materialism, Materiality and the Feminine in Nabokov’s Lolita. Laura Byrne, Trinity College Dublin Lolita’s central relationship of middle-aged European émigré Humbert Humbert, and his twelve-year- old ‘nymphet’, Dolores Haze, has been treated by some as representing a clash between old world literary aestheticism and the new, vulgar, neon aesthetic of 1950s America. What these readings have neglected however, is the implicit gender dichotomy entailed in such an allegorical framework. This paper examines Nabokov’s treatment of American consumer culture, arguing that the author associates materialism with the feminine in what amounts to a twentieth-century approximation of the Aristotelean equation of woman with matter. I will argue that the novel presupposes a dualism, whereby masculinity is con lated with the mind, intellectualism, artistic creativity and high culture, while its opposite—the feminine, represents the body, super iciality, materialism and philistinism. In Nabokov’s microcosmic vision of capitalist culture, woman is placed either as an unthinking bundle of transitory desires, or as human commodity in the igure of the prostitute. Lolita herself comes to represent both when she eventually establishes “the system of monetary bribes” that
Page !8 New Wave Coming affords her the meagre promotion from unpaid sex slave to enslaved sex worker. Meanwhile, her mother, Charlotte Haze, exempli ies the author’s revulsion with middle-class aspiration and female pretension. Ultimately, what horri ies Nabokov is not merely woman’s materialism but her very materiality—her leshiness recalling to him his own mortality. ! Laura Byrne is a second year doctoral candidate at Trinity College Dublin, currently working on a PhD thesis entitled "Nabokov's Lolita and the Mythologies of Femininity". She holds a BA in English and Philosophy from NUI Maynooth and an MA in Gender and Writing from University College Dublin, where her inal dissertation, "The Crisis of Conformity in the Drama of Tennessee Williams", explored the playwright's treatment of the sti ling effect of heteronormative cultural ideals on sexual identity. ! Son of Depression, Man of Anxiety: Frank Wheeler’s American Patriarchal Masculinity in Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road Rubén Cenamor, University of Barcelona The United States in the 1950s were mainly sexist and misogynist. Indeed, most scholars and feminists, including Elaine May and Betty Friedan agree that this decade was especially dif icult for women since the North-American patriarchal society of the time forced them to return to the role of submissive housewives after being, to a certain extent, liberated thanks to WWII. Furthermore, in the 1950s the hegemonic masculinity of the time demanded men to become the sole breadwinners and the patriarchs of their homes. Thus, there is no doubt that the United States in the 1950s advocated for a return to a more traditional gender hierarchy and roles. Richard Yates’ debut novel, Revolutionary Road, has been regarded as a novel which portrays the 1950s typical suburban life and its problems (Naparsteck, 35: 2012; Moreno, 85: 2004) as well as it presents the two main characters as “types” of the time (Ford 2000). That is, these scholars regard Revolutionary Road as a realistic novel that depicts rather than criticizes the society of its time. The irst one to draw attention to how Revolutionary Road was concerned with and criticized the United States’ gender inequality in the 1950s was Garcia-Avello. Indeed, she rightly argues that the novel “denuncia la alteridad de la mujer en este periodo [the 1950s]” (291). These interpretations, enriching and important as they are, seem to me to be insuf icient to fully understand the complexities of Revolutionary Road, since none of them seem to completely capture the obsession regarding manliness that Frank experiences, which I believe, is the key theme of the novel, especially since the narrator makes sure that the reader loathes this obsession. That is, I believe that the novel is mainly concerned with denouncing this obsession with conservative manliness. Thus, my intention in this essay is to examine Revolutionary Road through the lens of Masculinities Studies to argue that the novel criticizes the hegemonic, patriarchal and misogynist masculinity of the time and, more importantly, advocates for new alternative, more egalitarian and pro-feminist models of masculinity. ! PhD student at the University of Barcelona. Since May 2014 he is one of the members of the Steering Committee of the EAAS Women's Network. His research focuses on the representation of (alternative) masculinities in American literature written between 1930 and 1960, with particular interest in the work of Richard Yates. He has given papers in various international conferences and has published in different journals. He has also received prestigious awards such as the "Premi Extraordinari de Llicenciatura en Filologia Anglesa" (award given to the best student of the BA in English Philology) ! ! !
Page !9 New Wave Coming ! PANEL 3 U.S. FOREIGN POLICY & THE COLD WAR ! The Limitations of Eleanor Roosevelt's Humanitarianism Geraldine Kidd, University College Cork Eleanor Roosevelt, an iconic igure in American twentieth century political life, has been lauded as a model of humanitarianism by her fellow citizens and celebrated as the far-sighted engineer of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, (UDHR). She was esteemed for her efforts on behalf of the disadvantaged, in particular the African-Americans, as she shaped public opinion towards the institution of democratic ideals and practices. In refutation of this one-dimensional presentation of her complex character, this paper undertakes a reassessment of her reputation based upon her encounters with ‘others’ abroad. In particular, it considers the marginalised Palestinians whom, in 1947, she regarded as a ‘nomadic people leading simple lives’ as she oversaw their dispossession. She overlooked their humanity while openly favouring Jewish usurpation of Palestinian territories. With this approach she disclosed the dichotomies of her humanitarianism and demonstrated the extent to which she worked within the parameters of the dominant cultural discourse, including its latent imperialism, its Orientalism and its paternalism. Her reactions simulated the values and ideologies of her society and re lected the major personal in luences on her, including that of her husband, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, regarding the Jews and the Palestinians. Where she has been extolled for her greatness, her limitations have been ignored. This paper illustrates that the cultural traits of her elite social milieu had conditioned her thinking to enable the ready absorption of the racisms of the period. She has been lauded for her evolution past the ubiquitous anti-Semitism of the period which coincided with the ‘whitening’ of the Jews yet simultaneously she denigrated the less white Palestinians much to their detriment and certainly to the detriment of human rights. Her partisanship and her biases cast a shadow on her conception of human rights and cast doubt on her entitlement to a lofty position amongst the pantheon of American heroes.” ! I am a PhD student supervised by Professor David Ryan of UCC and am intending to submit my dissertation on Eleanor Roosevelt, Israel and Palestine by the year's end. I am interested in US Foreign Policy, in particular of the the latter half of the twentieth century and have been teaching in UCC on aspects of the Cold War. ! A national energy plan as an element of national security: a Cold War perspective. Nevin Power, University College Cork In January 1977 Jimmy Carter stood in freezing temperatures in Washington DC to deliver his inaugural address as newly sworn-in President of the United States. Throughout that winter a severe natural gas shortage had hit many parts of the US, closing schools and factories and leaving whole towns without adequate heating. On the back of this Carter committed himself, through the inaugural address, to submitting a comprehensive National Energy Plan to Congress within ninety days. This paper will consider the development of the National Energy Plan through a Cold War lens, seeing it as not just an important domestic development but also a very important event within US foreign policy as well.
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With US reliance on oil from the Middle East having grown to dangerous levels since 1973 and concerns that the Soviet Union would soon be competing for Middle East oil by the late 1980s, a National Energy Plan was to be an integral part of US security considerations within the overall Cold War. By tracing the motivations which drove Carter, and his energy advisor, former Secretary of Defence James Schlesinger, to concentrate on energy, the paper will show how signi icant a development it was within the Cold War international environment. The US reliance on Middle East oil had to be reduced if future con lict over Middle East oil with Moscow was to be avoided but it also had implications for US allies within the Cold War who were struggling with high oil prices. America’s own reliance was also contributing to a weakening economy and showing the US as weak. As such the National Energy Plan was a key piece in the Cold War puzzle. ! Nevin Power is a PhD student in the School of History at University College Cork. His project concentrates on the 1979 crisis and the topic of energy in general throughout the presidency of Jimmy Carter. He has previously completed a BA and an MA in US foreign policy history at University College Cork. ! ! Reagan, Afghanistan and the Strange Case of the ‘Yellow Rain’ Jacqueline Fitzgibbon, University College Cork The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on 24 December1979, and subsequent occupation for most of the 1980s, received widespread international coverage, at least initially. However, interest in the far- lung con lict soon waned. Such indifference threatened effective aid to the Afghan resistance or mujahedeen whom, it was felt by their US supporters, had the potential to keep their Cold War rivals bogged down in Afghanistan in a costly and politically damaging ‘Vietnam-like’ quagmire. To counter this, the mujahedeen’s American allies in private voluntary organisations (PVOs), Congress and, from 1981, within the Reagan Administration turned to public diplomacy and propaganda to re-ignite public interest and ensure continued aid. This paper focuses on just one aspect of what was a wide-ranging propaganda programme that would last the duration of the con lict – the ‘yellow rain’ controversy. This involved allegations that the Red Army had deployed a chemical weapon in Afghanistan described as a ‘yellow rain’ in contravention of the Geneva Protocol on Chemical and Biological Weapons and other arms talks, which were, at the time, under negotiation. The Reagan administration accused the Soviets of killing over 3,000 Afghans with it. Eminent scientists argued it was bee faeces. Coincidently, at this time, the administration hoped to convince Congress to approve the regeneration of US chemical weapons stocks – President Nixon had halted the US chemical weapons’ programme back in 1969. Ultimately, no hard evidence to support the ‘yellow rain’ allegations was ever produced but they continued to be cited by the Reagan administration and American pro-mujahedeen private organisations and were never of icially withdrawn by the US.” ! I am a inal year postgraduate student in the School of History, UCC and Irish Research Council, Government of Ireland Scholar, 2012 - 2014. My work focuses on the contemporary history of US foreign relations, particularly the use of propaganda and public diplomacy as an instrument of foreign policy. My PhD investigates Reagan administration's propaganda programmes centred on the Afghan con lict (1979 -1989) and their impact on the course of that war. ! ! !
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! PANEL 4 LITERARY STRUCTURES ! They Cannot Represent Themselves: Narrative Expropriation in Herman Melville’s Clarel Jonathan Sudholt, Brandeis University Herman Melville engaged with the issue of the ownership of narratives throughout his career, but nowhere more than in his long poem, Clarel (1876). Here he repeatedly stages scenes in which a character begins to tell a story, only for the poem’s narrator to interrupt the character and tell the story himself. Melville constructs a narrator who always knows better than the individuals who have experienced the event under discussion. And on each occasion of narrative expropriation, the narrator reminds the reader that the version he or she is reading is very different from the one that the poem’s characters hear. As the poem progresses, however, the narrator gradually begins to relinquish control, even allowing one of his least articulate characters, a Greek sailor, to tell a story without any interference at all. The poem therefore seems to be heading for a liberating climax. But Melville refuses us this satisfaction. Shortly before the end of the poem, he undoes all the work he seemed to be doing with regard to narrative ownership by allowing the narrator to take one last story away from a character. I will argue that Melville uses these narrative expropriations to criticize the alarming oversimpli ications common to American political discourse. The narrator’s greater eloquence produces a clearer representation of a past event, but that, for Melville, is not entirely to the audience’s bene it. The clarity toward which the narrator thinks he is obliged to strive is in Melville’s poem a miniature version of the American inclination toward simplistic, black-and-white thinking, which then leads to intellectual and cultural homogenization and the suppression of marginalized voices. 100 years before the coining of the term “sound bite,” Melville warned that the demand for conveniently packaged narratives threatened to invalidate America’s much-vaunted constitutional guarantee of the freedom of speech. ! Jonathan Sudholt is a Ph.D. candidate at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. He is writing a dissertation on alternative constructions of sentimentalism in the nineteenth-century American sentimental novel. He has a B.A. in English from Yale University. ! ‘Atheists with Souls’: Rebecca Goldstein’s 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, American (ir)religious identity and dissent. David Deacon, University College Dublin “Religion is, once more, haunting the imagination of the West.” With this sentiment, Graham Ward offered a summation of what has come to be deem the “Post-secular Age” by Jurgen Habermas, amongst other scholars. The post 9/11 world has seen a probelatisation of the general conception of a modernity which was thought to be conducive with an increasingly secular public sphere. Talal Asad has offered a degree of mediation in his 2003 text Formations of the Secular, which proposes a reappraisal of pluralism and its problematic relationship with a secularity, which is equally as polarised as its religious counterpart. The theory of secular and irreligious experience has been further diversi ied in recent years by Anthony B Pinn and Sikivu Hutchinson, who have valiantly argued for a recognition of the prejudice against African-American Humanism in the greater secular sphere. Through their valuable efforts, the biases of secularity have been challenged and deconstructed, in a manner which re lects the luctuating experiences of religious and irreligious identity and their often tensioned interactions in contemporary America.
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Religious identity, and an aversion to it, is often perceived as a derisive subject. Rebecca Goldstein’s 2010 novel, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, is the most direct (and recent) explication through iction of the modern American atheistic identity, its social repercussions and its rhetoric. Goldstein’s protagonist, a promising academic and psychologist, has “debunked” God as a product of what he deems “religious illusion,” and is embroiled in the social repercussions of his arguments in tandem with the congratulation of the receptive academic community. Aspects of American religious identity, its current cultural stance and its detractors are all represented and provided a voice which this paper will endeavour to dissect and analyse. In doing so an under- explored aspect of contemporary American society and its writing will be engaged with a view to expounding a prescient mode of what James Baldwin considered an indelible “right to criticise” in American discourse. ! David is a third year PhD student at University College Dublin. His thesis focuses on twenty- irst century American literature, and explores aspects of secularism, Post-secularism, ethics and (ir)religiosity. ! ! The Cult of the Sentence: Gordon Lish’s in luence on American Fiction Tim Groenland, Trinity College Dublin Gordon Lish has, in his activities as writer, editor and teacher, been actively involved in the world of American iction since the 1950s. In that time, he has edited and overseen the publication of works by many of the major writers of postwar American iction – most notably as editor at Esquire magazine and Knopf – and produced a substantial body of his own writing. Lish is best known for his controversial editing of Raymond Carver’s early stories (he was described by his friend Don DeLillo as “famous for all the wrong reasons”), but an examination of archival material shows that as editor he also played a major role in the development of canonical works of minimalist iction by writers such as Mary Robison as well as award-winning iction by, for example, Barry Hannah and Harold Brodkey. His teaching work (at Columbia and Yale and in private seminars) was arguably as in luential; Lish’s writing workshops are legendary for the way in which they relentlessly encouraged what one former student described as “the cult of the sentence”, and several of his former students (Ben Marcus and Sam Lipsyte, for example) have themselves gone on to teach in prestigious MFA programs. In this paper I will draw on manuscripts from Lish’s archive in order to examine his editing and teaching methods and suggest the way in which these have helped to shape the work of contemporary writers. Viewing Lish’s career across time and surveying his diverse literary endeavours allows us to identify something like a coherent aesthetic vision and to begin to trace an in luence that continues to reverberate through American iction. ! Tim Groenland is currently completing a PhD, supported by the Irish Research Council, in Trinity College Dublin. His thesis examines issues of editing and authorship in the iction of Raymond Carver and David Foster Wallace; it traces the role of editorial processes in some of their key works and examines the issues raised for critical interpretation. !
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