Wednesday, October 29
1:30-4:30 Executive Council Retreat
4:00-7:00 Registration
5:15-6:30 Executive Council Dinner
7:00-8:30 Welcome: Krista Comer, Rice University, WLA
President
Readings
by Artists/Activitists from “Voices Breaking Boundaries”
8:30-9:30 Opening Reception
9:45 Film Screening: Come and Take It Day
(2002)
Introduction:
Priscilla Ybarra, Rice University
Q&A
with Director Jim Mendiola
Thursday, October 30
8:00-4:00 Registration
9:00-5:00 Book
Exhibit
8:00-9:30 Session
A
Indigenous Women Speak
Chair: P. Jane Hafen, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
P. Jane Hafen, University of
Nevada, Las Vegas: “Native Matters in the Academy: Looking for Apaches”
Gwen W. Griffin, Minnesota State University, Mankato: “Reclaiming Breath in Susan Power’s Roofwalker”
Domino Renee Perez, University of Texas at Austin: “Native Theory, Native Text: Nahualli and I Lak’ech or Indigenous Doubling in Rudolfo Anaya’s Albuquerque”
Joann Quiñones-Perdomo, Minnesota State University, Mankato: “The West as Civil Rights Frontier in African American Literature”
Recovering Regional Chicano/a Literature
Chair: Jesse Alemán, University of New Mexico
Lillian Gorman, University of New Mexico: “Expressions of Ambivalence: The Implications of Statehood in Nuevomexicano Narrative”
Tonya Troske, University of
New Mexico: “The Inventive Racialization of Billy the Kid”
Emily Beenen, University of New Mexico: “Critical Race Theory and the Limits of Chicano/a Literary History”
Michelle P. Baca, University of New Mexico: “Epic History, Novelistic Discourse: Fray Angelico Chavez’s Regional Narrative, La Conquistadora”
On Texas, Local Heroes, and the “Nature” of the Place
Chair: Walter Isle, Rice University
Tom Bailey, Western Michigan
University: “Houston in John Forsythe’s Local Hero”
Terrell Dixon, University of
Houston: “Donald Barthelme and the ‘Nature’ of Houston”
Walter Isle, Rice University: “Dave Galloway, Big Bend Desert Survivalist”
Lisa Slappey, Rice University: “Violence and Cultural Change in John Graves’s Elegy Goodbye to a River”
Negotiating Racial Stereotypes in/of Western Film
Chair: Nancy Cook, University of Rhode Island
Vincent Perez, University of Nevada, Las Vegas: “Mexican Los Angeles in Hollywood’s Golden Era: The Autobiography of Anthony Quinn and Leo Carrillo”
Matt Wanat, Denison University: “Point of View and the Rhetoric of Hombre (1967)”
Michael K. Johnson, University of Maine at Farmington: “Chris Eyre: Adapting the Literary West for Film”
Nicolas Witschi, Western Michigan University: “‘Clint Eastwood? What kind of stupid name is that?’: Back to the Future III, Naming Land, and the Revisionist Westerns of the 1990s”
Global Environmentalism and the Forging of New Epistemologies
Chair: Vanessa Hall, Purdue University
Joshua Dolezal, University of Nebraska-Lincoln: “The New Ceremony of Consilience: Science and Storytelling According to Leslie Marmon Silko and Stephen Jay Gould”
Leigh Holmes, Cameron University: “Knowledge and Globalism in Gretel Ehrlich’s Islands, Universe, Home”
Vanessa Hall, Purdue University: “‘As If A Story Would Guide Us’: Aesthetic and Narrative Strategies of Resistance in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead and Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms”
Sarah Wald, Brown University: “What the Palm Trees Are For: Linking Ecology, Eco-Criticism and Post-Positivist Realism in Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange and Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus”
Studies in the New West
Chair: Melody Graulich, Utah State University
Stacy Coyle, “The New Decadent West: Annie Proulx and ‘The Governors of Wyoming’”
Jenny Emery Davidson,
University of Utah: “Landscapes in Limbo: Region and Religion in the West’s
Changing Wilderness”
Elizabeth Wright,
Pennsylvania State University, Hazelton: “‘A Happy Landscape’: Transnational
Migration in Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters”
Melody Graulich, Utah State University: “‘I’m just a lonesome Korean cowgirl’: Adoption and National Identity”
Creative Reading – Memory and Memoir
Chair: Sue Maher, University of Nebraska, Omaha
Laurie Clements Lambeth, University of Houston: “Fluid on the Brain”
Jackie Pugh Kogan,
California State University, Northridge: “What Exists Before Memory: A
Narrative in Five Generations”
Carmen Pearson, University of Arizona: “Resurrecting the Unremembered”
9:30-10:00 Coffee
Break
10:00-11:30 Session
B
Robinson Jeffers: Inveterate Prophet of Change and Ecological Wholeness
Chair: Robert Brophy, California State University, Long Beach
Dirk Aardsma, University of Colorado, Boulder: “Toward a ‘Poetics of Place’”
John Cusatis, University of
South Carolina, Columbia: “Destined for the West: the Jungian Aspect in Cather
and Jeffers”
Pierre Lagayetten,
University of Paris IV, Sorbonne: “Jeffers’s California as a Paradigm of U.S.
Hegemonic Worldview”
Robert Brophy, California State University, Long Beach: “Jeffers’s West as a Metaphor for the 21st Century”
Lives in Crisis: Women’s Stories of Domestic Violence in the West
Chair: Lillian Schlissel, State University of New York
Lillian Schlissel, State
University of New York: “Readings from Smedley, Sykes, Austin, and Sandoz”
Mary Clearman Blew, University of Idaho: “A Writing Death: Grace Stone Coates and the Perils of Regionalism”
Debra Magpie Earling,
University of Montana: “Readings from her novel Perma Red”
Janet Campbell Hale, Desmet, Idaho: “Readings from her novel Bloodlines”
The “Place” of Aesthetics in Western Studies
Chair: Scott Derrick, Rice University
Nat Lewis, St. Michael’s College: “Remedial Aesthetics”
Stephen Tatum, University of Utah: “Orphaned Beauty”
William R. Handley, University of Southern California: “Pleasing Form”
Bonney MacDonald, Union College: “Beauty in Motion: Reevaluating a Frontier Aesthetic”
Cruising the Barrios and Reservations: Story Stealers, Wannabes, Tourists
Chair: José F. Aranda, Jr., Rice University
Marcial González, University of Washington, Seattle: “Authenticity and the Form of the Novel: Danny Santiago’s Famous All Over Town”
Rachel Rich, Utah State University: “Reckoning With Difference: Cultural Tourism in Anaya’s Bless Me Ultima”
Mckenzi Mckenzie, University of Arizona, Tucson: “White Kid(s) Read(s) the Indian(s): A Rhetorical Analysis of ‘Paths of Life,’ A Self-Reflexive Ethnographic Exhibit of Ten Native American Tribes of the Southwest”
Linda Lizut Helstern, University of Texas-Pan American: “Steal This Book! Dimensions of Textuality in the Novels of Louis Owens”
Art, Activism, Pedagogy: Decolonizing Western Master Tropes
Chair: Vincent Perez, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Tace Hedrick, University of
Florida: “Inside & Outside of the Academy: Keywords in Anzaldúa’s Borderlands”
Jeff Berglund, Northern
Arizona University: “Rememories of Hwééldi: Diné Writing”
Ryan Hediger, University of Oregon: “Terry Tempest Williams’ Physical Language”
Jennifer Lynn Stoever, University of Southern California: “‘Re-Storying’ Los Angeles: Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange and the Artistry of Community”
Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Variations on the “Regeneration through Violence” Thesis
Chair: Gioia Woods, Northern Arizona University
Gioia Woods, Northern
Arizona University: “How the Myth was Spun: Cowboys, Indians, and Iraq”
Nell Sullivan, University of Houston, Downtown: “Sovereignty, Psychosis, and Bare Life in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian”
David Mogen, Colorado State University: “Louis Owens and The Indian’s Escape from Gothic”
Rod Romesburg, Embry-Riddle
Aeronautical University: “Regeneration through Vampirism: Buffy the Vampire
Slayer’s New Frontier”
Paths Less Taken in Western
Criticism: Comparativism, Gothicism, Technology Studies, Comics
Chair: Mark Busby, Southwest Texas State University
Tom Hillard, University of
Arizona: “The Frontier World of Edgar Huntly: Towards a Theory of a
Nature Gothic”
John Donahue, Champlain Regional University: “Jay Gatsby and Pedro Paramo, Dreamers, Lovers, Fools”
Kris Peleg, “Contemplating Digital Evidence: Challenges for Biography”
Jason Gallagher, University
of Illinois: “Krazy Kat: Comics in the Desert Southwest of the 1920s
& 1930s”
Chair: Amelia de la Luz Montes, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Ben Olguin, University of Texas, San Antonio: “Jimmy Santiago Baca and the Chicano Picaresque”
Frederick Aldama, University
of Colorado, Boulder: “Re-theorizing the ‘Real’ in the Short Stories of
Dagoberto Gilb and Luis Rodriguez”
Rebecca Moreno, UC Berkeley: “The Body Remains: Sacrifice and Memory in Alejandro Morales’ The Brick People and Arturo Islas’ The Rain God”
Elizabeth Fenton, Rice University: “Forgetting the Priest and the Devil: Confession and the Construction of Sexual Truth in Sor Juana’s Second Dream”
Creative Reading – On New Landscapes: Love-Hate Meditations
Chair: Michael L. Johnson, University of Kansas
Hal Crimmel, Weber State University, Ogden Utah: “The Gift of Clouds”
Michael L. Johnson, University of Kansas: “Don’t Mess With Texas: Love-Hate Poems on the Lone-Star State”
John Bennion, Brigham Young University: “Selections from Falling Toward Heaven”
11:30-12:45 Past Presidents’ Luncheon
1:00-2:00 Plenary Session: Past President’s Address, “Why in the World Study Diaries: A Tale of the Road Less Traveled”
Introduction: Melody Graulich, Utah
State University
Judy Nolte Temple, University of
Arizona, Immediate Past President
2:15-3:45 Plenary Session: “The Ethnicity of Environment”
Soenke Zehle, Transcultural Anglophone
Studies, Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken, Germany: “Integrating
‘Regional’ Environmental Justice Issues Into Transnational Networks: Virtual
Water and the Hydro-Politics of IT Development”
Other Speakers: TBA
3:45-4:15 Coffee Break
4:15-5:30 Session
C
Chair: Barbara Nelson, Sul Ross State University
Twister Marquiss, Southwest Texas State University: “Westward Ho! (Chi Minh): Tim O’Brien and the Demise of the American Cowboy Mythos”
Pat Matteson, Southern Utah University: “Gaping Fish or Chameleon?: Andrew X. Pham’s Cycle of Passage in Catfish and Mandala”
Michael Hobbs, Northwest Missouri State University: “West of the Imagination: Walt McDonald’s ‘Aesthetic du Mal’”
The Frontier, the Chicana, and the Third Space: The Discomfort of History and Society
Chair: Andrea Tinnemeyer, Utah State University
Maria C. Gonzalez, University of Houston: “Sexuality and the Chicana Historical Novel: Sor Juana’s Other Dream”
Elizabeth Kessler Rodriguez, California State University: “Coatlique Reincarnated: Las Artistas Guadalupanas y las Otras”
Anne Perrin, University of Houston: “Soul-Speech: Issues of Performance and Control in the Spiritual Journals of 19th Century Frontier Women”
“Real” Places, Ghost Spaces, and the Problem of Sustainability
Chair: Ann Ronald, University of Nevada, Reno
Cheryll Glotfelty,
University of Nevada, Reno: “Urban Environmentalism and Dead Cities: Reading
Ghost Towns”
Anna Guiffre, Utah State University: “‘Tain’t no bottom in that wishin’ well…’”
David G. Jurkiewicz, University of Tulsa: “The Illinois River: Model for Environmental Concerns”
The Regional Politics of Music
Chair: John Gonzáles, University of Texas, Austin
Shawn Holliday, Alice Lloyd College: “Lawson Fusao Inada, West Coast Jazz, and the Politics of Identity Formation”
Richard Hunt, Delaware Valley College: “‘Save a Few for Lefty Too’: The Matter of Judgment in the Songs of Townes Van Zandt”
Philip R. Coleman-Hull,
Bethany College: “Lyrical Communication: Sinclair Ross’s Use of Music in Sawbones
Memorial”
Chair: Stephen Tatum, University of Utah
Marissa Lopez, University of California, Berkeley: “The Wild, Wild West: Hollywood and Mexican Migrant Labor”
Matt Burkhart, University of Arizona: “Rewriting the West(ern): Shane, Jane, and Agricultural Change in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine”
Molly Robey, Rice University: “Eminem Knocks Out Hollywood: Racial Crossdressing, White Adulthood, and the Film Industry”
“All of Us Remembering What We Have Heard Together”: Tensions between Western Narrative Forms and Tribal Storytelling
Chair: Lisa Slappey, Rice University
Bernard Alan Hirsch, University of Kansas: “‘A Community of Words’: Self and Story in American Indian Autobiographical Writing”
John Miller-Purrenhage,
Michigan State University: “Two Ways of Coming Home in Louise Erdrich’s Love
Medicine”
Greg Wright, University of Nevada, Las Vegas: “Rethinking Literary Theory in James Welch’s The Heartsong of Charging Elk”
Roundtable: Canonicity, Commercialism, and Hipness in Contemporary Southwestern Literature
Conveners: David Dunaway, University of New Mexcio
Sara Spurgeon, University of Arizona
The experience of
researching and producing a revised edition of Writing the Southwest
(2003, University of New Mexico Press) forced this roundtable’s conveners to
tackle issues of canonicity and commercial appeal. What does it mean to be a marginalized writer within a
marginalized canon? Has
Western/Southwestern literature now become so hip that it is trendy and not
marginal at all?
Discussion: Audience
5:30-7:00 Graduate Student Reception
Chicano/a
Studies & Friends Reception
7:30-9:00 An Evening Sandra Cisneros,
Recipient of WLA’s Distinguished Achievement Award for Literature
Featuring
Special Guest, Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say
Sponsored by Rice
University President’s and Provost’s Offices
Award
Presentation: WLA President Krista Comer, Rice University
9:00 Reception and Book Signing for WLA
Members and Their Guests (Not open to the public)
8:00-4:00 Registration
9:00-5:00 Book Exhibit
Beyond Binaries: Multiplying Genders and Sexualities in American Indian Literatures
Chair: Lisa Tatonetti, University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh
Lisa Tatonetti, University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh: “Sovereignty and Sexuality in Craig Womack’s Drowning in Fire”
Julie Stockwell, University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh: “Converting Agnes: The Female Priest as a Two-Spirit in Louise Erdrich’s The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse”
Guy Witzel, University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh: “Dismantling The Duke: Complicated Sexual Identities in Sherman Alexie’s The Toughest Indian in the World”
Patrice Hollrah, University of Nevada, Las Vegas: “The Slippery Slope of Sexual Orientation in the Novels of Louise Erdrich”
The Legacy of 1848
Chair: David Weber, Southern Methodist University
Jesse Alemán, University of New Mexico: “The (M)other Country: Mexico, the U.S., and the Birth of a National Narrative, 1835-45”
John M. González, University of Texas at Austin: “The Difference Between 1848 and 1938: Coloniality and Postcoloniality in Américo Paredes’s George Washington Gomez”
Spencer Herrera, University of New Mexico: “Territorial Regionalism: ‘Los Tejanos’ and New Mexican Regional Identity”
Andrea Tinnemeyer, Utah State University: “Mis(s) Taken: The Identity Politics of Captivity Narratives After 1848”
The Gender of “Lesser” Literatures: Narrating Female Stories in Diaries and Young People’s Fiction
Chair: Margaret Doane, California State University, San Bernardino
Margaret Doane, California
State University, San Bernardino: “Reality Rewritten and Romanticized in the
Short Stories of May Stewart Doane”
Rebecca Fiend, James Madison
University: “Boston in Wisconsin: The Domestic Sphere of Caddie Woodlawn and
the ‘Settling’ of the American West”
Jennifer Adkison, Idaho State University: “‘These is my words’…or are they?: Constructing Western Women’s Lives in Two Contemporary Novels”
Living Up to the Fictions of Authenticity
Chair: Tara Penry, Boise State University
Jefferson D. Slagle, Ohio
State University: “America Unscripted; Or, The Absolute Fake: History, Fiction,
and Authenticity in the Wild West”
Michael Brown, Creighton University: “Foucault’s Flourish and the New Western Regionalism: Why Authenticity to Place can Be Maximally Subversive”
Suzanne Bost, Southern Methodist University: “I Left My Authenticity in New Mexico: ‘Crippled’ Xicanisma and Cold Chicago Winters in the Work of Ana Castillo”
Amy Hamilton, University of Arizona: “Love, Language, and Lowriders: Cultural Essentialism and Self-Creation Michele Serros’ Chicana Falsa and How to be a Chicana Role Model”
Taking the Exceptionalism Out of Western Land, “Natives,” and Ecology
Chair: Susan Kollin, Montana State University
Susan Kollin, Montana State
University: “‘In the living margin between ice and blood…’: Feminist Ecopolitics
in Sherry Simpson’s The Way Winter Comes”
Vivian Chin, Mills College:
“Starring Hillary Chan: The Politics of Space and Mobility in Hawaiian
Getaway, an Optic Nerve Comic”
James Barilla, UC Davis: “Bio-Invasion Discourse and Hybridity in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes”
J. Gerard Dollar, Siena College: “So Far From God, So Far From Home: Ana Castillo and the Chicana Search for Origins”
WAY South, WAY West: Writing from Aotearoa/New Zealand and Antarctica
Chair: Judy Nolte Temple
Chadwick Allen, Ohio State University: “Kia Hoki ki te Whenua: Potiki and the New Mäori Frontier”
Danny Keenan, Massey University, New Zealand: “Reading Whale Writer as a Pastoral Mäori Film”
Leslie Roberts, Canterbury
University, New Zealand: “Remembering Out Loud: De-icing Antarctic Oral
Tradition”
Judy Nolte Temple, University of Arizona: “Negotiating Difference: 19th Century Missionary Women’s Potrayals of Self and ‘Others’”
Decentering Traditional Notions of the American West: Language, Culture, Geography, Politics
Chair: Gioia Woods, Northern Arizona University
Gioia Woods, Northern
Arizona University: “Off the Plate: Gary Nabhan and the Decentering of the
American West”
Ann Kennedy, Rice University: “Bitter Geographies: Gender, Nation, and the Frontier in Agnes Smedley”
Karen Ramirez, University of Colorado, Boulder: “Narrative Mappings of the Land as Space, Place, and Partner in Willa Cather’s My Ántonia”
David Messmer, Rice University: “The White, White West: Jack Kerouac’s Racialized Relocation of Narrative in The Subterraneans”
Creative Reading – Spectator Sports, Nonspectator Sports, and a Bit of Comic Relief
Chair: Ann Putnam, University of Puget Sound
Seth Bovey, Louisiana State
University, Alexandria: “Trespassers”
Twister Marquiss, Southwest
Texas State University: “Spectator Sports”
Lawrence Coates, Bowling Green State University: “Readings from The Master of Monterey”
9:30-10:00 Coffee
Break
10:00-12:00 WLA Distinguished Achievement
Award Plenary (Award to be presented at the awards banquet)
Featuring: José
David Saldívar, Ramón Saldívar, and Sonia Saldívar-Hull
Introduction:
WLA President Krista Comer, Rice University
12:00-1:30 Post-Plenary Luncheon & Conversation
1:30-2:45 Session
E
Lost in the Supermarket
Anne L. Kaufman, University of Maryland: “‘Lost in the Supermarket’: Literature of the Local in Duncan, McPhee, and Produce Signs”
Nancy Cook, University of Rhode Island: “‘To Market, to Market’: Fast Food, Slow Food, and the Edible West”
Laurie Ricou, University of British Columbia: “Culinarily Homeless”
Modernism, Urbanism, and
“Genius” in Cather
Chair: Robert Thacker, St. Lawrence University
Catherine Holmes, College of
Charleston: “‘Poisonous Reticence’: Modernist Experience and Expression in One
of Ours”
Matthias Schubnell, University of the Incarnate Word: “Willa Cather’s Quarrel with Urbanism”
Matthew Hokom, Fairmont State College: “Roman Conceptions of Genius in Cather’s O Pioneers!”
Narrative and Healing From the East
Chair: Nancy Nelson, Henry
Ford Community College
Nancy Nelson, Henry Ford Community College: “The ‘Enormity’ of the Moment: Bruce Weigl’s Buddhist Journey in The Circle of Hanh”
Peter Kearly, Henry Ford Community College: “Having a Bone to Pick: Grieving Female Labor Abuses in Chinatown”
Ed Demerly, Henry Ford Community College: “Eastern Thoughts in the Western World: Butler’s Vietnamese Voice”
Lyrical Borderlands
Chair: David Fenimore, University of Nevada, Reno
O. Alan Weltzien, Western Montana University: “Accordion North and South: Flaco Jimenez, TexMex, and New Fusions”
Christine Hill Smith, Longmont, Colorado: “‘I’m headed for the border, man, I’m going down in style’: Borders, Freedom(s), and the (Folk) Music of Texan Robert Earl Keen, Jr.”
David Fenimore, University of Nevada, Reno: “‘No soy un desarraigado’: The Narcocorrido Returns to Its Roots”
Charles Bowden: Probing the Borderlands
Chair: David Cremean, Black
Hills State University
David Cremean, Black Hills State University: “Take It To the Limit, but Never Take It Easy: Charles Bowden and the Artifice of Borderlands Literal and Metaphorical”
Robert Headly, Southern State Community College: “Charles Bowden: Crossing the Borders Between the Wilderness and the Urban, the Pre-Modern and the Modern”
Christine Shearer-Cremean, Black Hills State University: “Capitalism as Murder, Incorporated: The Murdered Women of Mexico in Charles Bowden’s Juarez: The Laboratory of Our Future”
Power Struggles and Violence a la Peckinpah and McCarthy
Chair: Leonard Engel, Quinnipiac University
Joint Presentation - Leonard Engel and John Gourlie, Quinnipiac University: “A Terrible Beauty is Born: The Death Scenes in Sam Peckinpah’s Major Westerns” (two time slots)
Ken Melichar, Piedmont College: “A Socio-Cultural Comparative Study of McCarthy and Peckinpah”
American Fathers, Sons, and
Their Daughters
Chair: TBA
Gary Scharnhorst, University of New Mexico: “Moodie, My Dad, Allen Ginsberg, and Me: Reflections on Wichita and ‘Wichita Vortex Sutra’”
Stephen Cook, California State University, Sacramento: “An American Son - A Family Memoir and Oral History”
New Directions in Western
Studies
Chair: TBA
Lourdes Alberto, Rice University: “The Secret Mexico: The Erotics of Touring the ‘Indigenous’”
Matt Herman, Stone Child College: “Receiving Indian Literature: Sherman Alexie Teaches Reviewers a Few Lessons”
Ramón Javier Guerra, University of Nebraska. Lincoln: “A Border Ballad Hero As Inspiration: An Analysis of Resistant Action in Américo Paredes’ With His Pistol in His Hand”
2:45-3:15 Coffee Break
3:15-4:30 Session
F
Imagining a Chicano/a Film Subject Unburdened by Cultural Nationalism: Jim Mendiola’s Come and Take it Day
Chair: Kirsten Ostherr, Rice University
Juan J. Alonzo, Texas
A&M: “Contingency and Critique in Come and Take It Day”
Trinidad Gonzalez, University of Houston: “Come and Take it Day: a Continuation Of Counter-Discourse in the 21st Century”
Priscilla Solis Ybarra, Rice University: “Just telling some (hi)stories: Exploring Contemporary Chicana/o Identity in Jim Mendiola’s Come and Take It Day”
Chair: Neil Campbell, University of Derby, United Kingdom
Joshua Damu Smith, University of Southern California: “Re-thinking Race and Region: Miscegenation and Frontier Adventurism in Black Mystery and Science Fiction”
Theresa Delgadillo, University of Notre Dame: “‘Which collectivity does the daughter of a dark-skinned mother listen to?’: African Diaspora and the Borderlands”
María Cotera, University of Michigan: “Jovita Gonzalez and the Politics of Collaboration”
Expanding Critical Boundaries: Cather Studies, Chicano/a Studies, American Indian Studies
Chair: Janis Stout, Texas
A&M University
Janis Stout, Texas A&M
University: “Brown, White, and Cather: A Call for a Race-Centered Cather
Studies”
Reginald Dyck, Capital University: “Love Medicine for Class Conflict”
Amelia de la Luz Montes, University of Nebraska, Lincoln: “New Chicana and Latina Geographic Perspectives: Days of Awe and Caramelo”
Masculinity and Femininity/Western Spaces/Honor
Chair: Forrest Robinson,
University of California, Santa Cruz
Virgil Mathes, University of
New Mexico: “The Hermeneutics of the Duel: Understanding the Other through Coda
Duello”
Keri Overall, DeVry
University: “Go West Young Man? The West as Feminine Comforter and Redeemer in
the Works of Robert Penn Warren”
Forrest Robinson, University of California, Santa Cruz: “Western Homo Hystericus: Preliminary Reflections”
Revising 19th Century Folklore and Public Culture
Chair: Bonney MacDonald, Union College
Richard Huston, University of California, Berkeley: “Cowboys and Contracts: Andy Adams’ The Outlet (1905)”
Tara Penry, Boise State
University: “Regionalism and Globalism in Millicent Shinn’s Overland Monthly”
Lawrence Coates, Bowling Green State University: “Narratives of ‘Discovery’ and ‘Rediscovery’: Versions of Yosemite in the Nineteenth Century”
“The Music and the Mirror”: A Gathering of Creative Readings
Chair: Karen Ramirez, University of Colorado, Boulder
Ann Putnam, University of Puget Sound: “The Last Supper: A Memoir”
Beverly Conner, University of Puget Sound: “Falling From Grace”
Looking for New Models of Chicano Manhood and Womanhood
Chair: TBA
Kathryn Kuszmar Franzell, California State University, Fresno: “La Virgen de Guadalupe Sightings: Encounters with Mother Archetypes in the Southwest”
Linda Aguilar Pena, University of Houston: “Forces of the Kings--Female Power in Sandra Cisneros’ Caramelo”
DeNara Hill University of Nevada, Las Vegas “‘And a man must find out some things for himself’: Masculinity and Cultural Identity in José Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho”
Roundtable: Blackwell’s Regional
Literatures of America: Why Now?
Convener: Charles Crow
Discussants: Various WLA Contributors to the Volume
Response: Audience
6:00-7:00 Reception
7:00-9:30 Annual Banquet
Speaker:
TBA
Brief Reflections:
Ann Ronald, University of Nevada, Reno: “Sites and Sounds of WLA”
Award
Presentations:
WLA
Distinguished Achievement Award in Literary Criticism
Thomas
J. Lion Award
J.
Golden Taylor Award
Don
D. Walker Award
Delbert
and Edith Wilder Award
9:30 Dancing
8:00-12:00 Book Exhibit
Global Western Landscapes
Chair: Neil Campbell, University
of Derby, United Kingdom
Neil Campbell, University of Derby, United Kingdom: “Virtual Wests: Post-Tourism and Postwestern Landscapes”
John Beck, University of
Newcastle: “Dead Calm: The ‘Still’ Image as Aftershock”
Audrey Goodman, University of Georgia: “Photographic Afterlives: Re-exposing the Wartime Landscapes of Los Alamos and Manzanar”
Representing the Rio Grande: Mapping, Imaging, Teaching
Chair: Alex Hunt, University of West Texas A&M University
Alex Hunt, University of West Texas A&M University: “Imperial Cartographies: Emory and the Boundary Survey on the Rio Grande”
Barbara Cook, Eastern Kentucky University: “A Tapestry of the Land, the River, and the People: Laura Gilpin’s Photographic Essay of the Rio Grande”
Barbara Nelson, Sul Ross State University: “Crossing Borders: A West Texas Wolf Trapper’s True Stories Cross Over Into Cormac McCarthy’s Fiction”
“We Are No More and No Less than the Life that Surrounds Us”
Chair: O. Alan Weltzien, University of Montana, Western
Patrick K. Dooley, St. Bonaventure University: “The Inhuman Philosophy of Edward Abbey”
Angela Waldie, Utah State university: “Ecoautobiography: Seeking the Self in Nature”
Paul Varner, Oklahoma Christian University: “Jane Hirshfield: Celebration of the Ordinary”
Neoliberalism, Empire, Romance: Chicano/a Critical Interventions
Chair: Chadwick Allen, Ohio State University
Patricia M. Perea, University of New Mexico: “Sleeping with the Enemy: Manifest Destiny, the Impure Daughters of Mexico and the Legitimate? Nation-Building Project of the United States”
Hector A. Torres, University of New Mexico: “Contemporary Chicana/Chicano Literary Discourse, Postmodern?: The Social Act of Writing Under Erasure/Empire”
John-Michael Rivera, University of Colorado, Boulder: “Don Zavala and President Fox Go to Washington D.C.: Mapping the Neoliberal Spectacles of US/Mexican Democracy”
Chair: Melody Graulich, Utah State University
James Maguire, Boise State University:
“A Letter to Sands Hall About Fair Use and Angle of Repose”
Linda K. Karell, Montana State University: “Western Studies Grows Up: Stegner, Mary Hallock Foote, and Fair Use”
Jason Williams, Utah State University: “Competing Visions: The Alternate Wests of Elinore Pruitt Stewart and N.C. Wyeth”
Can the Old West be Narrated Anew?
Chair: Nicolas Witschi, Western Michigan University
Will Brannon, Texas Tech University: “‘Each Tale the Sum of All Lesser Tales’: Cultural Myths and Social Conflicts in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy”
Malek H. Mohammad, Angelo
State University: “Race and the Western Border in Elmer Kelton”
Cory Shaman, University of Mississippi: “Humans as Nature, Humans in Nature Naturally: Spectacles of the Primal in Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian”
Redemptive Western Landscapes, Early and Late 20th Century
Chair: Reuben Ellis, Prescott College
Robert King, Utah State
University: “Authenticity as Modern Salvation and the Cultural Work of the
Southwest in Willa Cather and Zane Grey”
Reuben Ellis, Prescott College: “Therapeutic Urban Space: Aestheticizing Dead Cities”
Sarah E. McFarland, University of Oregon: “Penetrating Doug Peacock’s Wilderness: Animals, Gender and Power in Grizzly Years”
9:30-10:30 WLA Business Meeting and
Coffee Break
10:45-12:00 WLA Readers’ Theatre: Hispanic
Playwrights Project
A Revue of
Selections from Plays from South Coast Repertory
Directed
and adapted for WLA by David Fenimore, University of Nevada, Reno
(cast to follow)
12:30 Buses Depart for Saturday Tours