WLA Conference Program

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Wednesday, October 29

 

1:30-4:30                    Executive Council Retreat

 

4:00-7:00                    Registration

 

5:15-6:30                    Executive Council Dinner

 

5:30-7:00                    Graduate Student Reception

 

7:00-8:30                    Welcome: Krista Comer, Rice University, WLA President

 

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 Goodbye to a River

 

 

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”

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’”

 

 

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 Lagayette, 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”

 

 

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 at Bonneville: I Could’ve Had a V-8”

 

 

Cruising the Barrios and Reservations: Story Stealers, Wannabes, Tourists

Chair: José F. Aranda, Jr., Rice University

Marcial González, University of California, Berkeley: “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: "(South)Western Origins, Changing Futures: Borderlands/La frontera and Chicana/o Historiography."

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, Texas State University, San Marcos

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”

 

 

Genre as Political Strategy: Narrativizing Chicano/a “Reality”

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

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

Jody Keisner, University of Nebraska, Omaha: “Train Gang” (excerpt from a work in progress)

 

 

Colonialism, “Tradition,” Female Resistance

Chair: TBA

Angie Kritenbrink, University of Nebraska, Omaha: “Latina Authors, Feminine Traditions and the Feminist Canon”

Alexandra Ramirez, University of Nebraska, Omaha: “Divakaruni’s Arranged Marriage: A Redefinition of Independence and Femininity”

Michael C. Carroll, University of Nebraska, Omaha: “Laura Tohe as Storyteller of a Dine Aesthetic”

 

 

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 Status of Western Studies: From Inside and Out”

                                    Speakers: TBA

 

3:45-4:15                    Coffee Break

 

4:15-5:30           Session C

 

Post-Vietnam Western Imaginations

Chair: Barbara Nelson, Sul Ross State University

Twister Marquiss, Texas State University, San Marcos: “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: "Bridge Between Troubled Waters: Navigating the Intellectual and Environmental Landscapes of the Dumbarton Bridge."

David G. Jurkiewicz, University of Tulsa: “The Illinois River: Model for Environmental Concerns”

 

 

The Regional Politics of Music

Chair: Michon Benson, Rice University

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

 

 

Shane, Jane, The Alamo, and Eminem: Postnational Readings of Hollywood’s Wild West

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

Bud 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

 

 

Female Mountaineers, Oilmen, and Abbey: Studies in Voice

Chair: Richard Hutson, University of California, Berkeley

Edgar H. Thompson, Emory & Henry College: “The Creation of Voice in Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire

Sarah Vause, Utah State University: “Celebration and Sorrow: Women’s Voices in the Literature of Mountaineering”

Dickie Heaberlin, Texas State University, San Marcos: “Metamorphoses: From Cowboys to Oilmen in Western Fiction”

 

 

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                    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                             Book Signing

 

 

Friday, October 31

 

8:00-4:00                    Registration

 

9:00-5:00                    Book Exhibit

 

8:00-9:30           Session D

 

 

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 Feind, 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”

 

 

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 a stupid name is that?’: Back to the Future III, Naming the Land, and the Revisionist Westerns of the 1990s”

 

 

Decentering Traditional Notions of the American West: Language, Culture, Geography, Politics

Chair: Linda Lizut Helstern, University of Texas-Pan American

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: Bev Conner, University of Puget Sound

Seth Bovey, Louisiana State University, Alexandria: “Trespassers”

Twister Marquiss, Texas State University, San Marcos: “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

Chair: Laurie Ricou, University of British Columbia

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 Owen Nelson, Henry Ford Community College

Nancy Owen 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”

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

Kent Meyers, Black Hills State University: “Charles Bowden, A Writer’s Writer”

 

 

Power  Struggles and Violence a la Peckinpah and McCarthy

Chair: Leonard Engel, Quinnipiac University

Joint Presentation - Leonard Engel and John Gourlie, Quinnipiac University: “O Death, Where Is Thy Sting?  Peckinpah’s Death Scenes” (two time slots)

Ken Melichar, Piedmont College: “A Socio-Cultural Comparative Study of McCarthy and Peckinpah”

 

 

American Fathers, Sons, and Their Daughters

Chair: Walter Isle, Rice University

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: John Gonzales, University of Texas, Austin

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

 

 

Cowboys and Other Western Heroes

Chair: TBA

Carole Quaas, University of Nebraska, Omaha: “Will Rogers: Poet Lariat or Successful Sociolinguist?”

Christopher Schaberg, University of California, Davis: “Brad Pitt's Contested West(s)”

Eric Chilton, University of Arizona: “The Perilous Survey of Nature in John Wesley Powell’s Grand Canyon Narrative”

 

 

2:45-3:15                    Coffee Break

 

3:15-4:30           Session F

 

With His Camera in His Hand: Filmmaker Jim Mendiola's Contingencies of History and Identity in 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

Jim Mendiola, Writer/Director: “On Artists and Critics”

 

 

Rethinking Race and Region: La Mestizaje, the African Diaspora, and the Politics of Collaboration

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: “Necessary Fictions: Reading the Politics of Collaboration in Jovita Gonzalez and Eve Raliegh’s ‘Caballero’”

 

 

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 Hutson, 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: Paul Guajardo, University of Houston

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

This new, substantial (31 essay) collection suggests the increasing status of regional studies. The editor and several contributors invite a discussion of the current status of the field, and the range of critical approaches to it.  Is "regional" still synonymous with "minor?"

Response:      Audience

 

 

5:30-6:00                    James Welch: A Memorial Tribute

"Heartsong of James Welch," Mary Clearman Blew, University of Idaho
Introduction by Nancy Cook, University of Rhode Island

 

6:00-7:00                    Pre-Banquet Reception

 

7:00-9:30                    Annual Banquet

                                    Speaker: Rubén Martínez, University of Houston

Brief Reflections: Ann Ronald, University of Nevada, Reno: “Sites and Sounds of WLA”

                                    Award Presentations:

                                                WLA Distinguished Achievement Award in Literary Criticism

                                                Thomas J. Lyon Award

                                                J. Golden Taylor Award

                                                Don D. Walker Award

                                                Delbert and Edith Wilder Award

                                                Frederick Manfred Creative Writing Award

 

9:30                             Dancing

 

 

Saturday, November 1
 

8:00-12:00                  Book Exhibit

 

8:00-9:15           Session G

 

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, Georgia State University: “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”

 

 

Creative “Borrowings” and Other Ethical Matters

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, University of New Hampshire: “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

 

 

Gaps and “Other” Issues in Cather Studies

Chair: TBA

Brett Mertins, University of Nebraska, Omaha: “Cather's Gaps: Imaginative Allusions to William Blake's Synthetic Poetry”

Todd Richardson, University of Nebraska, Omaha: “Cather's Empire: The Inclusion, Differentiation, and Management of 'Others' in Willa Cather's Fiction”

 

 

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:

            Jennifer Adkison

            David Fenimore

            Jackie Kogan

            Betty Maguire

            Jim Maguire

            Christine Hill Smith

            O. Alan Weltzien

           

12:30                           Buses Depart for Saturday Tours