Research

Conference Review: ‘Supposedly Fun Things: A Colloquium on the Writing of David Foster Wallace’

‘Supposedly Fun Things: A Colloquium on the Writing of David Foster Wallace’ Held at Birkbeck, University of London 7 February 2015   A building as twistingly complex as some of Wallace’s sentences provided the venue for Birkbeck, University of London’s ‘Supposedly Fun Things: A Colloquium on the Writing of David Foster Wallace’, an important event in the field of Wallace Studies. The first wave of Wallace scholarship had a vested interest in eulogizing Wallace in order to justify the study of him. Now that his place in the canon seems reasonably assured, there is an opportunity for scholars to conduct more critical and probing analysis, a development that was evident in many of the papers. Appropriately enough, the first panel dealt with aspects of Wallace’s reception and subsequent canonization. Dr. Tony Venezia (Birkbeck/Middlesex University) began by noting that Wallace is unusual, as the first research into his work was undertaken […]

Gae Pride Parades: The Impossibility of Queerness in Irish America at the St Patrick’s Day Parades

2015 marks twenty-five years since the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization’s (ILGO) first application to march in New York City’s St Patrick’s Day parade on Fifth Avenue. Still the world’s largest celebration of the day, it was rejected by the event’s organizers, the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), a Catholic Irish-American institution. Backed up by the Supreme Court, the AOH not only removed the ILGO from the parade, but also succeeded in barring the organization’s right to protest against its own exclusion on the basis that, “as the parade was a celebration of Irish ethnicity, the AOH had a right to discriminate against the ILGO, based on the tacit acceptance that an a priori condition of being Irish was an active intolerance of homosexuals, and therefore no expression of an identity that was simultaneously Irish and homosexual was possible” (O’Donnell 136). The last twenty-five years have included ongoing queer exclusions […]

Merging aesthetics and politics: Toni Morrison’s jazz affect in JAZZ (1992)

Morrison produces an aestheticism that is driven by her own political impulse, which means that her political impulse – to protest against American history – is felt rather than known. As a result the untold stories of black America become real. Because Morrison writes American history through feeling, sense, and blurred images, not through definitive, clear information and files of data, to the reader her history of America becomes more than a history, it acts like a memory.

Film Review: In P.T. Anderson’s Inherent Vice Pynchon’s “Badass” prevails

Pynchon mentions, and praises, the “Badass” in one of his few essays: “when times are hard, and we feel at the mercy of forces many times more powerful, don’t we, in seeking some equalizer, turn, if only in imagination, in wish, to the Badass… who will resist what otherwise would overwhelm us?” Ultimately breaking noir convention, Inherent Vice does turn, if only in part, to the Badass detective. Bigfoot’s diligent respect for his deceased police partner’s memory, which further distances him from any thug-cop stereotype, leads him to have a very personal stake in Doc’s case and he ends up working more or less alongside the stoned PI.

Book Review: Masculinity in Contemporary New York Fiction by Peter Ferry

Ferry weaves his exploration of masculinity in the works of Paul Auster, Bret Easton Elllis’ American Psycho, and Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis around the figure of the flâneur.

Deconstructing ‘Uncle Tom’ Abroad: The Case of an American President

The character of Uncle Tom experiences the benevolent paternalism and cruel exploitation of chattel slavery, and eventually dies at the hands of a malicious master. What does it mean for a twenty-first century presidential candidate, who became the 44th President of the United States, to be described in such terms? The rhetorical implications of this epithet demonstrate how media and popular culture shape ideas about history, race, and politics, even beyond the United States.

60 Seconds With Peter Molin

To usher in a new series of 60 seconds interviews for 2015 we have invited contemporary war literature experts Assistant Professor Aaron DeRosa (California State Polytechnic University), Assistant Professor Peter Molin (Rutgers University) and Associate Professor Patrick Deer (New York University) to tell us a little bit more about themselves and their expertise.

DeRosa, Molin and Deer will lead our January #Bookhour discussion on Phil Klay’s REDEPLOYMENT on the 27th January 2015, 9-10pm GMT.

“How did you come to your current area of research?”

“My own military deployment to Afghanistan in 2008-2009 inspired me to begin reading contemporary war literature. I started my blog Time Now: The Iraq and Afghanistan Wars in Art, Film, and Literature to publicize great work and initiate conversations on the subject.”

American Studies in Europe: Interview with Jack Thompson, University College Dublin

“As scholars such as Richard Pells have observed, the United States initially encouraged American Studies in Europe after the Second World War as a way to tie the Old World more closely to the New, and many Europeans were eager to learn about the new superpower. American encouragement and money combined with European curiosity to create a thriving field of study. Of course, over time, American Studies in Europe evolved in directions that early Cold War policymakers in the US could not have imagined, or would have necessarily always welcomed. However, the incredible richness of the field today emerged thanks to this close, if not always stress-free, post-war transatlantic relationship.”

Clinton’s Ghost: Bill’s Foreign Policy and What It Tells Us About a Hillary Presidency

The recent decision by the Obama administration to move towards the normalisation of diplomatic relations with Cuba marks perhaps the most significant foreign policy decision of his presidency. Indeed, of all the decisions made in the past 6 years, this is one of the few that do not relate back to policies inherited to one degree or another from the previous administration of George W. Bush. The policy implications of the War on Terror, therefore, have loomed large over the White House for the first 6 years of the Obama presidency, ensuring that only now, as he enters his final two years in office, has he found the diplomatic and political space to make such a bold move. Obama’s efforts in this decision have been assisted by a series of factors that were not present when similar efforts were considered by previous administrations. While the full explanation as to how […]

Conference Review: ‘Protest: Resistance and Dissent in America’

Bianca Scoti and Dr Tomas Pollard review a selection of panels and the keynote lectures at the BAAS Postgraduate Conference (15 November, 2014)