[This past
weekend was the 2018
Northeast MLA convention in Pittsburgh. It was a great time as usual, and
this week I’ll highlight some standout moments and conversations. Leading up to
a weekend post on how you can get involved in this great organization!]
As the incoming
American Literature Area Director, I made sure to get to a ton of the
convention’s wonderful American Lit panels. Here are three that I would briefly
highlight:
1)
“Excluded: Neglected Authors Pre-1900”: One of
this panel’s presenters couldn’t be there, but the two that were offered this
AmericanStudier two distinct but equally important forms of literary historical
recovery. Mary Balkun
focused on an American author I had literally never heard of before this
moment: Abigail
Levy Franks, an early 18th century Jewish American woman living
in New York City whose letters
to her son in England open up questions of religion and culture, gender and
perspective, family and multi-generational shift, and how we define colonial
American community and literature. And Robert Wilson talked
about James
M. Whitfield, a mid-19th century African American poet and
activist whose poetry
I knew slightly from teaching him in my 19th Century Af Am Lit
course but whose journalistic debates
with Frederick Douglass and others over black nationalism and colonization
were entirely new to me, and significantly shifted my sense of this figure, his
poetry, and his cultural and historical role.
2)
“Material Culture Studies and American
Literature”: Each of the four thoughtful and ground-breaking papers on this
panel exemplified different sides to the literary study and meanings of
material culture. Wesley
McMasters put Edgar Allan Poe’s
Philadelphia-era writings in conversation with journalistic texts and
contexts from the period. Blevin
Shelnutt highlighted the rise of both gaslights and
gaslight culture in antebellum New York City. Stephanie Scherer
used the relationship of paper production to cotton (and thus slavery) and rags
(and thus poverty) to open up works such as Melville’s
“Tartarus of Maids.” And Brad Congdon
focused on the short stories that Langston Hughes published
in the first issues of Esquire magazine to think about both
the rise of men’s magazines and the culture of the 1930s. So much to keep
thinking about in all four talks!
3)
“Minor Print Cultures of the 19th-Century
United States”: My friend and longtime NEASA colleague Luke Dietrich
organized this panel, with three papers that each highlighted cultural and
literary figures and works about which I knew absolutely nothing and into which
I’m now excited to delve further. Liana Glew discussed
The Meteor, a
short-lived but incredibly interesting paper produced in the 1870s by the residents
of Alabama’s
Bryce Hospital (a mental asylum). Maria Ellenberger discussed
mid to late-19th century novels of domestic abuse, including Lillie Devereux
Blake’s Fettered for Life: A Story of
To-day (1874). And Monika Giacoppe
discussed French Canadian political activist and exile Ludger Duvernay
and his radical newspaper (produced from Burlington, VT) Le Patriote Canadien.
All three of these impressive speakers and talks reminded me of how much I
still have to learn about American literature, culture, and history—one of many
reasons I’m so excited to be taking over the NeMLA American Literature Director
role!
Special post
this weekend,
Ben
PS. NeMLA
responses or thoughts? Other organizations or conferences you’d highlight?
Thanks for the nod, Ben! Glad you enjoyed the panel.
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