[A couple weekends back I was in Niagara Falls for the 54th annual Northeast Modern Language Association Convention. Longtime readers will know well how much I love NeMLA, the organization and the convention alike, and this year was no exception. So as usual, here are a handful of reflections on a great NeMLA convention!]
On takeaways
from the two great papers (and, yes, mine too) from my session on Niagara Falls
in American pop culture.
1)
Vaughn
Joy on honeymoon films: University College London History PhD candidate
Vaughn Joy has become one of our most prominent and prolific public scholars
for her Twitter threads & thoughts
on all things Hollywood, and she brought that veritable expertise to this panel
with a great talk on Niagara honeymoons on the silver screen between 1940 and
1980 (Superman II,
natch!). She also historicized those cinematic representations with analysis of
changing views and realities of marriage, premarital sex, and gender roles over
these mid-20th century decades. Really productive and powerful blend
of Film and American Studies, and one that helped us all think further about
the place where we were, literally and figuratively, geographically and
symbolically.
2)
Jamie Carr on
short stories: While Vaughn crossed an ocean to join our conversation, Dr. Jamie
Carr came just down the road from Niagara University, where she’s Professor and
Chair of English. Her scholarly work has focused both on place and identity
overall and on writers
and Niagara Falls in particular, and for this panel she linked those
subjects to a pair of evocative stories from a particular contemporary and
local writer, Stephanie
Vaughn. Everything about Vaughn’s stories sounds well worth our time, but I
was especially struck by the way they and she evoke the histories and legacies
of the region’s nuclear sites (operating and then waste
disposal), which I had never thought of as a very distinct frame for the
area’s waterways, the Falls, and the ground itself.
3)
Me on the famous sketch: In my September
blog series on APUSH I wrote about the famous “Niagara Falls” comedy sketch,
and specifically there the Three Stooges
version. I had a vague sense at that time that the sketch went far beyond
that one version, but it was only when researching this talk that I really
learned both the breadth of those versions and how fully they connect to the 20th
century history of comedy and culture in America. From contested Vaudeville
origins to competing 1944 sketches from Abbott and Costello and
the aforementioned Stooges to TV adaptations from Lucille Ball and Danny
Thomas to meta-commentaries from M.A.S.H.
and Steve Martin to a disco
song from Divine, “Niagara Falls” is just about everywhere in American
culture—a fitting conclusion for a great conversation about its many tendrils!
Next
reflection tomorrow,
Ben
PS. If you
were at NeMLA, I’d love to hear your reflections too!
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