CFP: America in the Modernist Imaginary (4/22/07; MSA, 11/1/07-11/4/07)
America in the Modernist Imaginary
Freud visited in 1909, enjoying the cinema, but complaining about the richness of the food; Henry Miller dubbed it the
“Air-Conditioned Nightmareâ€; in America Day By Day, Simone de Beauvoir admires drugstore food but condemns class
inequality and racial strife; in Lolita Vladimir Nabokov documents his own affections for American kitsch culture; Gertrude
Stein struggled to win over the American reading public, but wrote afterward that “In America everybody is [a celebrity]
but some are more than others. I was more than others.â€
This panel will explore the idea of America in modernist imagination, with a focus on non-American artists or American
expatriates who returned to or visited America after living abroad. We will consider configurations of America as an “other
space,†a source of inspiration, denunciation, or 

allure to modernists. We will look at America as an implicit construct, a place that exceeded national boundaries and
provided a lens through which artists could explore 

their own creative visions. Papers considering America as a geography of creative or professional identityâ€"a place of
change, self-creation and self-promotion, of mobility and transformation are especially welcome.
Some questions we will consider: How did America exist as a psychological space 

--transnational, hemispheric, transatlanticâ€"enabling particular exchanges, interactions, and 

negotiations? How was America a geography of identity formation-- a site for the exercise of power, a 

place for the interaction of myriad discourses, a political and institutional space, a place to explore certain genres, media,
and discourses, or a laboratory for self-transformation?
Please send proposals of 250 words (include a title) and brief (no more than one page) cv to Annalisa Zox-Weaver
(zoxweave_at_usc.edu) by 22 April 2007.
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Received on Mon Mar 19 2007 - 14:50:21 EST