Dostoevsky’s character Ivan Karamozov declares, “Without God, everything is permitted.” This notion is philosophically provocative and existentially potent, particularly in the study of secular literature from the modern era. Having experienced with Hillis Miller calls “the disappearance of God” or Nietzsche’s “death of God”, secular literature shows several attempts to account for humanity’s place, meaning, and immanent values. This panel seeks to explore questions of existential crisis in the secular age that perforate throughout modern literature and theory. How does one ascribe meaning or purpose to a world of violence, trauma, and suffering? How does modern fiction tease out social problems and what insight to they provide for them?

Founded in 2016 in Amsterdam, the Memory Studies Association (MSA) aims to provide a central forum for developing, discussing, and exchanging ideas about the theory and methodology of the broad-ranging field of memory studies.  The MSA welcomes all students, scholars, and practitioners interested in memory in both the public and private realms, no matter their home discipline, to come together to help advance the field and exchange work and ideas.

Leslie Fiedler describes American fiction as “bewilderingly and embarrassingly, a gothic fiction… a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation” (Love and Death in the American Novel, 29). However, for settlers within the early colonies and citizens of the young republic, the wilderness of the supposed New World not only represented material promise, but also unknown danger. This panel proposes a move away from the more common “land of light and affirmation” reading of American nature towards an ecogothic approach.

The digital age is changing the way we access the past. Previously, writers often accepted family lore, the recollections of elders, as a way to access the past. However, in the digital age, lore may be proven false. A recent post on a Facebook Ancestry.com group reported that a common disappointment for many users is that their DNA results indicate no Native American ancestry despite family legend of a great-grandmother “Cherokee Princess.”