(Un)Narrating the West: Literature, Politics, and the Frontier Unconscious

deadline for submissions: 
February 28, 2025
full name / name of organization: 
Virginia Pignagnoli/Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Marco Petrelli/University of Pisa

XXVIII AISNA Biennial Conference

“Facing West: Thinking, Living, Outliving the American West”

(Bergamo, 11-13 September 2025) Deadline: February 28 2025

 

Panel 19. 

(Un)Narrating the West: Literature, Politics, and the Frontier Unconscious

 

Coordinators:

Marco Petrelli (Università degli Studi di Pisa), marco.petrelli@unipi.it

Virginia Pignagnoli (Universitat autònoma de Barcelona), virginia.pignagnoli@uab.cat

 

The political (the socio-historical reality) in literary fiction often occupies a liminal space between what is worth narrating and what is impossible to narrate: an unconscious influence that finds its way into the background, as subtext—as Fredric Jameson (cf. 1981) writes, as a symbolic solution or resolution of historical dilemmas (on tellability see Ryan 2005, on unnarration see Prince 1987 and Warhol 2008). The aim of this panel is to explore the ways in which the West—as both an actual geographical place in the United States and an idea connected with possibility and new beginnings— is conveyed in literary fiction as a paradigm to shape a political discourse. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, as a result of the Louisiana Purchase and the westward expansion that followed, U.S. literary narratives have been responding to an extra- textual cultural understanding of the West’s defining features while contributing to the creation, recreation, and/or distortion of its mythical traits, sometimes openly criticizing the contrast between this imaginary place and reality, sometimes exploiting its powerful image to depart from it and envision new utopias or dystopias. A classic example of the escapist/utopian leaning can be found in Huck Finn’s desire to “light out for the Territory” at the end of his adventures, with Robert Coover’s Huck Out West (among others) standing as its mythoclastic counterpoint. We seek papers investigating narratives in which the West is directly or indirectly addressed as a symbolic locus harboring the text’s political unconscious, and exploring how these narratives deploy specific critical and theoretical frameworks, formal devices, and rhetorical strategies to foster it.