Meetings

MEETINGS Thursday, October 21 3:00 to 5:30 p.m. CONJOINT: WESTERN STATES WOMEN'S STUDIES ASSOCIATION (Bonneville 2) The Myth of Female Self-Sacrifice: Perpetrators, Participants and Others Presiding: Rebecca S. Hogan and Elizabeth Robertson, University of Colorado, Boulder Diana A. Wilson, University of Denver. "The Myth of Female Sacrifice in Cervantes' s Persiles." Cervantes 's Persiles, a prose romance long obscured by its more famous relative Don Quixote, explores all the masculine fictions of desire that sustain, even require, the sacrificial process. Cervantes violates readerly expectations about these fictions, however, through a gallery of women who energetically rewrite the scripts that would make them sacrificable. This early feminine focus on the myth of female sacrifice may account for the marginality of Cervantes ' s final work within the male preserve of European literary history. Gerda S. Norvig, Huntington Library. "The 'Nearly Silent Listeners ': Authorial Presence and the Sacrifice of Intentionality in the Writings of Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley." Taking off from Margaret Homans's work in her Women Writers and Poetic- Identity, this paper examines the strategies of narrative and lyric decentralization used by Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley, not as unconscious or regressive defenses against authorial identity, but rather as deliberate critiques of the values of logocentric remembrance championed by the masculine Romantic sublime. Gena Dagel, University of Texas. "Jane Bowles: The Myth of Female Self-Sacrifice as Self-Created Trap." In her career as a writer, Jane Bowles produced a limited output. For her, writing was a protracted and painful process, particularly because she was always struggling against a strong sense of competition with her more prolific and successful husband , Paul Bowles. Though really stuggling with her own demons and torn between the role of writer and writer's wife, she sought to explain her difficulties and provide incentive for her work by creating a myth of competition . SPECIAL EVENTS: GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM(Bonneville Z) Presiding: Gerhard P. Knapp, University of Utah Consul Siegfried Opitz, Consulate General of the FRG, San Francisco. "Der Expressionismus in der bildenden Junst--Kampf, Hoffnung und Niederlage einer Generation." Der Expressionismus als Revolte einer Generation gegen eine fortschrittsgläubige , bürgerlich-konventionelle Gleichgültigkeit. Sowohl Ernst Kirchner als auch Franz Marc fühlten sich 156ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW als Streiter "in unserer Empoche des grossen Kampfes um die neue Kunst als Wilde, nicht Organisierte gegen eine alte, organisierte Macht" und glaubtei an eine neue Generation. Um neue Bewusstseinsformen zu gewinnen, galt es, Symbole zu schaffen, die den Geist trösten- -das war die hohe Utopie expressionistischer Küstler. Stephen Clausing, University of Utah. "Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf and Expressionism." The idea is presented that Hesse's Steppenwolf contains many themes and motifs of expressionism and in fact is an expressionist novel. As such, attempts to understand the work purely in terms of Hesse's traditonal themes are inadequate since Steppenwolf is essentially a contradiction to most of Hesse's other writings. It is, however , a logical creation of the expressionist era. Sigrid Mayer, University of Wyoming. "Heinrich Mann: Der Untertan als 'sozialkritischer Expressionismus'." Eine Rechtfertigung von Thomas Manns abschätziger Kritik des Romans, die sich auf formale Kriterien stützt, wird hier nicht versucht. Im Gegenteil: die bestürzende Modernität des Textes soll auf ihre Einzelheiten befragt werden. Der Untertan , der gleichzeitig mit dem Anbruch der expressionistischen Epoche entstand, ist als ein ihr verwandtes politisches Dokument zu deuten. Steven P. Sondrup, Brigham Young University. "Polarities in Swedish Expressionism." Although expressionism has long been recognized as an international tradition, the contributions of Swedish expressionism have not always been fully appreciated. Par Lagerkvist and Artur Lundkvist have much in common as expressionists but more significantly they represent widely divergent positions in many respects. A comparison of their differing themes and styles well illustrates some of the richness of Swedish expressionism. Jost Hermand, University of Wisconsin. "The Rediscovery of Expressionism after 1945." Since Expressionism had been one of the prime examples of "degenerate" art in the eyes of the Nazis, works that could be labeled "Expressionistic" were among the first to be exhibited or republished after 1945. But since the general political and intellectual climate after 1945 was markedly different from the years following...