ALA, May 26-29, 2016, San Francisco, Ca

The twenty-seventh annual meeting of the American Literature Association emphasized reconsidering and recovering nineteenth-century American authors' work. Participants expressed particular interest in affect, race, and history and in these concerns' implications for critical and pedagogical practices. Throughout the conference, several scholars explored how contemporary racial and social movements such as Black Lives Matter can inform scholarly work concerning nineteenth-century literature both inside and outside the classroom.

Program link: http://americanliteratureassociation.org/wpcontent/uploads/2016/06/2016-ALA-program-final2.pdf

Affect and affiliation

Several panels explored affect and affiliation in nineteenth-century literature, a fitting theme for a conference hosted by the ALA, a "coalition of societies devoted to the study of American authors." In a roundtable entitled "Friendship and/in the American Renaissance," scholars explored friendship in transcendentalist literature. For Henry David Thoreau, Mark Gallagher suggested, friendship functions as a "godlike discourse," or a "divine affinity" creating an affective speech that parallels Puritan sympathy. Amelia Marini outlined a hermeneutics of friendship's linguistic experience, arguing that Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Friendship" (1841) urges readers to seek deeper relationships with literary texts. As such, the essay offers a reparative model that counters more normative and aggressive reading habits. Eileen Abrahams examined Margaret Fuller's journal and correspondence in order to study transcendentalist friendship. Abrahams maintained that Fuller outlines a personal, pleasurable, and virtuous "Philia" with Emerson, whose essays express a more detached and metaphysical concept of this bond. David Heckerl asserted that in Walden (1854), Thoreau attempts to speak without discursive confines—an emergent prospect the author could not achieve. Likewise, Heckerl claimed, academic writing on Walden will never achieve true clarity, since the text was written in a "mood of questionableness" that scholars can sustain only by dissolving disciplinary boundaries. Lizzy LeRud identified the polyvocality of Thoreau's writing as a form of collaboration and "intelligence above language."

"Margaret Fuller in the Nineteenth Century" examined devotion and society, focusing particularly on Fuller's influence within her transcendental circle and upon later feminist writers. Monica Urban argued that Fuller's political philosophy was so inextricably informed by fashion that she challenged Emerson's injunction in The Conduct of Life (1860) to "live coarsely and dress plainly." Instead, Urban contended, Fuller exploited fashion's ability to call attention to the invisible via the visible. Chip Badley examined how Emerson and his circle collectively rewrote Fuller's memoirs in an attempt to write her "back to life." According to Badley, the posthumously published Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852) should be viewed not just as an autobiographical romance but also as an extended conversation between Fuller and her cohort about friendship's transformative influence. Adrienne G. Perry discussed Fuller's influential work as a translator, suggesting that Fuller's decision to reproduce the original text, or only partially annotate it, creates a heteroglossic "contact zone" that resists language dominance and challenges patriarchal hegemony. Susan M. Stone examined how postbellum writers such as Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Annie Adams Fields expanded Fuller's notion that genders are fluid and "perpetually passing into one another," allowing Fuller's feminist seeds to "bloom" in other authors' later writing.

The panel "In Whose Image? The Narrative Construction of Nathaniel Hawthorne" considered how biographies imprinted Hawthorne's image upon the national imagination. Jana Argersinger's close reading of Rose Hawthorne Lathrop's biography Memories of Hawthorne (1897) showed that Lathrop used affective narrative tactics to contest other family storytellers. These tactics, Argersinger argued, not only indicate subtle tensions in Lathrop's relationship with her father, but also complicate commonly accepted narrative constructions of Hawthorne himself. Comparing biographies written by Sophia and Julian Hawthorne, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, and George Parsons Lathrop, Ryan Lowe examined how biographers erased, countered, or reframed characterizations of Hawthorne as "morbid." These disability narratives, Lowe pointed out, index cultural rules concerning the body and offer insight into the politics surrounding the nineteenth-century author figure. Using quantum mechanics' "both-and" approach as a metaphor, Samuel...