Jeffrey Gonzalez (Montclair State University)
gonz@****.com (Log-in to reveal)
Papers in this session focus on American Literature from 1945 to the present. The category of “literature” includes imaginative works (fiction, poetry, drama) but also essays, memoirs, or creative nonfiction. This session investigates texts that are written by American-identifying authors, composed by writers in the US, or address American life.
While we are open to any compelling abstracts that address works of literature from this era, we are especially interested in papers that relate to the conference theme, "Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict.” The postwar period of American literature offers an incredibly rich body of responses to this area of focus: growing American hegemony and its eventual fading, the mainstreaming and commodifying of individualism, the rise of corporate power, the peak of the Keynesianist welfare state, the norms of late and neoliberal capitalism, life before and after the end of the Cold War, the specter of globalization and its fate after the new populism.
Topics of particular interest include, but aren't limited to, literary explorations of:
—Old and new forms of power and control
—New money, tech money, venture capital
—Complicity and manufactured consent
—Imagined and real resistance to ruling classes
—Literature’s alignment with and subversion of cultural norms
—The marginalization or force of literature relative to emergent forms of power
All PAMLA presenters must be paid PAMLA members and have paid their conference fee. Please email the panel presiding officer/organizer, Jeffrey Gonzalez, at gonzalezje@montclair.edu with questions or concerns.