Oct 29, 2016 | 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM | STUDIO THEATRE

Ms. Sara Rutkowski, PhD

“The Federal Writers’ Project: Truth Meets Fiction in Depression-Era America”

This paper explores the extraordinary collaboration between sociological truth and literary invention that was engineered by the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), a massive government relief program of the 1930s that embarked on what would be the largest collective effort ever undertaken to compile the nation’s history and culture. The FWP hired not historians or anthropologists, but unemployed writers, many of whom would become major literary figures—including Ralph Ellison, Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, Margaret Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, among others. These federal writers collected oral histories, folklore and former slave narratives, reported on cultural practices and described communities from every walk of American life.

The Project allowed them considerable freedom to interpret the spontaneous, self-generated world around them, while also, paradoxically, demanding that they be accurate in their transcriptions. The notion of accuracy was an issue that was forever raised, but never resolved, exposing the fault line in the FWP’s mission to present a factual history of the nation and produce writing that was subjective, immersing and literary. Yet this tension was itself an important feature in the documentary form. With its rich display of folk speech and vernacular, rambling monologues, and extemporaneous social critiques, the FWP’s fieldwork quite effortlessly straddles the lines between history, sociology, and fiction. This material made its way not only to official FWP publications, but also to the work of individual federal writers. The result is a new body of postwar literature that can be termed subjective realism, a largely unverifiable collection of memories and convictions, documentaries and fictions that together represents a new kind of truth-telling in the 20th century.

Dr. Bev Hogue, PhD

Dealing with Debris: Narrative in the Aftermath

In Don DeLillo’s 2007 novel Falling Man, Keith Neudecker, a survivor of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, makes his way to the emergency room, where a doctor explains that ash from the falling towers contained “organic shrapnel,” microscopic bits of human flesh embedded in survivors’ bodies (16). Repulsed by his mingling with the stream of debris, Neudecker is nevertheless drawn to others whose bodies have been similarly marked. Likewise, Amy Waldman’s 2011 novel The Submission describes a fictional competition to select a design for a Ground Zero Memorial; a survivor, horrified by those who strive to turn proximity to the debris into profit, concludes, “Horrible as the attack was, everyone wanted a little of its ash on their hands” (150).

These complex responses to the aftermath of disaster—the human need to separate ourselves from debris we feel compelled to embrace—suggest an enduring tension in our relationships with detritus, a tension also apparent in responses to other forms of waste, from plastic bottles to food scraps to nuclear waste to the debris and broken bodies left behind by a tsunami. In "Dealing with Debris: Narrative in the Aftermath," I argue that the sharp line dividing clean from dirty, valuable from worthless, self from garbage functions as a semipermeable membrane through which literature can reach to recuperate trashed narratives, ideas, people, and things and restore them to cultural circulation. This process suggests that while human communities define themselves through separation from detritus, trash actually forms an essential foundation for the building of human culture, but the process often begins with the construction of narrative from the ashes of disaster.

Dr. Joseph Donica, PhD

Revising Vice: Tourism and Vice Districts in New Orleans, Chicago, and New York

Spaces like Storyville in New Orleans, The Levee in Chicago, and The Tenderloin in New York have long held sway over the prurient imaginations of residents and tourists that live and visit these places that were once synonymous with all flavors of sexual activity , drug use, massive alcohol consumption, and anything one can think of as vice. In short, they were fun. However with the rapid increase in tourism in all three of these cities, there have been concerted and somewhat successful efforts to advertise these areas as former vice districts now made palatable to family sensibilities. Boutique shops and gin bars full of hipsters have replaced the brothels and drug dens of the nineteenth century. The historical record disappears with this sort of erasure along with the individual character of the city residents are familiar with.

Another crucial thing is lost when cities intentionally misremember the history of their vice districts. The histories of marginalized people--the poor, working-class women, immigrants, and gays and lesbians--and the way they fought back against established powers in cities get pushed aside when vice is scrubbed from cultural memory. In this paper I will review the importance of Storyville, The Levee, and The Tenderloin to the histories of their cities. I then look to efforts by their respective cities to cleanup the record of these spaces or to treat them as "cute" lore from an era long removed from the city's history. Many of these cities have actually physically removed the spaces or built over them. I also look to guided tours that these cities offer of these spaces. To conclude I reflect on what is lost when cities do not embrace their past vice and how thinking toward the histories of marginalized peoples bleeds over into the tourism industry's treatment of those marginalized in cities today.

Biographies

Ms. Sara Rutkowski

Sara Rutkowski is an Assistant Professor of English at the City University of New York, Kingsborough Community College. Her current research interests focus on American literature of the Depression and postwar eras, and the cultural and political contexts of American writing. She teaches courses in writing and literature and has published and presented papers on global modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, the Federal Writers’ Project, and writers Ralph Ellison and Nelson Algren.

Dr. Bev Hogue

I serve as McCoy Professor of English at Marietta College, where I have been teaching American and postcolonial literature and writing classes since 2000. Recent publications include:

"Florida Gothic: Shadows in the Sunshine State." The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic. Ed. Charles Crow and Susan Castillo Street. Forthcoming.

“When Local Color Meets the Open Road: Rawlings and Hurston at the Crossroads.” The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature 23 (2015): 3-28.

“Thirteen Ways of Looking at an Essay: Nature Writing through Multiple Lenses.” Pedagogy 13.3 (Fall 2013): 549-53.

“Suffering that Slips through Rhetorical Gaps: Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days.” On Suffering: An Inter-Disciplinary Dialogue on Narrative and the Meaning of Suffering. Ed. Nate Hinerman and Matthew Sutton. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2012. 103-118.

Dr. Joseph Donica

Joseph Donica is an assistant professor of English at Bronx Community College, CUNY. He has published on a wide range of topics including American architecture, 9/11 literature, Arab-American literature, Netflix and the digital future, and disability studies. His latest two articles are "Rethinking Utopia for the Twenty-First Century: The Good Life after Occupy and the Arab Spring" (in the collection The Good Life and the Greater Good in a Global Context, Lexington, 2015) and "Negative Memory after Katrina: The Persistence of Memoir" (in the spring issue of the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association). He is currently finishing his first book titled Inequality's Memory: American Literature after Occupy and the Arab Spring and is editing a collection of essays titled Fictional Economies: Inequality and the Novel. He is also co-editing a collection titled Reflections on a Changing Profession: The Future of the English PhD. This past summer he participated in an NEH fellowship in D.C. on the history of Islam in the U.S.